Progressive Causes. The original title of that book published in 1999 was “Hating White People Is a Politically Correct Idea.” This was an accurate description of the culture promoted by the new leaders of the civil rights movement, and—equally important—was the undeniable thrust of what was being taught in university curricula devoted to the malevolent race, gender and class “hierarchies,” which tenured leftists falsely claimed as structures of American society. The book was rejected by my publisher, Basic Books, whose editor told me, “We will never publish a book with that title.” His response indicated how completely the literary culture had succumbed to the new dispensation. I had to find an obscure publisher in Texas to get the book in print, and thus the upshot of trying to right an injustice was a dramatic diminishment of my career as an author.
Both essays, “The Red and the Black” and “Memories in Memphis,” were written in 1999, and the opening chapter of Part II, “The Race Card,” two years earlier. All the other chapters in this volume are organized in chronological order to form a running journal of the conflicts that accompanied the transformation of the civil rights cause. Until this transformation it had been a movement to integrate African-Americans into America’s multiethnic democracy. In less than a decade it had become a movement led by demagogues to refashion racial grievances into a general assault on white people and on the country they were said to “dominate.” In its core agendas, the new civil rights movement was an assault on the basic American social contract, and in particular the 14th Amendment’s commitment to equal rights under the law and thus to race-neutral standards and race-neutral governmental practices. Post-King civil rights became a movement to institutionalize racial preferences—the same kind of discriminatory practices that characterized segregation—and to recreate a race-conscious political culture in which blacks and a handful of designated minorities were singled out as the groups to be racially privileged. On other the side of the coin, whites were made targets of exclusion, suspicion and disapprobation.
Part III recounts an effort I undertook in the spring of 2001 to oppose a campaign by the left to gain reparations for slavery. This was a cause that had been first proposed in 1969, during the civil rights era, and rejected by every major civil rights organization. At the time of the proposal there were no slaves alive to receive reparations, while the vast majority of Americans who would be forced to pay reparations were descended from immigrants who had arrived in America well after slavery had been abolished. The clear goal of the radicals who launched the reparations campaign was to indict America as a racist society, and to sow the seeds of racial conflict. It was also an obvious shakedown effort of the kind that had come to characterize the civil rights leadership of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. In the winter of 2001, I published an account of these battles titled Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery, which explained why the issue of race was at the heart of the left’s assault.
Democratic congressman John Conyers was the author of the legislative bill supported by the reparations movement. During the controversy, a Republican majority in the House of Representatives prevented Conyers’s legislation from being passed out of the Judiciary Committee and sent to the House floor, a fact that the left seized on to insinuate that Republicans were racists. Yet when Democrats won control of the House in 2008 and Conyers became chair of the Judiciary Committee under a newly elected African-American president, he did not bring the reparations bill to the floor. The reparations issue, which had been infused with such moral urgency until then, was apparently no longer a priority and disappeared from public view. Few episodes seem better designed to illustrate how race had become a political weapon for a movement driven more by its anti-American and anti-white animus than a desire to correct actual injustices.
Part IV of this volume examines the way attacks on a chimerical “white supremacy” have fostered a new progressive racism whose consequences have been destructive for all citizens. The principal target of this racism is the idea of equal treatment under the law—the idea that informs the American identity and unites its diverse communities into a single nation.
As in previous volumes, I have edited the individual pieces to eliminate repetitions where possible and enhance the overall readability of the text.
The Communist Manifesto is probably the only Marxist text that most of his millions of followers have actually read. During the last century, his disciples went about killing a hundred million people in attempts to create the utopia he promised, but these disasters have had no effect on the fantasy that inspired them. It is almost a decade since the collapse of the empires that Marxists built, but it is already evident that its lessons have not been learned. Today, few people outside the halls of academia may think of themselves as Marxists, or publicly admit to pursuing socialist illusions.11 But behind protective labels like “populist,” “progressive” and even “liberal,” the old socialist left is alive and powerful, and in steady pursuit of its destructive agendas.
Since this was written, the situation has changed fairly dramatically. A Pew poll taken in 2011 reported that 49 percent of 18–29 year olds had a positive opinion of socialism. This change had already taken place a few years earlier. See “Little Change in Public’s Response to ‘Capitalism,’ ‘Socialism,’” Pew Research Center, December 28, 2011. http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/.
Three ideas advanced in Marx’s famous tract make up the core of this contemporary leftist faith. The first and most important is the belief that modern, secular, democratic societies are ruled by oppressive “alien powers” (as Marx referred to them). In Marx’s vision, even though industrial nations had dethroned their hereditary rulers and vested sovereignty in the people, this did not mean they were actually free. Though liberated from serfdom, workers were now “wage-slaves,” chained to capital as effectively as they had been chained to the land under feudalism. According to Marx and his disciples, capital is the alien power that rules the modern world in the same way landed aristocracies presided over it in the past. Electoral democracies are fictions within the framework of capitalist societies. Behind the democratic facade, the capitalist “ruling classes” control political outcomes and keep their citizens effectively in chains.
The second idea of the Manifesto flows naturally from the first: politics is war conducted by other means, and specifically class war. The third idea is that victory in this class war leads to a world without chains—a rupture with the entire history of humanity’s enthrallment to alien powers.22
Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, 2008.
In response to the collapse of communism, and to distance itself from that failure, the modern left has revised its vocabulary and expanded the notion of alien powers to include race and gender. The target is rarely described anymore as a “ruling class,” but as a trinity of oppressors: a class-race-and-gender caste. In the war against these hierarchies, race carries the greatest moral weight and political impact. Consequently, racial grievance is the spearhead of the modern radical cause, although gender and class grievances are not far behind. Oppressed blacks and their grievances are deployed to undermine the bulwarks of the social order. And they are effective. In the past several decades, racial preferences to redress past injustices have been the most successful elements of the assaults on the standards and practices of the old order based on individual rights and equality before the law.
The left’s stated
