The Land of the Free owes its name and its perseverance to the likes of Abraham Lincoln.
That doesn’t matter to the San Francisco Unified School District’s board, which voted last month to move forward with the renaming of the district’s Abraham Lincoln High School, along with several other schools named for prominent national figures.
Nothing about renaming a school is in and of itself objectionable, though the district’s reason for cutting Honest Abe out can be recognized only for its sheer asininity. As the board points out in a resolution, it began the process in 2018 by “committing the District to changing names of schools named for historical figures who engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
President Lincoln, Union victor, didn’t make the cut.
If it weren’t evident already, this country suffers from a demented cultural insurgency demanding that the way to societal redemption is to abolish and then replace important, shared cultural touchstones. And they are still shared cultural touchstones, which finally brings me to the danger.
In a Thursday press conference, a reporter asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi what she would say to those who ask why Congress should bother trying former President Donald Trump in the Senate, considering he is “long gone.”
“Why bother? Why bother,” Pelosi responded. “Ask our founders why bother. Ask those who wrote the Constitution, ask Abraham Lincoln, ask anyone who cares about our democracy why we are bothering.”
Call Pelosi’s appeal whatever you want, sincere, insincere, right on target, morally bankrupt, but she could only make it because she shares, or assumes she shares, with her rhetorical target a reverence for Lincoln and the founders. Their virtue is and has long been a point of reference in the public square. As in, what would Lincoln do?
More to the point, what would we do without him? One can easily imagine that ideological divisions couldn’t get any worse, but they actually could. The factions already share very little in terms of their vision of the good. Without shared national heroes, there will be no common language at all.
Certainly, Pelosi and, say, Republican Sen. Tim Scott rely on very different associations when they point to the founders or to their own duty to protect the Constitution of the United States. At least they both think it helps their argument, which provides some hope of agreement.
Just to reinforce this last point, elsewhere on Thursday, Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts criticized the “party of Lincoln” on Thursday during the drama about conspiracy-theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia; and President Biden decided that on inauguration night, the best place to communicate his message that he has “never been more optimistic about America” was the Lincoln Memorial.
The indiscriminate “cancellation” of such national heroes, whom collective wisdom had deemed good in sum and worthy of emulation, is a destructive pursuit that would dissolve a lasting source of civic commonality. Charles Lane of the Washington Post, no right-winger, was spot on, calling the San Francisco district’s effort “culturally pernicious.”
Finally, I must point out that San Francisco is Pelosi’s district, and the San Francisco Unified School District sits within it. While members of the old guard such as Pelosi and Biden can still be seen relying on their long-established instincts, the insurgents are wearing off on them. Columbus is not Lincoln, but remember that Pelosi’s response to the property destruction in Baltimore last summer, when some people threw a Christopher Columbus statue into the harbor, was, “People will do what they do.”
With any luck, that won’t be her last word on the mutiny against history, and if the civic preservationists need some motivation to keep making their case, they need only to look around and remember the observation of mid-20th century political theorist Richard Weaver: “Civilization must be saved from some who profess to be its chief lights and glories.”
