The Post's Richard Cohen pens an exquisitely phrased paragraph, with which, perhaps to some readers' dismay, I agree. In replying to Princeton University students' demand that President "Wilson’s name be expunged from the Princeton campus" because of his racism, Cohen writes:
What’s lacking in the Princeton debate over Wilson, and similar debates elsewhere, is an appreciation for the word "and." Instead, "but" is too often substituted, so that a person becomes one thing or another — not two things at once. Sometimes those things are in conflict, as with Thomas Jefferson. He drafted the Declaration of Independence, founded the University of Virginia and championed religious freedom. And he was a slaveholder. Still, I would keep his monument on the Tidal Basin.
Cohen goes on to note that "George Washington, like Jefferson, owned slaves," and that "Andrew Jackson extended American democracy, yet he was brutal to Indians." Both men remain revered — though Jackson far less so in my book, less because of his brutality (which land-grabbing white Americans generally cheered) than his ignorant, stubborn retardation of Whiggish economic progress. Cohen also notes that LBJ "supported racial segregation early in his career — and embraced civil rights as president." Should all three U.S. presidents, alongside Wilson, be Stalinistically sandblasted from every monument because of their darker sides? Should FDR's resplendent achievements in depression and war be airbrushed from collective memory because of his internment of Japanese Americans?
In this, our wretched age of intense polarization and Manichean simplicites, we are losing, observes Cohen, our "ability and willingness to keep two opposing views in mind at the same time," which "are hallmarks of adulthood. We grow up to respect the gray. Black or white, one or the other, is childish."
Cohen's last line is true. As for his preceding line, our "grow[ing] up" seems to have been arrested.