Two Princeton University professors tried to dismantle the current "cancel culture" sweeping across the nation as well as the Democratic Party in an opinion piece, saying the latter could end up in "the dustbin of history."
Writing for National Review, professors Sergiu Klainerman and John Londregan argued that tearing down statues and renaming buildings and institutions is part of the "epidemic of destruction" that's tearing the country apart.
"How far will all this go? Shall we also change the names of months?" they wrote. "We might start with July, which honors Julius Caesar, who by common standards committed genocide against the Gauls, and August, named after the man who put the last nail in the coffin of the Roman Republic and declared himself emperor — both were also slave owners themselves as well as leaders of vast slave empires."
Klainerman and Londregan pointed out that until the 1960s, Democrats supported "slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, poll taxes, and literacy tests for voting. The first Confederate Congress was dominated by former Democrats.
"While one might argue that these Democrats left their party when they left their country, their party certainly continued to stand by them: In the contested presidential election of 1876, the Democrats allowed the Republican Rutherford Hayes to assume office despite the stronger claims of their own candidate, Samuel Tilden, in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South."
They also pointed out that during World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans to be rounded up and put into internment camps, "where they were lent out to farmers as slave labor."
And they added that 18 of the 19 senators who cast votes against the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrats.
"The Democratic Party has been able to redefine itself over the past half-century as the champion of minorities, yet all too often, when Democrats have held power, they have substituted identity politics for sound and effective policies," Klainerman and Londregan wrote.
They closed by saying, "We hope and pray that people will reflect on the existential dangers of cancel culture — the course advocated by extreme social-justice warriors and their demagogic allies is bringing our nation to the brink of a chasm. But if the frenzy persists, then let the Democratic Party be the next to have its name swept into the dustbin of history."