On an ordinary Monday in July, the Jackson County, Missouri, legislature voted 7 to 1 to begin the process to remove the statues of President Andrew Jackson from the front of its two county courthouses.

This took some moxie. Less than three years earlier, the voters of Jackson County – named after the aforementioned president – voted by a 65 to 35 percent margin to keep the statues in place. 

The turnout was high, given that the statue referendum was on the ballot in November 2020, a presidential election year. For the record, Democrat Joe Biden carried the county by a 60-38 percent margin.

As a reminder, this election was held months after George Floyd mania inspired our nation’s homegrown Red Guard to tear down statues of white men from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln. In the November vote, at least in Jackson County, sanity had reigned.

In the three years since, other Democrats have suffered deserved blows to their reputation – Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden – but Jackson, being long since dead, killed no additional Indians or took any new slaves. Nor has there been any new tell-all history of Jackson.

Up until a few years back, in fact, Democrats celebrated his memory as a founder of their party at the annual Jefferson-Jackson day events. 

Just about every elected Democrat has attended hundreds of such events, knowing full well the man they were honoring had been a slave owner and Indian fighter. 

In a 2013 op-ed in Salon, writer Steve Yoder found numerous Democrats willing to defend Jackson’s record. Mississippi party chairman Rickey Cole, for instance, reminded Yoder that  Jackson was committed to public investment as are Democrats to this day. 

Also like contemporary Democrats, Jackson was keen on expanding the voting franchise. It was he who insisted that males need not own property to vote. “For that day, for that time, it was progressive,” said Cole.

“Progressive” is the critical word here. Democrats have all but abandoned liberalism, even the very word “liberal.” Although conservatives prefer the shorthand “woke,” Democrats now pride themselves on being progressive. 

If liberals can have fixed values, progressives cannot. At the risk of tautology, progressives “progress.”

Being more progressive than their peers in eastern Jackson County, Democrats in Kansas City showed their dismay at the countywide vote to retain the Jackson statues by attaching a warning label to the Kansas City statue.

That label reads in part, “This statue of Jackson reminds us we are on a path that, in the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., bends towards justice. In turn, we must acknowledge past injustices to help us create a greater nation built upon humane policies to light our way and the way of humanity everywhere.”

In recent years, the Democrats’ path has done a good deal of bending. If, 10 years ago, Salon’s Yoder had told his interview subjects that they would soon enough be championing the sexual mutilation of children, they would have thought him mad.

But today Democrats do just that. They approve the chemical castration of boys and the breast removal of barely pubescent girls under the soothing euphemism of “gender-affirming care.” 

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, some of the bluer states have retaliated by allowing women and their doctors to kill their unborn children up to the moment of birth and, if need be, even beyond.

This, they do under the banner of “reproductive rights.” It is just one more way in which progressives help us create a greater nation built upon humane policies to light their way and the way of humanity everywhere.

Given all this enlightenment, it should be no surprise, then, that the Democrats on the Jackson County legislature this week called for yet another public vote in 2024 — ignoring the 2020 vote and presuming that voters had progressed enough to rethink their affection for Andrew Jackson.

This is the way progressives roll, always and everywhere. Democracy is for suckers. The woke know better than the unwoke. 

Once the revolution is won, the proletariat surrenders its will to the “central committee” and the central committee to the “chairman.” During the surrendering, heads roll, often literally.

With the cultural revolution in full bloom in Jackson County, legislators might turn their attention to UMKC. Like other strongholds of higher education, UMKC has been showing us the way.

As a case in point, UMKC has long maintained something of a shrine to a deceased journalist named Edgar Snow. The curators portray Snow as the “man who first told the true story of those times.” By “those times” they mean the brutal years that brought Mao-Tse-Tung to power in China. 

It was Mao who set the template for our current cultural revolution, the tearing down of historic icons and the shaming – or worse – of those “capitalist roaders” who cling to the past.

True, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, the authors of the definitive biography Mao: The Unknown Story, explain how Mao fed Snow a goulash of useful facts and “colossal falsification,” that the hungry reporter “swallowed in toto.” 

So persuasive was Snow’s disinformation that America eventually lost the will to defend China from the Communists, but sometimes, Snow would argue, facts have to be sacrificed to a higher truth.

In time, we yielded the whole of mainland China to three more decades of Mao’s population thinning and three more decades after that of coerced abortions and forced lockdowns.

Speaking of lockdowns, no county in Missouri served up more absurd restrictions during COVID mania than did Jackson County. 

Progressives progress. Like sharks, if they don’t swim forward, they die.

So why bother with intermediate steps and temporary heroes? Why not replace the Andrew Jackson statues with Chairman Mao’s. That’s where our “path” is bending if we don’t speak up and straighten that path out.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is now available in all formats.