NEW ANDREW GILLUM TALKING POINT: RON DESANTIS WROTE A BOOK JUSTIFYING SLAVERY, YOU KNOW.

Anti-slavery Founders made a Faustian bargain with the pro-slavery wing to bring them into the fledgling country. Get them to sign onto the Constitution by avoiding any immediate confrontation over slavery, the abolitionists calculated, and then hope that the new constitutional order would gradually and peacefully steer the practice into disuse. That calculation … did not work out, but it did make national union possible in 1787. That gamble was worth taking, DeSantis is saying, given that it ensured the formation of the United States and that slavery in the south would have gone on even if the southern states had refused to ratify a new, strictly abolitionist Constitution. If that amounts to DeSantis “justifying slavery,” you could claim by the same logic that Gillum and his progressive fans believe the United States should never have existed.

Which would be an awkward position to be in for a guy running to be governor of America’s most electorally important southern state and maybe someday president.

Between banning Columbus Day, getting the vapors over Winston Churchill, and attempting to memory hole original “Progressives” Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (is FDR next?), that’s the next logical step for the left, isn’t it? (The Obamas tap-danced around the notion with Michelle Obama’s infamous “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country” quote.) Or as Dennis Prager once wrote, “As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: ‘In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.'”