There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson).  There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after that the movie’s denouement takes place on the mountainside itself as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint face off against one of the villains, Martin Landau.  If today’s assortment of slavering, anti-American grievance-mongers should get their way, however, the measured, dignified gaze of those stalwarts of American history might be replaced by the haughty sneers of such heroes of the Resistance as Bernie Sanders (with stony index finger raised in hectoring mode), the paragon of human rights Fidel Castro (with cigar lifted), Barack Obama (chin jutting in familiar faculty-lounge twit pose), imprisoned cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal (middle finger extended), and Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Today’s leftists, in customary high dudgeon, are breaking new ground in their irrational hatred for American traditions and values, the Founding Fathers, the concept of freedom of speech, and Western civilization in general.  In a ghoulish attempt to erase what they claim are symbols of America’s evil past, they vandalize and demand removal of statues and memorials to American history.  It may be too soon to know if the refusal of professional athletes to respect the National Anthem and the American flag may escalate into lawsuits to prohibit the singing of what many leftists no doubt see as hymns to American imperialism—the “broad stripes and bright stars” of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” and the “mountains and prairies and oceans white with foam” of Kate Smith’s celebrated rendition of “God Bless America” still, to use Billboard Magazine’s colorful showbiz patois, “pulling excellent coin” in royalties 30 years after her death—at sporting events across the land.

It doesn’t help the cause of America or Western civilization that today’s Democratic Party and mainstream media are crawling with identity-politics vote-pandering mayors, governors, and congressmen, as well as op-ed columnists, editors, and others eager to play Barack Obama’s destructive partisan parlor game of contempt for America’s success and influence.  Many are also fired up with today’s fashionable scorn for capitalism, entrepreneurship, and the private sector, enthusiasm for redistribution of wealth, and the vengeful notion that the Constitution is a white-supremacist document and thereby illegitimate.  Like the activists of the 1960’s whose repertoire included such bombast as “never trust anyone over 30” and “history is irrelevant,” these postmodern haters reviewed the old newsreels and, no doubt wowed by the dubious personal hygiene, hallucinogens, cheap sex, and destruction of private property that were part of the act, are confident that establishment university officials, political moderates, and organizational bureaucrats are at heart cowardly and will surrender to the antagonism of activists from MoveOn.org, Black Lives Matter, and various other violence-prone groups operating within the general rubric of what we now call Antifa.  The leftie rabble-rousers are aware that a strong offense of insolence, incivility, and abuse, vociferous dismissal of the historical record, absurd lawsuits, and barely veiled threats of personal injury can go a long way.

Nearly two thirds of Democrats and academics think that conservatives should be barred from public speaking and are happy to find common ground with the thuggery of Antifa groups, who behave as if the social advances of the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, American Revolution, Industrial Revolution, and Civil Rights Era are irrelevant.  According to the likes of the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the great racist charlatans and tax cheats of our age, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, thus public funding for the Jefferson Memorial in our nation’s capital must be eliminated.  Christopher Columbus was a murderous colonialist, suggest some in the inner circle of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a youthful supporter of Nicaragua’s vicious Sandinista regime who honeymooned in that whoopie-and-high-jinks vacationland paradise Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and seems to back the removal of the statue of Columbus from Manhattan’s Columbus Circle.  Well-adjusted people typically abandon such adolescent foolishness as they grow older, but not De Blasio, who believes that, because of what he calls “income inequality,” punishment for America tops today’s order of business.

The mayor has surrounded himself with such nasty pieces of work as City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, a Puerto Rican-born activist who noisily advocates Puerto Rican independence (supported by fewer than five percent of island residents) and long-time Fidel Castro booster Harry Belafonte as members of an “advisory committee” on statues and monuments.  Today’s guilt-mongers are convinced that the allegedly noble struggles of the 1960’s have never ended, America and the West are more racist and oppressive than ever, and an endless, draconian program of denunciation and moral blackmail must be enforced—with appropriate financial “reparations” that for leftists will never be enough.  MSNBC host Joy Reid has denounced traditional American reverence for church, family, the police, the military, and the National Anthem as preoccupations of “a bygone era,” presumably to be cast aside. Thus, the opening gambit to destroy monuments and references to America’s past achievements is an air-brushing of history much the way the old-time Stalinists and Nazis did it back in the day, with names of cities, streets, schools, cultural institutions, and even rivers changed to reflect the altered historical realities brought on by the Russian Revolution and, 20 years later, the Nazi sweep across Europe.

