It seems bizarre for a government to flag up the issue of statues and street names while over 1,500 of its citizens are dying each day from a virus they failed to control. But statues and street names don’t actually matter. They are a proxy for the far more important issue of diversity and demography; perhaps people worry about statues of dead Englishmen disappearing from city centres because they worry about Englishmen disappearing from those cities.
America’s iconoclastic spasm is certainly related to the country’s transformation from an overwhelmingly European country to a multicultural liberal caliphate, a bold experiment which is yet to produce its end results. African-Americans, though small in number and in relative overall decline, are a totemic group for the multicultural “Blue Tribe”, and their all-American narrative of slavery and redemption echoes the country’s Christian ideals.
When you have a hammer, all your problems are nails.