Our present generation of progressives can be described in many ways, but one key characteristic that can be safely ascribed to nearly all of them is a simple one: Contempt of our ancestors.
Whether it be the statue-smashing iconoclasm gripping North America, the purging of our historical heroes as bigots who need to be posthumously repudiated by their enlightened descendants, or progressive political parties falling all over themselves to condemn the newest phobia cooked up in the gender studies departments of our ivory towers, our forefathers do not fare well.
This was, in some ways, inevitable.
The transgender craze has so recently come upon us, for example, that even some liberals were left scrambling to check their privilege and purge their vocabularies of “transphobia,” a word that many of them had only recently discovered.
Suddenly, it is no longer acceptable to refer to breastfeeding as an exclusively female activity, we are now informed—even “men” can get pregnant. (Rarely do the postmoderns bother to stop and consider what their forefathers would think of them.)
But despite all of this, recent comments by Justin Trudeau’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland managed to be savagely offensive in an entirely new way.
