More serious still, the fallout from the Charleston church shootings has led to a drive to delegitimize even our founders, many of whom were slave owners. This list includes arguably the greatest of the founders, George Washington, as well as Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, James Madison, a critical figure in framing the Constitution, and Andrew Jackson, primary architect of the populist ideology of the Democratic Party.

Now, like what occurred with Trotsky and the other Stalinist purge victims, there is a concerted move to airbrush these American idols from the national pantheon. Today’s Democratic Party, for example, has started eliminating its traditional Jefferson-Jackson day events, starting with Iowa.

Progressives, notes liberal writer Ross Baker, may rue the day they replaced their historic forebears with a new identity as “the Church of Perpetual Repentance.” The shaper of modern progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, could be knocked off his pedestal, in large part because he was, among other things, a confirmed racist.

Even Franklin Roosevelt, Baker notes, could be considered suspect for his political alliance with Southern segregationists and the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II. FDR also made Columbus Day a national holiday, an abomination today in progressive strongholds like Minneapolis and Seattle (among the whitest cities in America), which have opted to rename it Indigenous Peoples’ Day.