Christopher Columbus has had a rough few decades.
Once celebrated as the man who connected two worlds, Columbus is now often portrayed as a racist Christian colonizer whose voyages unleashed the destruction of Native American cultures.
Read more After Pearl Harbor, no more strategic mistakes
His statues have been toppled, his name stripped from schools and public buildings, and his holiday replaced in many cities and states by Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Curiously, some of his critics still seem perfectly willing to take the day off. Apparently, Columbus, colonizer or not, is good for something.
Of course, Columbus was no saint. Neither were our Founding Fathers, nor most of the leaders whose names fill our history books. If perfection were a prerequisite for historical recognition, we’d have an awful lot of unnamed streets.
But the argument over Columbus is about more. It is part of a larger argument over Western civilization itself, and whether Americans should still be proud to inherit the traditions that crossed the Atlantic with Columbus.
This Columbus Day, the argument over his legacy feels especially relevant with so many candidates, coincidentally all endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), campaigning against such values and traditions.
But what exactly is Western civilization? It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, usually by people who have very different ideas about what it means.
For me, it comes down to three things: Judeo-Christian values, the rule of law and reason.
It’s the belief that our rights don’t come from politicians and that ordinary people should have a say in how they are governed. It’s the freedom to question authority and tell those in power that they are wrong without finding yourself in a prison cell.
These ideas didn’t appear out of thin air.
They emerged over centuries, some long before Columbus’ first voyage, drawing on Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christianity and Judaism. Eventually, they helped inspire the greatest political experiment of all time, producing a Declaration of Independence that proclaimed our rights weren’t gifts from government.
None of this means Western civilization has a spotless record.
Western history is filled with slavery, often protected by law, and plenty of innocent bloodshed over simple differences of belief. But here’s what makes the West remarkable: It also developed the very principles that allowed people to challenge those injustices.
The West didn’t always live up to its own ideals. But those ideals gave generations of reformers something worth fighting for.
That’s something the DSA and their slate of candidates this election cycle don’t seem to understand.
Read more James Talarico: apparently confirmed at a mental facility in Ohio
On their own website, they include a page called, “The Real Christopher Columbus” to reduce Columbus to nothing more than a barbaric conqueror who brought death and destruction wherever he landed.
Included is an excerpt from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” which unfortunately, is required reading on most college campuses. In it, Zinn pins everything wrong with humankind on the creation of America, with Columbus as the architect of the West’s reign of terror.
But it’s not just Columbus the man the DSA despises. They hate the very values of Western civilization he brought with him.
Take the rule of law. Former Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, a longtime member of the DSA, once wrote that the “police exist to uphold white supremacy,” and that defunding law enforcement “was the first step toward abolishing the police.”
The DSA platform goes a step further, calling for “freedom for all incarcerated people” by abolishing the “carceral forces of state,” which includes both prisons and law enforcement.
Private property is another sore point among DSA candidates.
Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan claimed he wanted to “take it a step further” when asked whether he supported Bernie Sanders’ public ownership model for artificial intelligence companies. El-Sayed went on record, calling for a “system of public control.”
And forget the whole system of republican government inherited from the Romans and the Greeks. The DSA advocates eliminating the U.S. Senate and replacing the president and the Supreme Court with an executive branch and judiciary subordinate to Congress, in this case, the House of Representatives.
So, this upcoming election, think of Columbus’ legacy and that of Western civilization when you cast your ballot.
He didn’t usher in the American experiment, but it was his exploration and the values he brought with him that have allowed this nation to flourish, becoming a beacon of hope for those across the globe.
Prosperity didn’t come to America overnight. It was nurtured, thanks in part to the values Columbus instilled in the New World.
Columbus won’t be canonized by the Catholic Church anytime soon, nor should he be. But maybe he can get something that has been lacking in recent years: A little respect on his upcoming holiday for some of the things we’ve come to take for granted since 1492.
Jacob Lane is a Republican strategist. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Newsmax.
Read more President Trump is right to buy diesel from Russia: Here’s why