Washington Monuments Falling Down, Falling Down ...

We are enjoying, or suffering, an epoch of the toppling of statues. Now consider the recent demand for the "contextualization" (meaning the embedding of critical plaques) on, among others, the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. What's really going on?

It will come as a surprise to some, especially anti-big-government libertarians and my fellow paleoconservatives, that Washington, D.C., was abolished … 150 years ago. Yet its ghost persists. This persistence would not have surprised Ronald Reagan (whose name still adorns, however temporarily, the main airport serving our nation's capital.) Reagan, in 1964: "A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth."

When D.C. was first created it included two incorporated cities, Georgetown and Washington. Both were abolished (although nobody, as a colloquial matter, seems to have noticed) in 1871 when the Congress revoked these cities' legal existence and replaced them with the District of Columbia. As an aside, in the "the more things change, the more things stay the same" department an early D.C. governor undertook infrastructure projects costing 3 times the amount authorized, bankrupting the District.