.Yesterday's 7-2 Supreme Court decision in American Legion et al. v. American Humanist Assn. et al. may prove to be a watershed in obstructing one of the Left's core strategies: discrediting our collective history and eliminating the monuments to it so as to tear up constitutional limits on the power of government.

The American Left has turned away from making the political economy of America better for the less fortunate in society and embraces what Barack Obama euphemistically called "fundamental change," meaning state control of the economy — putting politicians in charge.  This agenda requires discarding the constitutional limits on government — an ambitious goal, to be sure, but one that can be accomplished if the Founders and all who followed them and embraced those limits can be discredited in the eyes of a critical mass of the population.

For instance:

There's plans in the works to cover a mural of George Washington from the halls of George Washington High School in San Francisco due to complaints that it's offensive and demeaning to Native Americans and African Americans.

The San Francisco school board is expected to decide next week whether to cover the image or paint over it, but there's no plans among top officials to leave the imagery in the open for students to view, according to several Bay Area news reports.

Writing for the majority, Justice Alito called out the motives of those who want to remove all religious symbolism from publicly owned land:

"A government that roams the land, tearing down monuments with religious symbolism and scrubbing away any reference to the divine will strike many as aggressively hostile to religion."

Religious monuments are not the only markers of our past that are being torn down, of course.  Monuments to the Confederate dead and their leaders are being torn down, sometimes by governments and sometimes by mobs, in an effort to erase the history of that cause and its public support.

But Justice Alito recognized that over time, layers of meaning accumulate, and reflect not just the intent of those who created the monuments, but the sentiments of succeeding generations who interpret them from a different perspective.

[A]s time goes by, the purposes associated with an established monument, symbol or practice often multiply.

He offered a present-day example from the support of the aggressively secular French government for restoring Notre Dame Cathedral:

Although the French Republic rigorously enforces a secular public square, the cathedral remains a symbol of national importance to the religious and nonreligious alike. Notre Dame is fundamentally a place of worship and retains great religious importance, but its meaning has broadened. For many, it is inextricably linked with the very idea of Paris and France.

George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, but unfortunately, the American Left has adopted it as a how-to manual.  Orwell wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

The Supreme Court has grabbed back control of the past from the leftist mobs who seek to eradicate all that does not conform to their agenda.

Image credit: Joe Ravi.