One of the things that strikes me more and more as I get older is the lack of institutional memory from the chattering classes. Turn on TV news and you see two people screaming at one another seemingly unaware that their dispute was hashed out last month, last year or even twenty years ago. Politicians propose solutions that were tried a dozen times in the past, failed and were discarded. Hollywood, of course, is now recycling what was recycled last year.  America is a land of people with the memory of a goldfish.

The leaves of the tree are merely the manifestation of the roots. I think this piece I saw mentioned by Mark Steyn gets at the root of the issue. History is no longer a subject that American elites have much interest in these days. The national religion is liberalism and the liberal is by necessity at war with the past. All the leaning forward business we see from lefty nutters on TV is a dramatization of the struggle. For the liberal, the past is a nightmare from which they struggle to awake. It is the barrier to the glorious future.

The result is two phenomenon. One is the past is ignored. Vast amounts of the past has been erased from the record. The mere mention of them can get you banned from elite society. So much so they have been removed from the curriculum of our universities. If you dare bring any of it up, they run you out of the system. The other phenomenon is the rewriting of the past, even the near past, to fit the narrative of inevitable progress toward the glorious future. For instance, modern liberals all believe the Dixiecrats were right-wing Republicans. They are certain that Hitler was a conservative.

The religion of America is liberalism. The mandated stupidity we see everywhere is a direct result of the Left’s war on the past. It is one thing for the janitor to not remember what he had for breakfast. His role in life is to follow instructions. When the intellectuals deliberately close off their minds to the idea of history, the binding of the present to the past, we are going to have problems. Every one of history’s monsters promised to unshackle the people from the past. Our current monsters have the same plan.