LIKE THE QUEST FOR power, the need for control is driven by the progressive desire for a radical transformation of American society. On the eve of his election in 2008, Barack Obama declared, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”1 Fifteen years before that, First Lady Hillary Clinton had offered her vision of the future in a speech in Austin, Texas: “Let us be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.”2 Long before her speech, the Soviets had set out to create “a new man and new woman,” to people the communist future they were creating. It’s an essential element of the progressive vision that everyone becomes politically correct. The 2016 Democratic Party platform states, “We will push for societal transformation,” a warning that progressives are serious when it comes to revolutionary change.3
Progressives have been working toward this transformation as far back as the administration of Woodrow Wilson, when they moved to centralize power in Washington and create vast new bureaucracies of experts that would exercise “executive, legislative, and judicial powers without the consent of the people or its elected representatives.”4 Prominent among the new bureaucracies now are offices of “diversity,” which have assigned American citizens to categories of “disadvantaged,” “oppressed,” and “underrepresented” groups and provided them with privileges based on race, gender, and ethnicity. This “identity politics” and its goal of “social justice” are radical departures from America’s social contract. By empowering groups instead of individuals, they are, in fact, antithetical to the principles of the American founding, which proclaim that individuals—regardless of what groups they belong to—have God-given rights that are inalienable and that government cannot subordinate or take away.
Under the Fourteenth Amendment, all American citizens are guaranteed equal rights under the law. Nonetheless, in the postslavery South, discriminatory laws and practices persisted for nearly a hundred years. This injustice was rectified when discriminatory practices were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act, which ended segregation 50 years ago. The civil rights revolution should have put an end to government-imposed racial categories that privileged some groups over others and deprived individuals of their right to equal treatment under the law. But Democrats have spent the last 50 years reintroducing racial categories into virtually every aspect of public life and creating bureaucracies to enforce race-based privileges for designated groups. Discriminatory policies have also been extended to gender and ethnic groups through “affirmative action” measures justified as remedying past discrimination. Like progressive measures generally, these temporary remedies have proved to be the camel’s nose under the tent and are now a permanent structure of the social order and a guiding feature of the Democratic agenda.
While institutional or systemic racism has been illegal in America for 50 years, the 2016 Democratic Party platform promises that “Democrats will fight to end institutional and systemic racism in our society.”5 There is no evidence that such racism actually exists. It is asserted in a sleight of hand that attributes every statistical disparity affecting allegedly “oppressed” groups to prejudice against them because of their identity. This “prejudice,” however, is a progressive myth. This is not to say that there aren’t individuals who are prejudiced. But there is no systemic racism in America’s institutions, and if there is, it is already illegal and easily remedied.
A politically correct term for identifying the results of alleged systemic prejudice is “underrepresentation.” For progressives, underrepresentation is proof that there is systemic discrimination. But is it? Ninety percent of the multimillionaires in the National Basketball Association are black. Are whites and Hispanics and Asians systematically discriminated against to keep them out of this lucrative profession? Progressives claim that as a matter of social justice, a place at the table—admissions, jobs—must be found for underrepresented groups. But why are they underrepresented? Has one racist admissions officer been identified in the offices of America’s liberal colleges? Is there a single qualified black or Hispanic or Native American individual who has been denied university admission on the basis of their collective group identity? Is there one faculty candidate who has been denied a position because of their gender or race? In the absence of such evidence, a fair-minded observer would conclude that they failed as individuals to meet other—nonracial, nongender—standards. Perhaps their failure is attributable to cultural or economic issues rather than their race or gender. Women actually constitute a majority of college students. How is that possible if there is a gender hierarchy that oppresses them?
If an individual fails to gain a job or admission to an institution, the traditional American way has been to look to the qualifications of the individual to explain the rejection. Or to examine the measures used to screen applicants to see if there are discriminatory double standards. But under the progressive mandate, collective identities trump individual qualifications, and collective privileges replace individual rights. The consequences of this transformation are most visible in the American university, which over the last four decades has become the first major institution to be transformed by progressives. As a consequence, the curriculum has been turned over to “oppression studies,” in which white male Americans are the villains. Racial, ethnic, and gender privileges have been reinstituted by college administrators, and collegiate campuses have become the sites of segregated student housing, segregated student associations, “spaces of color” for nonwhites only, and even segregated graduations.
Universities are the training institutions for the nation’s future politicians, judges, journalists, and teachers, and therefore engines of the larger social transformation progressives seek. The identity politics and oppression myths of the left are already creating a hierarchy of social privilege in American society, along with increasing social divisions and conflicts. It is no coincidence that the cultural dominance of the left and eight years of the Obama administration have divided the nation along racial lines to a degree not seen for generations. Since membership in a racial, ethnic, or gender group enhances an individual’s status and social power, it is also an incentive to emphasize differences and claim more special treatment and exemption from the standards that govern others, hence the increasing Balkanization of the American public.