One of the reasons George Santayana’s famous line about forgetting the past resonates is because humans can be so bad at remembering. That’s especially true about the past 25 years of liberal Western democracy. The twenty-first century brand of progressivism that’s corrupted so much Western thinking is all about moving on from a past inevitably deemed regressive. To someone like me, who lived through 9-11 in Manhattan and spent years writing about what we learned from it, the extent to which we have forgotten the lessons of that day and discarded so many of the principles we developed to defend ourselves is shocking.
