Columbus Day is not the most widely celebrated federal holiday. But this year it offered voters a helpful contrast between each of the two political parties and their approaches to the nation’s past and its future.
Like many Democrats, Vice President Kamala Harris chose not to honor Christopher Columbus but instead celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, which is what the Left prefers to call Oct. 1. It does not simply honor this continent’s pre-Columbian past — that could be done on any day of the year — but is a deliberate and direct repudiation of America’s European heritage.
Harris has previously said she supports federal legislation replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. In 2021, talking to the National Congress of American Indians, she explained why, saying, “Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease. … We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.”
This is a statement that should be disqualifying for anyone who wishes to lead this country, which became great precisely because of the values, knowledge, and energy of the Europeans who followed in Columbus’s wake. Leaving aside the inaccuracy of Harris’s comments on European explorers for a moment, notice that her remarks are backward looking and recriminating. For Democrats, our history is an evil stain that must be atoned for, not the foundation of something unique and inspiring that has changed the world for the good. No one who fails to recognize this, who indeed denies it, should get anywhere near the White House.
The tribes that European explorers encountered were not the peace-loving, property rights-respecting angels that the Democratic Party says they were. The peoples that inhabited North America before Europeans arrived were every bit as violent and bent on domination and acquisition as those that came later. Europeans did not conquer America because Europeans encountered a peaceable and better people but because they had the advantage of guns, steel, and horses. They did bring disease with them. None of these facts make the European conquest of North America more or less justified than the Norman conquest of England, the Muslim conquest of the Roman Empire, or the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. It did, however, bring with it principles that have since been widely accepted around and to which even the world’s tyrants know they need to pay lip service.
These ideals were an advantage to European explorers and to the authors of our Constitution and subsequent generations who inherited them. They were ideals and a spirit that built what would become the world’s greatest nation. That spirit was captured on Monday by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican nominee for vice president, who celebrated SpaceX’s historic catch of a booster stage rocket.
“I believe the destiny of this country is to conquer the stars,” Vance wrote. “Whatever your views of Elon’s politics, this is something that should inspire all of us.”
Vance is right. The adventurous spirit that sent Columbus sailing out from Spain to the New World is the same spirit that inspired Elon Musk to build a company capable of launching a rocket into orbit from a Texas launch, circumnavigating the globe in space, and then landing that rocket at the same launch pad. From the Lone Star State, to the stars, and back to the Lone Star State.
That is the spirit that sent Lewis and Clark to find the Pacific. It is the spirit that built the transcontinental railroad. It is the spirit that put a man on the moon.
Republicans want to reignite that spirit. We used to be a country that built great things, the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam. We used to put people on the moon. Now we can’t even put a man on a space station.
Such failure and self-imposed smallness is a governmental choice. It is a choice such as that by the California Coastal Commission, which rejected SpaceX’s request to launch more rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in northern Santa Barbara County because some members of the committee don’t like Musk’s politics.
“We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race,” commission Chairwoman Caryl Hart said with all the pusillanimity one now expects from a hidebound ideologue.
The California Coastal Commission is supposedly a nonpartisan government agency charged with protecting California’s environment. It has no business policing the political views of space entrepreneurs. No wonder California has wasted billions of dollars on a high-speed train to nowhere. The Democratic Party seems incapable of building anything anymore.
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That is the choice voters face in November. Do we look back in shame at a history that, like the history of all other peoples, is imperfect? Do we want petty bureaucrats thwarting greatness? Or do we look forward to what we can accomplish among the stars?
Kamala Harris notoriously wants us to be unburdened by what has been. America needs a leader who does not consider the past a burden but an object mostly of pride.