BUT OF COURSE: The Iconoclasts Come For George Washington.

By now we should all be familiar with the inexorable logic of the iconoclasts, which goes like this. Lee, having fought for the slave-owning Confederacy in the Civil War, is more offensive than Washington, who merely owned slaves. Abraham Lincoln didn’t own slaves but he did sentence a couple dozen Dakota Indians to death in 1862 for war crimes against defenseless men, women, and children on the Minnesota frontier. For that, student activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demanded the removal of Lincoln’s statue from their campus. Frank Rizzo, the mayor of Philadelphia in the 1970s, didn’t own slaves or sentence any Indians to death, but he was insufficiently supportive of the civil rights movement in his day, so his statue must come down, too.

Once it takes hold, iconoclasm knows no distinctions or subtleties. It sweeps everything away. When progressive activists began clamoring for the immediate removal of Confederate monuments across the country, I and others noted that since this wasn’t really about the historical legacy of slavery but the imperatives of identity politics, there was no limiting principle to ensure that once they had finished with the Confederates they would not move on to the Founding Fathers, or Lincoln, or even the hapless Rizzo.

Of course, they came for them all. It wasn’t hard to see it coming.

The irony is that the iconoclasts can’t see the backlash coming, even though it started almost exactly one year ago.