Do nations or other groups have collective liabilities? These days, the issue usually arises in racial terms. Do white people owe some kind of inherited debt to black people? But the same question might be put in other ways. Were West Germany’s democratic leaders obliged to compensate victims of the Nazi abominations? Were the Allies entitled to bomb German civilians? Does Israel have the right to bulldoze houses belonging to the extended families of terrorist bombers?
There was an explosion of rage last month when Never Trumper David French suggested that there was a continuing obligation to correct the injustices of Jim Crow. Conservative writers rounded furiously on their onetime ally, accusing him of embracing critical race theory and freighting white people with ancestral guilt.
