Renaming is all the rage today. Yale University can claim credit for being a trendsetter: It renamed freshmen “first years,” stopped calling the heads of colleges “masters” (even though the derivation of the term, like the master’s degree, has nothing to do with racism or slavery), blessed the physical destruction of art so long as it depicted uncomfortable subjects, and, of course, created a follow-on Committee on Arts in Public Spaces, and then got into the renaming business by forming a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, the logic of which channels Orwell’s dystopia. Of course, Yale also exposes the hypocrisy with renaming. Elihu Yale, for whom the university was named, was not only a slave owner but also a slave trader and, beyond John Calhoun, whose name was stripped from a residential college, many other residential college namesakes owned slaves — theologians John Edwards and John Davenport, for example.
But enough about my alma mater’s hypocrisy. That’s too easy.
The United States is engaged in an orgy of righteous renaming and self-exaggeration. The 1619 Project and its subsequent Pulitzer show that truth in history and journalism is subordinate to politics and polemics. Another Pulitzer went to Greg Grandin for a work associating U.S. expansion with racism and discrediting the notion of American exceptionalism. That Grandin’s eulogy of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez contained such gems as, “The Venezuelan president could be a strongman. But he leaves behind what might be called the most democratic country in the Western Hemisphere,” and that “the biggest problem Venezuela faced during his rule was not that Chavez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough,” raises valid questions not only if Grandin represents the second coming of Walter Duranty but also whether politics trumps a quest for truth in Grandin’s work.
While a good case might be made for renaming military bases named after confederate soldiers — after all, they did commit treason against the U.S. — the iconoclasm now moves forward to claim U.S. presidents. The New York City Council wants to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall. Other Jefferson statues are on the chopping block. How long before activists call for renaming Jefferson City, the capital of Missouri? In an era in which affirming feelings mean more than learning history, even statues of Abraham Lincoln are in the crosshairs.
Within Washington, the biggest controversy about enshrined racism often revolves around the Redskins, Washington’s underperforming football team. But what about George Washington himself?
As we struggle to each out-self-righteous the other and collectively refuse to recognize that all historical figures are flawed but that even flawed men and women (and all those identities in between!) can make great contributions to society, shouldn’t we also rush to rename Washington, D.C., and Washington state as well?
After all, Washington owned slaves, and shouldn’t that cancel out his own evolution as well as the risks to limb and life he took for freedom from an oppressive monarch? We cannot rename the city after Martin Luther King Jr., no matter what he did for civil rights, because his namesake Martin Luther was religiously intolerant, and could there be a more misogynistic word than “king”? Nor should the city be renamed after any Quaker figure despite the Quakers’ pursuit of racial justice. President Richard Nixon ruined that, as did the American Friends Service Committee’s embrace of the Khmer Rouge.
Perhaps a good solution would be to rename Washington and other cities with numbers, not unlike our country’s interstate highway system? Actually, that will not work either, as social and racial justice warriors have also come for math. Then again, renaming might be a conundrum, but isn’t it really the wrong question? Doesn’t having a capital itself subtlety support hierarchy? And isn’t discussing hierarchy unfair to people who are short? After all, etymological truth should be subordinate to the feelings of those who don’t like the way a word sounds, no matter its origins.
The U.S. might be facing crushing debt. Authoritarians in China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey might seek to change the post-World War II liberal order that has broadly promoted peace and has enabled unprecedented wealth, health, and welfare, not only for a few billionaires, but also for the average man, with billions of people lifted out of poverty over the past few decades. Problems exist, of course: The growth of social ills can be largely traced to the decline in stable families. It’s important to root out bad police (while recognizing the vast majority are exceptional public servants) and also to confront uncomfortable facts about how statistics show that the greatest danger to young black men is other black men (and ditto white-on-white violence). But, please (and, of course, with tongue in cheek): Let’s focus on what is important, purify ourselves politically as we virtue signal, and come up for a new name for Washington, D.C.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
