Monuments we deserve
I have previously discussed statues and monuments in two separate Quillette articles published in 2023 and 2025 respectively. The first one was about the muddled mess of a monument to MLK by Hank Willis Thomas on Boston Common, and the second about Thomas J Price’s unfortunate installation in the Times Square. My most recent publication in the Christmas issue of The Spectator considers what monuments reveal about broader societal dynamics. Public monuments are often treated as stable carriers of historical truth, yet their meanings are anything but fixed. They are shaped as much by ideology as by cultural anxiety about preserving nobility and purpose. In this essay, I move beyond familiar arguments for the preservation or removal of statues to ask what these objects actually do in civic life. At a moment when public memory is deeply contested, monuments become mirrors, reflecting contemporary values as much as the past they claim to represent.
