False Idols? Looking at America’s Founders with a Clear Eye

Increasingly, America’s past is becoming a lightning rod for contemporary ideological struggles.

Colleges, highways and Democratic Party fundraising dinners are being renamed, monuments destroyed or desecrated, and a general suspicion seems to be growing of the value of anything emanating from America’s first century, soiled as it is with the stains of racism and slavery. This trend is a cause for concern among conservatives who value some elements of America’s past, especially as conservatives are increasingly being linked by their ideological opponents to these less admirable features of America’s history. Conservatives ought, therefore, to respond to such historical controversies with delicacy and tact if they are to separate themselves from the unsavory parts of our history, while still preserving what is good in it.