And the rot is deeper than you think.

The ruthless passions of the political left, which have been on full display in the campaign not just to defeat a Supreme Court justice nomination, but to destroy the nominee and his family, are inspired by an ideology that is racist, sexist, anti-Christian, and fundamentally anti-American. Just how powerful and entrenched this ideology is can be gauged by the following headline on the ABC News website: “Us white male Christians need to step back and give others room to lead.” The headline is explained in the article’s opening sentence: “In the great span of world history, nearly all change and progress has come from an under-served and out-of-power group pushing, prodding, and pounding on those who hold power to expand it to include a wider and more diverse population.”

This is pure leftist claptrap. There is not a shred of historical evidence to support it. The greatest progress of the last 250 years, beginning in 1776 and 1789, has been the creation of liberal societies that support the principles of individual liberty and equality, and tolerance. In the case of England and America the supporters of these principles led the world in ending slavery, which is still practiced in Africa today. This progress was entirely the work of white Christian males, who were under no pressure from diverse, under-served and out of power groups. But what is truly striking about these false claims and their racist, sexist and anti-Christian prescription is that they are the words not of some fringe leftist, but of Matthew Dowd, a prominent Republican, who was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.

Every American should be concerned that an ideology so antithetic to everything this country has stood for should now be the conventional wisdom of half the country (including all the persecutors of Judge Kavanaugh). The U.S. Constitution does not contain the words “white,” “black,” “male” or “female,” precisely because the Founders believed they were creating a society in which true equality would one day prevail. It took nearly two hundred years to bring about the social changes that would realize that dream.

For the last fifty years, however, the left and the Democratic Party have been working hard to turn back the clock and reverse these gains - to introduce racial and gender categories and quotas into virtually every aspect of social life, to portray white Americans as guilty before the fact, and non-white Americans as innocent even when the facts show they are not. The progressive goal is totalitarian in nature: to erase individuals, their achievements and failures and every aspect of the circumstances in which they find themselves, in order to judge them on the basis of their skin color, their gender and their sexual orientation.

Hatred for whites, males and Christians – falsely portrayed as “privileged” and “oppressors” and thus condemned on the basis of characteristics they were born with - is now the principal curriculum of our schools, starting as early as kindergarten and extending through graduate education. Under the leftist mantra of “social justice,” American society is falsely portrayed as a system of racial, gender and sexual hierarchies. As in Matthew Dowd’s article, the remedy proposed is to reverse the oppression. In other words, to indict, silence, and repress whites, males, heterosexuals and Christians as part of a scheme to establish the vaguely defined utopia of “social justice.” (Can anyone seriously believe that the lynch mob out to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, is capable of even understanding the concept of “justice,” let alone establishing a society committed to it?)

The ideology which now inspires the progressive left, and never Trumpers like Matthew Dowd, is called “identity politics” – a name that should be anathema to every American who cherishes our country’s commitment to individual freedom - to judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation. “Identity politics” is a euphemism for cultural Marxism, which takes Marx’s claim that societies are divided into oppressor and oppressed classes and imposes this dangerous and historically refuted claim onto races, genders and sexual orientations. Americans need to reject this destructive ideology as completely as they rejected its forerunner in the Communist movements of the past.