What's in a name change?

I’m not fond of changing the names of places and things. If the French Revolution didn’t give this a bad name, then surely the Russian Revolution did.

Our Revolution left well enough alone when it came to place names. New York kept its British-rooted name. So did New Hampshire, Maryland, and even Georgia (named after King George II, not George Washington).

The difference here is emblematic of the difference between an ultra-radical revolution and a more conservative one. When a regime changes without any revolution, we should be all the more conservative when it comes to changing names.

Even so, I favor name changes for places named in honor of figures who are almost universally considered odious. Stalingrad needed to be renamed, but that name was itself the result of a name change. It was restored to its original name, Volgograd.

In America, I’m fine with removing the name Forrest from places named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the slave trader who helped found the Ku Klux Klan and became its first Grand Wizard. And I’m not inclined to complain about changes to the name of places and schools that honor Woodrow Wilson. His racist policies, outlandish even by the standard of his times, and his disdain for our Constitution are condemned across the contemporary political spectrum.

It’s not surprising that Donald Trump is big on renaming. As one professor told the Washington Post, “Trump is. . .a branding expert. . .and branding is first and foremost about names.”

The Post complains that Trump is using the power of names to “impose his story of America.” Of course, he is.

But it’s important to note that so far, most of Trump’s renaming consists of restoring names to places whose names were changed by left-liberals who used that power to impose their story of America. For example, Barack Obama changed the name of Mount McKinley to Mount Denali, which is what the local Indians had long called it. Trump has changed the name back to Mount McKinley.

It’s also worth noting that liberals have dominated the naming game for decades. For example, the Post notes that in the entire United States, there are only 159 sites named after Ronald Reagan. By contrast, there are roughly 600 hundred named after John Kennedy.

Under any reasonable analysis, Reagan was a greater, more consequential president than Kennedy. It’s true that Kennedy was assassinated, a fact that helps account for the over-naming. But so was William McKinley. Very little is named after him.

By restoring the name Mount McKinley, Trump is overriding Obama’s ideologically driven name change and honoring a president who lost his life while serving our country, who served heroically in the Civil War, and whose presidency has been underrated by the liberals who dominate the telling of American history.

I applaud the move.

What about Trump’s other name changes? Calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf America isn’t a restoration. Furthermore, it’s silly, in my opinion, and punishing the Associated Press for not going along with the stunt is improper.

Restoring the names of forts that honored Confederate generals presents the most interesting case. Trump has restored the names of Fort Benning in Georgia and Fort Bragg in North Carolina. They were named after Generals Fred Benning and Braxton Bragg, respectively. Both led Confederate forces during the Civil War.

However, in restoring the old names, Trump has stipulated that they no longer honor the generals who waged war against the U.S. Instead, they now honor Cpl. Fred Benning and Private Roland Bragg, who won medals for courage in World War I (Benning) and World War II (Bragg).

The Post quotes an activist who says Trump is using Cpl. Benning and Private Bragg as “fig leaves.” “The true motivation,” he says, is to project to [his] base that the Confederacy was good” and “to hark back to a time and sensibility that the country and the military should be run by straight White men.”

Really? I suspect that the main constituency for restoring the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg consists not of white supremacists, but rather of those who served there or have family members who served there, and folks who live nearby and like the original names.

And I suspect that, in the main, those supporters of the restoration who have the Civil War in mind don’t believe the Confederacy was good. Rather, they believe that service in its army was honorable.

To me, restoring the names of the forts while specifying that the names don’t honor Gens. Benning and Bragg seems like a good compromise. The presumption against renaming is upheld without honoring rebel generals.

But reasonable people can disagree about this.

My hope is that Trump will confine his renaming efforts mostly to restoring old names. However, when the left complains, as does one professor quoted by the Post, that Trump is using names as “one tip of a spear to power through his worldview and impose that on a country at least half of which may not agree with the things he’s doing,” it’s a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.