Would the world be a better place without the United States? Would humanity be more prosperous without Apple , Microsoft, Tesla, Google , and Visa? Would some other country have invented doughnuts, paperclips, fire hydrants, fortune cookies, sunglasses, deodorant, air conditioning, the Jerry Springer Show, and smartphones? Would the democracies, unaided, have beaten Nazism and communism ?
Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t care. That is the only way to read her claim that Christopher Columbus’s discoveries, and the European settlement that followed them, were "shameful."
Now don’t get me wrong — Columbus was a flawed human being. In order to retain royal sponsorship, he lied about what he had found in the Caribbean, claiming that there were gold mines at hand. He made the natives pay him tribute and sent some to Spain as slaves — to the indignation of Queen Isabella, who regarded them as free Spanish subjects.
But that isn’t why we remember him. We remember him because he made possible the greatest republic in history. We remember him because he united the world, bringing into each other’s awareness civilizations that had until then lived in mutual ignorance. Yes, viruses crossed the Atlantic, smallpox and measles reaching the Americas to devastating effect, syphilis making the opposite journey. But so did technologies and resources, plant and animal species, sparking an increase in global living standards that built slowly over the next three centuries and then accelerated over the following two, culminating in today’s unprecedented wealth.
Does that wealth somehow cancel out the deaths of the aboriginal peoples who lacked inherited resistance to European pathogens? Does their descendants’ access to modern medicine, education, and recreation justify their suffering? It is an impossible question. But I can understand why some indigenous groups take the line that they’d rather not have been discovered, thank you very much.
However, it emphatically does not follow that someone who aspires to lead a nation — any nation, but especially the United States — should breezily call it tainted. I am reminded of when the far-left British politician Jeremy Corbyn was asked to name a war in which he’d have backed the country of which he aimed to be prime minister. Not a high bar, you might think, but it almost stumped him. He eventually came up with World War II — which I suspect he would indeed have done … after June 1941, when Stalin swapped sides.
I wish I could endorse an alternative to former President Donald Trump, whose refusal to accept election results imperils the republic and whose Smoot-Hawley protectionism endangers the world. But, whatever else is wrong with the old boor, at least he thinks the country he wants to lead is a force for good. Sure, he may approve of America largely on grounds that it has the honor of having him in it. Still, at least he passes the most basic test for any leader, namely believing in his country.
Harris is so steeped in the politics of grievance that she sides automatically with the designated victims — in this case, the Indigenous people — almost regardless of circumstance. But the implication of what she and the other anti-Columbus activists argue is that the entire American project is illegitimate, that stamping out human sacrifices, spreading literacy, doubling life expectancy, establishing equality before the law, including for women, inventing vaccines and iPads and spacecraft — that all these things are negated because they were built on the extinction of a stone age civilization.
That extinction was driven not by violence but by viruses. The only meaningful way to understand the different experiences of European contact with Africa and the Americas is through differing levels of genetic immunity. Europeans could not penetrate the African interior, at least not until quinine and anti-malarial treatments were developed. In the Americas, it was the other way around. It was the existing population that lacked resistance to unfamiliar diseases.
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Now the idea that spreading an infection is immoral rather than accidental dates only from the lockdown. Look at the TV commercials for anti-flu remedies from the 1990s or 2000s. They were all about getting back to work, powering through, shrugging off the symptoms. Only since 2020 have we started to think in terms of a moral responsibility to stay away from others so as not to pass germs on to them.
In the great tradition of backdating current fads, Kamala seems to have taken the extreme pro-mask position of California liberals and used it to condemn the conquistadores. Though, naturally, not the Chinese, who genuinely do have a case to answer. America, it seems, must always be in the wrong.
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