...The present ascendancy of the woke Left on race is no triumph for civil rights, nor for social justice or any sort of justice, nor for democratic government. Least of all is it a victory for government by reflection and choice. The central, concrete claim of BLM—that systemic anti-black racism corrupts law enforcement in the U.S., such that “Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise”—has been assiduously refuted by critics well schooled in the pertinent evidence. Yet the movement and its allies stay their destructive course, undisturbed by appeals to evidence and reason.
...The essay [the '1619 Project'] epitomizing the Left’s thoroughly racialized and condemnatory view of U.S. history was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and curricular ancillaries of that essay are being disseminated in schools throughout the nation. Educators are fired and students expelled for challenging it. It topples public monuments and renames institutions. University leaders, elected officials high and low, CEOs of companies large and small submit themselves, figuratively and literally, on bended knee before it. It defunds and discredits law-enforcement agencies. It rescinds public safety regulations, seemingly on its own authority. Priests are disciplined for criticizing it; it demands and receives confessions of sin and professions of faith. Elite media coverage ranges from deferential to adulatory. It dominates one major political party, intimidates much of the other, and stands poised to capture the White House and both houses of Congress.
...The 1619 Project, operating together with the BLM program as the matrix of the racial vision of the woke Left, is socially divisive on its surface and at its core. In its racialized partisanship it divides white and black Americans from each other, and in its anti-Americanism it divides people, especially the many students it bids to influence, from their country. It is utterly destructive of the spirit of civic concord upon which the preservation of our republican constitutional order depends.
...In the present contest, the principles of 1776 are grossly overmatched in institutional power. But as Douglass maintained in in his famous Fourth of July oration, those principles remain saving principles. They are the true principles of integration, of equal rights irrespective of color or ancestry, of constitutional republicanism, of a more perfect union. They and they alone are the moral architecture of free government. For an American conservatism worthy of the name, there is no choice but to honor its heritage as the party of 1776. For those who are confused or reticent on the Right, and for any genuine liberals remaining on the Left, let this serve to clarify the alternatives.