Expiation, penance, and the creation of Orwellian 1984-style un-persons are to be the new morality of today’s world.  Don’t like Southerners and any reminders of the Confederacy?  Play up the long-ago issue of slavery and tear down all statues of Robert E. Lee, who, although he abhorred slavery and was superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855, nonetheless possessed a few slaves from his wife’s family and later fought for the South.  Don’t like organized religion?  Abolish the word Christmas.  Looking for a sports scapegoat and can’t stand the Yankees?  The late conservative writer Arnold Beichman once joked that when, as a boy, he approached slugger Babe Ruth outside Yankee Stadium to ask for an autograph, The Babe, a legendary after-hours boozer and carouser never at his best with children, responded, “Get the hell off my running board, kid!”  Should Ruth’s plaque be removed from the stadium’s Monument Park of heroes in center field and his uniform number (3) be unretired?

In today’s environment, no national icon or tradition is safe.  Hillary Clinton and others have suggested that the Electoral College is an outdated concept that should be abandoned.  The city of Dallas has debated the renaming of several high schools named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison, and an alarming percentage of American Millennials, with the attention spans of hummingbirds and largely ignorant of any history pre-dating the early episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, seem to feel that this is perfectly reasonable and, worse, that defense of the First and Second Amendments is “violence,” that socialism is righteous, and Stalin was a hero and a swell guy.  The effete, resentful Barack Obama, bobbing and weaving in the background as a particularly annoying “Shadow President,” hasn’t hesitated to offer empty platitudes on issues of the day, but where is he, now that we need him, to prissily reassure the locals that, “If you like your statue you can keep your statue, if you like your history you can keep your history”?

President Ronald Reagan once articulated the elegant rhetorical question, “How can we not believe in the greatness of America?”  Daniel Patrick Moynihan defined the United States as a “singularly successful, multi-ethnic society.”  It is past time, then, for the remaining 80 percent of sensible, reasonable Americans to compose themselves and focus on the abundant verifiable positive aspects of their history, or there could be big trouble.  Leftists, who reviled both Reagan and Moynihan, are convinced, as usual, that everyone else is “racist, misogynist, nativist, and authoritarian,” as The New Yorker’s resident philosopher-in-chief, David Remnick, has branded the Donald Trump presidency.  An obscure commentator on ESPN has punched her ticket to media stardom with a comment that the President is a white supremacist who “has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists.”  Professional athletes, no doubt unaware that the roster of America’s duly elected black officials, high-level bureaucrats, and corporate CEOs continues to expand while 80 percent of the planet’s other countries have none, refuse to follow the established tradition of standing for the National Anthem and claim that the United States is “oppressive” to blacks and other minorities.  In a more sane and orderly world, such people, whose preferred style of debate is high-decibel falsehood, slander, and vulgarity, and whose fashion and accessory sense—recently exalted as “style-setting” by the New York Times—runs to ragged prison-style jeans hanging down below their buttocks, bizarre tattoos and body-piercings, black balaclavas and aluminum baseball bats, and many of whom have rap sheets or outstanding warrants involving robbery, assault, rape, and in some cases homicide, would be ridiculed as the malcontents, frauds, ruffians, and outright buffoons they are, their opinions laughed off as the opportunistic and inadmissible ignorance of tenth graders.

In the wake of last summer’s disorder in Charlottesville, Virginia, prominent Civil War historian Allen Guelzo defined the difference between monuments and memorials: “Monuments invite us to see exemplars.  Memorials are simply remembrances that something happened in this place.”  He suggested that memorials can be statements of mourning or repentance but are usually not about power or approval.  Leftists, though, have never believed in American greatness, denouncing a national success allegedly “built on the backs of slaves” and stolen from those somehow more deserving.  The late French philosopher Jean-François Revel and American political sociologist Paul Hollander have both observed that Europeans had borrowed the anti-Americanism of America’s elites and embroidered it into something they pretended was their own, although American political scientist James W. Ceaser has argued that European anti-Americanism actually traces back to the 18th century, when a number of European intellectuals—few of whom had visited America—charged that the New World was a degenerate place where, as the Dutch churchman and writer Cornelius DePauw and French biologist the Count de Buffon both huffed, dogs had forgotten how to bark and the population was stunted both physically and mentally.

