What Happens If History Comes For Cancel Culture Progressives?

Here’s a hypothetical: the year is 2037 and President Generic Progressive is giving her farewell address to the nation. She is America’s first female president and is recounting the various successes she believes history will remember her for. She has advanced the progressive agenda in areas of immigration, women’s rights, minority rights, LGBTQ rights, police reform, and health care.

In foreign affairs, she led the free world through it’s darkest hour since 1940 when she came to the rescue of Taiwan after the Chinese invaded because they thought her progressive politics would lead her to acquiesce to aggression in the name of peace. Not only she did she come to Taiwan’s rescue, allied forces defeated the PLA on the island and PLAN at sea and domestic discontent lead to the overthrow of the CCP and the mainland is now an aspiring democracy.

For the longest time, history remembers her well. Even conservatives admire her wartime leadership, but over time something changes.

The year is now 2120, exactly 100 years from today. In 2120 abortion is looked at like slavery is today. Even progressives have been forced to concede that conservatives had a point when they said the arguments for abortion are eerily similar to those that were used to defend slavery.

People who advocated for abortion in the past are now having their legacies re-evaluated. It does not matter to certain people that Generic Progressive stood for many good things, she stood for one evil thing and for that she must be cancelled.

Back in our own timeline, we see this happening in real life, but of course, it’s progressives doing the cancelling. Certain radical left-wing elements have developed a French Revolution-esque view of the world that says everything previously was a mistake and history should start today.

We see the 1619 Project win a Pulitzer and become a source for schools across the country, despite heavy professional criticism, for claiming that the United States was not founded in liberty, but in slavery. We see people in London who are self described anti-fascists defacing the monument to the world’s greatest anti-fascist, Winston Churchill, because he was a racist.

The desire to cancel people comes from the emotional side of politics that exists in all of us whether we like to admit it or not. Some people like to think that they make decisions based on facts and evidence, but most of us actually come to our political views on our beliefs of right and wrong, not practical and impractical. Even the most boring political topics like taxes and regulations are based off of differing perceptions of fairness, not how do we get more money into the Treasury or spur economic growth.

This is not in and of itself a bad thing. In fact, it is a good thing because it helps us determine what our society’s values are. But, it is important to always remember that bad people have bad ideas, but good people can also have some bad ideas. If this is hard for you to understand, you probably live in an echo chamber.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. They also, unlike the Confederates of later generations, recognized its immoral nature. Washington had his slaves freed after his death. Jefferson called the practice, “the most unremitting despotism” and “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

For many members of the founding generation, the only thing worse than one country with slavery with individual liberty as its backstop is thirteen countries without that backstop. They were facing the real world problem (as opposed to the academic problems of the immorality of racism) of how to form a country conceived in liberty, without it immediately falling into a civil war. Needless to say the federal government was far more capable of successfully prosecuting such a war in 1861–1865 than it would have been in the founding generation.

Winston Churchill was the man did more than any other to defeat fascism and who would describe contemporary self-proclaimed and self-righteous anti-fascists as those who, “had denounced ‘the capitalist and imperialist war’” only to “turn about again overnight and began to scrawl the slogan ‘Second Front Now’ upon the walls and hoardings.”

He was also the man who said he would not be the one to “preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” His staunch defense of empire and colonialism is “problematic” for many, although hardly unique for his era (the charge of genocide is complete bunk, however).

The problem with cancel culture is not just that it is a civic religion that has room for vengeance, but no room for repentance, although that is certainly part of it, but also that it’s proponents act like they are the first humans to ever walk the earth who could be considered noble and virtuous.

Sure, I didn’t defiantly stand in the House of Commons against members of my own party warning about German rearmament. Sure, I didn’t stand in that same House of Commons in 1940 after the fall of France, this time as prime minister defiantly declaring our intention to fight on to the bitter end, but I, 80 years later, support Indian independence.

Sure, I didn’t risk my life by signing a piece of paper arguing that all people have rights and sending it to the King of England or by facing his soldiers on the battlefield, but I, 244 years later think racism is bad.

People say that we study history because those who do not learn from the past are due to repeat its mistakes. This is true, but studying history also gives us perspective. For as bad as things are, they have been worse, but they got better because imperfect people did great things. We celebrate and honor them for those great things, while learning from their mistakes and imperfections.

Take Churchill’s axiom of “In War: resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Goodwill” and apply it as necessary. Leave the colonialism behind, while also having the humility to realize that Indian independence in 1947 led to a chaotic and bloody partition (which Churchill predicted as a reason for opposition to independence) and four Indo-Pak wars, including one in 1999 where both sides possessed nukes, the only such conflict in history.

You and I are imperfect people as well. Some day history will be written about us and people will say “I can’t believe they thought that was morally acceptable.” The question for our progressive friends who support this cancel culture is that, despite your own self-assurances, there is no guarantee that “you are on the right side of history.” One day history will come for you, too. Are you willing to see the progress you have made for causes you care about ignored and diminished? Because you while you did many things for your community that you today consider positive, history may not agree.