“It is the manners and spirit of a people, which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” —Thomas Jefferson (1787)

When the great Stanford economist Thomas Sowell was still writing his syndicated column, he would occasionally submit “Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene.” In one such offering on the prevalence of racism, as a black American he observed, “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racist.’”

That quote came to mind this week as I was surveying the passing scene and realized that this week marks the 55th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s remarkable “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall.

King declared: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. … And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.”

Surveying the rest of the passing scene, I came across a stunning presidential approval report: While an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that Donald Trump’s approval numbers are holding steady after last week’s pile on, what really caught my attention was one standout in Rasmussen’s highly regarded Presidential Approval Tracking Poll. Trump’s approval rating among black Americans is now 36%, almost twice what it was a year ago. Now, I don’t expect this trend will show up as dramatically in the midterm elections, but it is clear that more black voters are recognizing that Democrats turned King’s dream into a nightmare.

Trump’s standing is, in large measure, because of the impact of his administration’s economic policies, which have had a major impact on minority job and income growth. For generations, the Democrat Party has successfully subordinated its black American constituencies to its political will by convincing them they are victims and dependents, and thus, has kept them enslaved on government welfare plantations that have proven to be a miserable failure.

But that’s changing, much to the consternation of the Democratic National Committee, which must constantly juggle its support for an ever-growing list of “political identity groups.” Having shifted its focus toward a “new breed of Democrats,” those promoting “Democratic socialism,” the DNC announced this week that it would also be more visibly pandering to its gender dysphoric constituents, modifying its charter to account for “all genders.” Of course, everywhere but in the DNC’s altered reality, there are only two genders.

This is just the latest revision of the Democrats’ systematic “divide and conquer” playbook, as they foment “Trump Derangement Syndrome” among their increasingly unhinged adherents with an ever-increasing tenor of hate-filled rhetoric. They do so, however, at peril of moving the nation from uncivil discourse to civil war.

Recall that the Democrat race hustlers were greatly empowered under Barack Obama, who was a disciple of hate mentored by his Afro-centric black nationalist “pastor,” Jeremiah “G– d— America” Wright.

In stark contrast to Obama’s focus on race, Martin Luther King dreamed that his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” More than a half-century later, long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the enactment of Lyndon Johnson’s so-called “Great Society” programs, Democrats are still focusing on “color” rather than “character.”

Obama was elected both because of his unspoken promise to assuage liberal “white guilt” and because of his “color” rhetoric: “A deep distrust exists in communities of color. … There are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. … Frustrations have deep roots in many communities of color. Too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.”

The propagation of this insidious race-bait charade was apparent long before MLK’s generation.

In 1901, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, wrote the following in Up From Slavery:

[I] resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. … I pity from the bottom of my heart any individual who is so unfortunate as to get into the habit of holding race prejudice. … In the sight of God there is no color line, and we want to cultivate a spirit that will make us forget that there is such a line anyway.

As for those who maintain that line, Washington wrote in My Larger Education:

There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. … Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.

A few months before the Civil Rights march in Washington, Dr. King wrote of those who foment hatred:

I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency … The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. This movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil.’ … I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the ‘do-nothingism’ of the complacent nor the hatred of the black nationalist. … For there is the more excellent way of love and non-violent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle…

King concluded his “Dream” speech as follows:

I have a dream that one day … the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, From every mountainside, Let freedom ring.” When we let freedom ring … we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, We are free at last!”

Fortunately, there is increasing evidence that black Americans are awakening to the Democrats’ generational charade — that Demos have betrayed MLK’s grand vision. That shift is due to the ever-more apparent fact that Democrats and their Leftmedia talkingheads don’t think black lives matter beyond the voting booth.

I share King’s dream.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776