More recently such thoughtful observers as Christopher Caldwell, Claire Berlin ski, Theodore Dalrymple, David Pryce-Jones, and Douglas Murray have commented on Europe’s own crisis of confidence, a collective sense of hopelessness and overwhelming guilt over its history of religious persecution, pogroms, horrific wars, authoritarianism, fascism, antisemitism, communism, xenophobia, and the wholesale slaughter of the innocent.  The French philosopher and novelist Pascal Bruckner, in a pair of essential books written some two decades apart—published in English as The Tears of the White Man (1986) and The Tyranny of Guilt (2010)—has analyzed this neurosis by charging, in part, that “nothing is more Western than hatred of The West.”  It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that today’s inventive leftists have turned their fire on American history, playing all 52 of their favorite grievance cards—the standard baseless accusations of “racist,” “fascist,” “homophobic,” “sexist,” etc.—from the bottom of the deck.

During World War II, Noël Coward wrote a set of sarcastic lyrics that ran, in part, “Let’s not be beastly to the Germans”; in today’s orgy of leftist indignation, though, it’s become de rigueur to be beastly to just about everybody, living or dead.  So it looks like everyone and everything will have to go, yet it isn’t clear what will replace the numerous icons targeted for unpersonhood and demolition, and leftists are never easy to buy off.  There are literally thousands of towns and cities, counties, streets, schools, hotels, restaurants, and apartment buildings across America named after Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Lee, and other historical figures; should all these be renamed?  Should the many American blacks named after Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Founding Fathers be obligated, under penalty of derision and retribution from the rowdies of Black Lives Matter and MoveOn.org, to change their names?  And what of the hundreds of buildings, schools, and malls named after genuine racists like the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a Ku Klux Klan official early in his career?  Woodrow Wilson was an unreconstructed racist who as President resegregated the federal workforce and fired numerous black workers, so will his name be sandblasted from buildings at Princeton, Columbia, and elsewhere?

The culprits, creeps, and ne’er-do-wells are everywhere, the possibilities for retribution from spiteful leftist bluenoses endless.  But their own icons may also be at risk in today’s climate—leftist do-gooders would be enraged should anyone suggest renaming New York’s 125th Street or anything else named after the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., but he is known to have hobnobbed with members of the American Communist Party at one point, so is he, too, a villain of history?  Historians have documented the lies and fabrications in President Kennedy’s background, and he and his cronies were fond of bringing toothsome and fun-loving houris into the White House when Jackie was away, so what about all the schools and institutions named after the 35th President?  And what of the heroes and iconic figures of other countries known here in America?  Civic leaders in New Orleans are already on record to ban references to Lafayette, not realizing in their historical ignorance that the slaves Lafayette “owned” had been purchased from George Washington so that they could be given their freedom.  How about Rimsky-Korsakov?  The Russian composer might seem inoffensive enough, but he was an aristocrat, had been a midshipman at Russia’s Naval Academy, and wanted to create a purely “Russian” music free from all outside influences; these are all flagrant character flaws to leftists, so he must have offended somebody.  Let the destruction of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music begin forthwith.

Perhaps it was always unreasonable to expect today’s left, whose elders signed up with Russian Uncle Joe Stalin in the 1930’s and Asian Uncles Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao in the 1960’s, to respect our grand traditions, including the celebration of Christmas.  Divisiveness and scorn for America have always been in their DNA, and these updated initiatives fit neatly into their playlist from the “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go” songbook.  If today’s left can demand the destruction of historical monuments, and if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court’s resident Inspector Clouseau, can suggest that American jurisprudence be subservient to so-called international law, then surely conservatives can answer back, can make America’s case with vigor and certitude.

In his 1967 album Absolutely Free, Frank Zappa, in his fashion a more modern and hip American icon, featured the song “America Drinks and Goes Home,” which ends with the ironic line “and just like I say, there’s no regrets.”  As with the long-beloved faces on Mount Rushmore, today’s conservatives, patriotic Americans of good will, good sense, and high intellectual honesty, should gaze calmly back at those who advocate the destruction of America’s history and, with a savvy wink and a cheery smile—obscene hand gestures optional—respond simply, “No regrets.”