It’s odd to be living, as I do, in Virginia, now that it has become the principal battleground in what Angelo Codevilla calls our “cold civil war”—as it once was in the hot one whose memory has lately become the cause of new strife. A few weeks ago, some local high school students decided to demonstrate against what, had any other president taken it, might have seemed the arcane but hardly controversial decision by President Trump to return the legal question raised by the Obama-era decree known as daca (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to our national law-making body for resolution. The demonstrators naturally picked up, among their signs and chants, what had become a favorite topos of the Obama administration, and only slightly less popular than “that’s not who we are,” which the ex-president trotted out yet again in response to the daca decision. They denounced the current president, that is, for being “on the wrong side of history.”

What a depressing thought, that the only thing these newly radicalized children know about history is that it has a right and a wrong side—and that their country has long been on the wrong one. For that is always the assumption behind the right-side–wrong-side conceit, an idea that would never have occurred to anyone who didn’t believe to a certainty that he was on the right side. Nor, for that matter, would it have occurred to anyone who had studied history from a non-ideological perspective. But, then,