Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read Free

of the political divide. My views on race, however, have remained entirely consistent with my previous commitments and beliefs. I opposed racial preferences in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. Then, I believed that only government neutrality towards racial groups was compatible with the survival of a multi-ethnic society that is also democratic. I still believe that today.
    What has changed is my appreciation for America's constitutional framework and the commitment of the American people to those ideals. America's unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical understanding that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England are the nations that led the world in abolishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion — or that we are a nation besieged by peoples "of color" trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.
    The establishment of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire was historically essential to the development of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to all minorities than those of any society extant. White European-American culture is a culture in which the citizens of this nation can take enormous pride, precisely because its principles — revolutionary in their conception and unique in their provenance — provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white and non-Christian (and which are not so tolerant in their lands of origin). That is why America's democratic and pluralistic frame- work remains an inspiring beacon to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana, who have not yet won their freedom, but who aspire to do so. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the understanding of those who have been able to resist the discredited and oppressive worldview of the "progressive" left.
    The left's war against "whiteness" and against America's democratic culture is integrally connected to the Cold War that America fought against the marxist empire after World War r. It is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are merely updated versions of the ideas and agendas of the marxist left that once supported the communist empire. The same radicals who caused the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct administrators and faculty of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts, and even leaders of this left display a striking continuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America's national identity and, in particular, of the moral, political, and economic institutions that form its social foundation.
    The left's response to the observations contained in this volume is not difficult to predict. Impugning the motives of opponents remains the left's most durable weapon, and there is no reason to suppose that it will be mothballed soon. In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of "class bias" was used by communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with whom they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into "enemies of the people," a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror through the Stalinist purges and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left's self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on intimidation and smear to enforce its increasingly incoherent point of view.
    It is not that no one else