The Ungracious—and Their Demonization of the Past

The Ungracious—and Their Demonization of the Past
A worker cleans a statue of President Thomas Jefferson inside the Capitol on Aug. 4, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Victor Davis Hanson
12/30/2021
Updated:
12/29/2023
Commentary

The past two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are a lot of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.

Critics assume that their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly don’t measure up to them.

Yet 21st-century critics rarely acknowledge that their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped to create their current comfort. And what may future scolds say of the modern generation that saw more than 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, even as fetal viability outside of the womb continued to progress to ever earlier ages?

What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped more than $30 trillion in national debt on them—much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?

What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities? What’s so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car jackings?

Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?

Was it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity” principles of the prior civil rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the “color of our skin” and “equality of result” superior?

Would the United States have won World War II with the current labor participation rate of only six in 10 Americans working? Would our generation have brought all U.S. troops home and quit World War I in fear of the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic?

Are we proud that most standardized tests of student knowledge and achievement continue to decline, despite record investments in education?

Do we ever pause to consider that we enjoy our modern standard of living and security because we were once a meritocracy that quit judging our workforce by tribal affinities and ancient prejudices?

Our generation talks of infrastructure nonstop. But when was the last time that it built anything comparable to the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, or the California Water Project—much less sent a man back to the moon or beyond?

If prior generations were so toxic, why do we continue to take the moral and material world they bequeathed to us for granted, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to our airports, freeways, and power plants? Did we ever defeat anything comparable to the Axis powers or Soviet communism?

We know the symptoms of the current epidemic of hating the past.

One is Orwellian renaming and statue-toppling. Historical revision often responds to puritanical mob frenzies rather than to democratic discussion and the votes of relevant elected officials.

Where’s the pantheon of “woke” heroes who will replace the toppled or defaced Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt?

Whose morality and achievement should instead be immortalized? Were the public and private lives of Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Margaret Sanger, and Franklin D. Roosevelt without sin?

Racial fixations tend predictably in one direction. In good Confederate fashion, we lump all individuals who look alike into inexact collectives of “white,” “black,” or “brown”—often to stereotype the supposed evils of so-called white supremacy.

But if we go down that tribalist and simplistic road of caricatured oppressors and oppressed, will future generations tally up each group’s merits and demerits, to adjudicate the roles of millions of individuals in making the United States worse or better? What standard would they use to judge our ignorant world of racial stereotyping—proportional representation in Nobel Prizes, philanthropy, scientific breakthroughs, or lasting art, music, and literature versus statistics on homicides, assault, divorce, and illegitimacy?

Immigration—when legal, diverse, measured, and often meritocratic—has been the great strength of the United States, as typified by industrious arrivals who chose to abandon their own homeland to risk new lives in the United States.

But if the United States is so flawed and so irredeemable, why are nearly 2 million foreigners now crashing its borders—illegally, en masse, and intent on reaching a supposedly racist nation that’s purportedly inferior to those they’ve abandoned?

According to the ancient brutal bargain, assimilation and integration grant the immigrant as much claim to America’s present and past as the native-born. But then shouldn’t the antithesis also be true?

Shouldn’t immigrants at least respect those of the past who created the very country they now so eagerly desire and died in awful places from Valley Forge to Bastogne to preserve?

Never in history has such a mediocre, but self-important and ungracious generation owed so much and yet expressed so little gratitude to its now dead forebears.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian. He is a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Mr. Hanson has written 17 books, including “The Western Way of War,” “Fields Without Dreams,” “The Case for Trump,” and “The Dying Citizen.”
Author’s Selected Articles
Related Topics