Recently, I wrote an essay on the late 19th-century Russian pogroms that forced my great-grandparents to flee to the United States. I observed the striking and foreboding parallels between that old eruption of Jew-hatred and the rise of Red-Green Alliance antisemitism in the United States. I did so to highlight a peculiar irony of history: None of this is new.

It speaks to the historical ignorance of most of us today that this remains a radical statement (and I am hardly the first one to state it), perhaps because it flies in the face of the progressive ideology that dominates today’s intellectual and academic establishment.

Progressives believe that almost everything is new. As a result, they must reject history. They dislike the fact that human beings have been largely the same for thousands of years; that throughout history, they have felt and done largely the same things for largely the same reasons.

So, progressives tend not only to ignore but to erase history. They prefer not to know the past, and so they pretend it does not exist. After a short while, the past is contained only in books, so progressives make sure to not only write the books but burn all the other books should it prove necessary—and it usually does. This is especially true in academia, which is ruled by a totalitarian dictatorship of the professoriate that not only wants to control history but to destroy it when it proves inconvenient.