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Where it rhymes, inevitability is close at hand, reminding us that, as Santayana observed, we are condemned to repeat the past we fail to remember.

In 1920, the philosopher George Santayana wrote that Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”

Ultimately, though, Santayana was right: If America is to survive as liberal democratic republic, it will have to stop making ethno-racial distinctions a key organizing principle of its legal and educational public life.

In the words of the philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

On the left as well as the right, there are those who, with hostility oozing from every pore, fit George Santayana’s description of a barbarian: someone who thinks his passions are their own excuse for existing.