Who can stand?

The school board in Falls Church, Va., has voted to rename two schools bearing the names of Thomas Jefferson and George Mason.

The vote was unanimous, though a survey of 3,500 citizens, staff and students showed that 56% opposed renaming the schools.

Thus, political correctness trumped majority rule, which reminds one of the old Bertolt Brecht line about the government abolishing the people to form another.

Both of these Founding Fathers owned slaves, though Mason wanted to end slavery when the Constitution was adopted and refused to sign on that basis. And he wrote Virginia’s Declaration of Rights. Jefferson, in addition to being the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

Indeed, the late Christopher Hitchens, no right-winger by any means, called Jefferson, in a short but fine book, “Author of America.”

And that is not a hard case to make. Jefferson articulated the ideal that we follow to this day.

That does not mean that he personally lived up to it, in all respects.

But there would be no United States of America, as we know it and still try to imagine it, without him, just as there would be no Christianity as we know it without St. Paul, and no Israel without Moses — two other flawed men who would be candidates for cancellation, and perhaps meds, today.

Who will be good enough and pure enough to stand in American lore and civic iconography after all has been washed clean and woked?

John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all flunk the good husband test. Are they therefore misogynists who cannot be honored?

Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson fail the crudity test. Are they bigots whose memories cannot be kept alive?

Teddy Roosevelt was guilty, no doubt, of toxic masculinity. Abraham Lincoln was bipolar. And yet, for decades, we have called them great and erected statues.

They were great.

Great means not that you were without flaw, or error, or sin, but that once, or a few times, in your life you rose above your common humanity, and perhaps your demons, to something uncommon — something decent, uplifting and fine.

Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech does not negate whatever wrong he did in his life. But it redeems his life and enlightens ours. It lightens ours.

The same for Jefferson. Jefferson was a highly flawed hero, but a hero. He was a fascinating, almost infinitely complex and maddening one. But without him, we’d be a big Switzerland with regional twangs.

Let us not bury Thomas Jefferson, or his friend George Mason. They were human beings. But they gave us more than a little light to find our way. Let Jefferson’s name and statues stand.