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Americas Founders understood political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens.

Progressives rejecting the idea that any rights, including the right of consent to government, are natural accept no such limits. Progressivisminsists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic,evolutionary modelof the Constitution.

To them, historical progress should be facilitated by experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control especially at the national level. As progressivism has grown into modern liberalism, the commitment to extra-constitutional progress is broadly shared across elite political, academic, legal, and religious circles. Politics is thus increasingly identified with a mix of activism, expertise, and the desire for change.

The progressive understanding of the American polity grew out of a transformation in American political thought that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This transformation stemmed from a confluence of ideas borrowed from Darwinism, pragmatism, and German idealism. Each of these philosophical systems rejected natural law and natural rights. They privileged inexorable historical evolution and change over continuity and fixity.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Americas intellectual classes, guided by these ideas, moved in lockstep. They scorned whatever they perceived to stand in the way of Historys march especially the Founders Constitution and traditional Christianity. Government was understood to be unlimited in principle and it certainly could not be limited by a dusty 18th-century Constitution based on the flawed theory of a fixed, and fallen, human nature.

The most important forms of social, economic, and political progress came to be seen as depending on the state, and the manipulation by the state of measurable phenomena. Human flourishing was most often seen as an incident of politically engineered growth and transformation. As the idea of a formal Constitution disappeared as an object of study and eventually of public veneration so, too, did the realm of the private and the invisible.

American Catholicism and Protestantismassimilated themselves to the progressive synthesis, in their calls for social solidarity through economic policy. Whether through the Catholic social thought of Fr. John Ryan (A Living Wage, 1906), or the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (Christianizing the Social Order, 1913), significant portions of religious opinion turned against limited constitutionalism in the quest for more rational, just, and scientific state administration.

This stood in contrast to the pre-progressive American Christianity that buttressed the constitutional order by linking human fallenness, or imperfection, to the need for political moderation, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government. Such assimilation of secular thought and theology to the aims of progressivism continues to have important ramifications.

It would be next to impossible to understand the nature and depth of this progressive revolt against American institutions if one were to read the accounts of major American historians from the mid-twentieth century onward. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. In large measure, the scholarly interpreters of progressivism were in deep sympathy with its premises and conclusions.

For much of the twentieth century, progressivism was interpreted as a populist or occasionally intellectual movement that was ultimately assimilable to the basic contours and concerns of the American regime. This is largely becauseprofessional historians shared the assumptions of the progressivism they documented: the utility of statism, the chimerical status of natural rights in the face of Darwinian and pragmatic criticisms, and the anachronistic nature of a Constitution rooted in political thinking that could not be squared with scientific and evolutionary approaches to history.

The dominant professional organization of historians theAmerican Historical Association was founded in the late 19th century, just as fashionable progressive ideas were sweeping the intellectual classes. American historians from the beginning downplayed any constitutional perspective because they saw it as quaintly irrelevant and professionally antediluvian.

With the growth of academic history in the 20th century, the disciplines practitioners absorbed progressive orientations deliberately or through subtle osmosis from the very movement that many of them would chronicle. Collectively, therefore, they were guilty of a strange complicity of understatement.

In fairness, historians were not alone in this. Many other academic disciplines were similarly compromised. But it was historians who most thoroughly told the American story to generations of college-educated citizens.

Such matters are not merely of academic or antiquarian interest. The serious but flawed historical scholarship of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for far less serious but more famous progressive assaults on America, such as those contained inThe 1619 Project.

More broadly, as History and progress cameto replacenature as the fundamental ordering ideas of American politics, they laid the groundwork for the contemporary embrace of the living Constitution as a replacement for the Founders formal, fixed Constitution. The reverberations of this shift are still being felt on matters as diverse as the size and scope of government, freedom of conscience, identitarian politics, and the political and cultural drift of the nation.

Writing after the Progressive Era had morphed into the New Deal, leading progressive historians wrote with the considerable authority that twentieth-century American academia provided. Starting in the 1940s, they studied progressivismquaprogressivism which is to say, they identified it by name, casting longing glances in its direction.

These scholars cemented in the American mind the image of progressivism as a warm and fuzzy movement for change whose time had come and gone. The chroniclers more often than not ignored the fundamental constitutional dimensions of progressivism and the relationship of citizens to the state. And where they didnt ignore such matters, their works trod lightly so as not to challenge an increasingly conventional wisdom.

For example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (The Vital Center, 1949), gives an account of progressivisms direct lineal descendant the New Deal which, he claims, fills the vacuum of faith. New Deal liberalism provides an intellectual and moral compass that allows Americans to work their way through the anxieties of the postwar era, when unhappy people see that both communism and capitalism have dehumanized workers and destroyed personal and political liberty.

