There is a bitter, Orwellian irony about what’s been happening recently to the cause of freedom in the world. The evaporation of democratic rights in Hong Kong at the hands of Communist China is helping to expose a new malevolence, closer to home. Something of immense consequence is occurring: a civilizational self-loathing, a perverse disenchantment with the concept of government by consent of the governed.
In the two nations that have done the most to advance democracy and human rights over the past century, the United States and Great Britain, political and cultural elites have acquiesced as violent mobs continue to assault the statues, images, and symbols that embody the highest human achievements of our civilization. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Christopher Columbus, and even the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass have all been targeted in America, while in Britain statues of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria, as well as London’s sacred Cenotaph war memorial, have been attacked by rioters. No one is safe from the guillotine of rage unleashed by the radical Left. Basic civil liberties — including free speech, academic freedom, and religious freedom — are considered disposable by the new Jacobins of social justice.
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