America’s liberals are apoplectic that President Donald Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House to build a new ballroom. They haven’t looked into it far enough to discover this was a guest entrance built in 1902 that was later expanded to hold some secretaries and is a glorified outbuilding, so they are sure a key part of our heritage is gone as part of Trump’s quest to destroy America. No less a personage than Hillary Clinton said, “It’s not his house. It’s your house. And he’s destroying it.”

This is particularly curious, as in most instances these same liberals seem to hate America’s heritage and have been the first to tear down statues or call this a helplessly racist country. This is just one episode in a long string of supposed outrages since Trump took power that have no obvious connection to how we are governed, our liberty, or America’s well-being, but which we are told to be hysterically upset about. The reason why such things mean so much to these people is because since the beginning of the hippie era the liberals have systematically torn down everything true and meaningful in life. Left with no true moral, intellectual, or religious sentiments, they have nothing to hold onto but what I call the “liturgy” of government and morally and politically neutral symbols of a faceless state.

None of this to say there aren’t reasonable criticisms of what Trump has done. It doesn’t seem they went through the proper channels to gain approvals for such changes, which are enormous and out of proportion to the White House. Trump’s ostentatious design tastes are a bit regal for a republic, and most sensibly, as he is building it with his own money and private donations, it is reasonable to be concerned about corruption. But this is how “presidential libraries” are built and it is more or less a legal, socially acceptable form of corruption.

The reason for this obsessive focus on the most irrelevant parts of government is that decades have been spent tearing down anything meaningful by academia and the media. To them, our Founders are not one of the most brilliant generations to have ever lived in any time or place who left us a remarkably robust political system, but instead are hypocrites because our nation was founded on “racism and genocide.” You don’t read The Iliad to learn the moral lesson of how Achilles was a great hero, but his inability to control his rage sent countless Achaeans to their doom; you read it, if you read it at all, to learn about how women were treated as property with perhaps a little discussion about how he seems overly fond of Patroclus. What is taught in schools is that until 1965 our entire country was defined by racism and it still was after 1965 but it was somewhat less bad. If they have religion at all it is divorced from all the difficult, and therefore rewarding, moral and ritual aspects of Christianity and is instead a “kindness club” stripped of all meaning.

Every belief in beauty, goodness, humanity, and liberty has been torn down systematically over the last sixty years by the liberal world view. The only thing that is left to them are the most non-controversial symbols of the state and the belief that our government exists to be “on the right side of history” and fight some vague concept called “fascism,” which in their minds roughly translates to “government by mean people.” The perfect example of this was the reaction to January 6. It is not unreasonable for citizens to be angry about their fellow citizens getting out of hand and becoming destructive at our great seats of power. However, liberals took an incredible amount of personal hurt from this and seemed to believe that if the Senate Chamber would have been occupied our government would have fallen. Of course, the reality is the Senate Chamber is just a room, while the Senate is the body of men. They could meet at the airport Hilton and still be the Senate, but the symbolism of the room itself—no matter how badly we are governed—is one of the only things they have left to believe in.

The reason these people hate statues but love key government buildings is that the White House or Senate Chamber represents the central bureaucracy and collectivism. It is the faceless god which they can worship. Here, they can have something to believe in, even if it isn’t much of anything at all. It is too much for them to have a statue of someone like Christopher Columbus, an incredibly competent and brave explorer who discovered our continent and then fell into vice and brutality with his newfound power. Instead we are told that Columbus was just lost, that the Scandinavians had already discovered America (even if they discovered northern islands and concealed it as trade secret) or that natives already lived here so America didn’t need discovering at all! (Of course, they didn’t know about the Old World.) Fortunately, Columbus Day is making a comeback compared to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” celebrating our heritage instead of apologizing for it—though, of course, not among the liberals.

There was a time when Plutarch’s Parallel Lives were part of any good education, and thus students were taught that every great man is morally complicated and that we can honor them and their achievements while also recognizing and understanding their flaws, and that these lessons will improve us as people. One could see in the story of Columbus is that he was a great hero who didn’t behave well in his good fortune, a lesson for every ambitious man. One could see that Robert E. Lee was a personally virtuous man respected by friend and foe who got involved in a cause he himself questioned, a cautionary tale about going along with the crowd.

The time for such subtle lessons about the human experience that one could actually profit from is long since gone. Everything is “deconstructed” now. All that is left are symbols and thus outrage that a president on the “wrong side of history” would tear down a relatively recent outbuilding to build a bigger one without going through the proper bureaucratic channels. I can’t even imagine trying to explain to these people that Pericles, a profoundly Trump-like politician, built the Parthenon largely as a make-work program to buy off the artisan class, and that a big ballroom from the time our president was a billionaire property developer is a perfectly reasonable thing to leave to posterity, no more or less “problematic” than any of humanity’s great monuments.

To the modern American liberal—with no true knowledge of history, literature, or human affairs generally—all this bit of construction can mean is that America has been reduced to such a state that it makes the ultimate “wrong side of history” president the happiest he has ever been. For my part, I find it hard to get excited about how White House buildings are managed because I actually have some frame of reference and it has no impact on my, or anyone else’s, life.