HISTORY’S BAD IDEAS ARE AN INSPIRATION FOR PROGRESSIVES, Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Yet 19th-century nullification is the font of the current “sanctuary city” law adopted by nearly 500 American cities that declare federal immigration statutes null and void within their jurisdictions. No matter that such liberal cities would have been the first to call insurrectionary any conservative city that declared federally protected abortion rights, gun laws or the endangered species act impotent within their city limits.

How strange that the entire “liberal” concept of nullifying federal immigration law rest on illiberal legacies that either sought to or actually did start a civil war.

Resegregation on the Rise

Another dark tradition from America’s past was the institutionalization of segregated spaces on the logic that the victims of discrimination did not deserve the protection of their freedoms under the Constitution, given their supposed innate odiousness. Yet once again the progressive Left has returned to its roots for inspiration and implemented an entire array of discriminatory practices. Special landscapes on campuses where particular races cannot enter are called “safe” rather than “segregated” spaces. Entry is entirely predicated on outward appearance—although how one’s genealogy is assessed ad hoc poses the same challenges as it once did for the racists of the Old South who came up with the ‘one-drop’ rule.

Campus dorms are now routinely segregated by race, at least sort of, given that a white “theme” house would be properly declared racist and shut down.

The far left wants Woodrow Wilson’s name airbrushed from history at Princeton, while continuing to practice his pro-Confederacy, pro-segregation beliefs.