Democratic Party may have a date with 'cancel culture,' Princeton professors argue

Two professors from Princeton University co-authored a column published Thursday that took apart the country’s current “cancel culture” that they consider to be based on “twisted logic,” but they said if the trend continues – to be fair – the movement should consider relegating the Democratic Party to “the dustbin of history.”

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Sergiu Klainerman, a mathematics professor, and John Londregan, a professor of politics and international affairs, co-authored the piece titled, “A Modest Proposal for a Name Change,” which appeared on the National Review’s website.

They point out that there is a clear movement afoot in the country that aims to erase the “symbols and exemplars of American society” that have suddenly become the targets of an “unprecedented iconoclastic purge.”

The column mentioned the obvious targets: Civil War generals, slave owners, but they also point out that the movement goes much further. Universities across the U.S., for example, are quickly changing the names on school buildings to keep up with the trend. They pointed out that their own university changed the name of its Woodrow Wilson School.

Christopher L. Eisgruber, the school’s president, wrote in a letter last month that the school’s board of trustees “concludes that Wilson’s racist views and policies makes him an inappropriate namesake for the School of Public and International Affairs.”

Those in favor of removing statues and renaming school buildings insist that they have no interest in erasing the country’s history. They say that in order for the country to move forward to more racial equality these symbols need to be removed because they create additional hurdles on that path.

But critics have asked just how far the cancel culture will go?

Klainerman and Londregan wrote, “Shall we also change the names of months? 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."

The two then looked at the history of the Democrat Party that up to the 1960s “was the party of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, poll taxes, and literacy tests for voting."

They listed other offenses that Democrats committed in the previous decades-- including President Franklin D. Roosevelt's treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII-- and noted that the party has “been able to redefine itself over the past half-century as the champion of minorities.”

But they concluded that the party’s "divide-and-conquer approach concerning race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual preferences has advanced their political ambitions to the detriment of our unifying motto E pluribus Unum."