Echoing the central themes of the progressives while seeming to dismiss their romanticism, Schlesinger observes matter-of-factly that the problem remains of ordering society so that it will subdue the tendencies of industrial organization. He laments threats to the vital center the New Deal center that must be defended against all enemies. The positive state latent in the American tradition since Hamilton must continue to flourish for the sake of democracy.

Likewise, Richard Hofstadters consensus view of American intellectual history (The Age of Reform, 1955) deemphasizes the depth of philosophic disagreement that separated the founders of progressivism from the founders of the American regime and from what was then the mainstream of American political thought.

In Hofstadters telling, the desire for reform was more psychological than political, not rising from a will to promote ideas as much as a reflex to defend against economic and emotional insecurities. He sees progressivism as the quest of the essentially well-off classes to maintain status in an era of socioeconomic challenge.

America, he asserts, lacks a conservative intellectual tradition, so progressive thinking exists as a highbrow reaction to unserious political conservatism. The possibility of a genuine constitutional conservatism stretching from the Founders to Lincoln and reasserting itself in the very period that is the subject of his book (through William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge, among others) is beyond Hofstadters imagining.

Indeed, the continuities in the American tradition, rather than important disjunctions in thought, were emphasized by scholars across the spectrum, from Louis Hartz (The Liberal Tradition in America, 1955) to Henry Steele Commager (The American Mind, 1950), to Daniel Boorstin (The Genius of American Politics,1953). In these accounts one finds a peculiar mix of understatement and triumphalism, something particularly noticeable in Commager, who claims that progressive calls for reform rested on moderation, common sense, and even inevitability, given the fundamentally changed political and economic landscape of the early twentieth century.

In other words, Commagers historians interpretation coincides with the self-understanding of his subjects. The progressives searing constitutional critique attracts surprisingly little attention.

Arthur S. Link (Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1954) argued for the relatively superficial character of progressive thought exemplified by Woodrow Wilson, in the course of which he accepts the historicist premises of progressivism, claiming that the progressive movement itself was the natural consummation of historical processes long in the making. The understanding of progressivism as fundamentally a populist rather than philosophic movement was reinforced by historians such as C. Vann Woodward (Origins of the New South, 1951). Henry F. May (The End of American Innocence, 1959) even suggested that many progressives represented a basic cultural and political conservatism, a theme that would be magnified in the next decade.

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, American history writing was increasingly defined by the concerns of New Left scholars, who interpreted progressivism primarily in economic terms. They rejected the psychological reductionism of consensus historians and made ideology and interest central concepts in their analysis. But their deep sympathy with the aspirations and philosophical orientations of progressivism ensured that they became part of the story they chronicled.

In The Contours of American History (1961), William Appleman Williams sees the progressives as Christian capitalists merely trying to harmonize private interests, rather than attempting to challenge the system as whole. Themes of economy and empire loom large in Williamss account, and constitutional questions are all but invisible as he insists that a fundamental conservatism characterized progressive thought. Williams argues that the progressives sought to nationalize and Americanize but he does not attempt to define Americanization other than in materialist terms.

Like Williams, Gabriel Kolko (The Triumph of Conservatism, 1963) tries to construct a grand narrative of American history along materialist lines. The Progressive Era was really an era of conservatism, serving the needs of particular classes especially the business classes. Political capitalism is the term Kolko uses to describe the dominance of politics by business.

Competing scholarly accounts of the nature and significance of progressivism, among other matters, culminated in furious battles within the historical profession. The 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association was tumultuous, with conflict between the radical caucus and the establishment coming to a head. The radicals aimed their fire at the consensus historians, who were seen to dominate the field.

It was only a matter of time before someone would attempt to put conflicts over progressivism to bed once and for all both for the historical profession and ultimately for the American people. And the way to do this was to claim that there was no there there to begin with. By the 1970s, the radicalism of the New Left was giving way to a perhaps even more radical postmodernism.

Cultural historian Peter Filene (An Obituary for The Progressive Movement, 1970) denied that progressivism had ever existed. In fact, he saw significantly less to progressivism than even Hofstadter, who at least allowed for some measure of psychological unity among progressives, or temperamental traits that they shared.

Filene accepts the view that progressivism was aimed at undermining privilege and expanding both democracy and government power. But he claims that there was much more that divided the progressives than united them. For example: Teddy Roosevelts beliefin big government to offset the power of big business, versus what he denigrated as the rural toryism of the more populist wings of the movement.

Additionally, progressives alternately emphasized either democracy or paternalism. Such splits point not to a cohesive movement, according to Filene, but to various incompatible visions of reform. In each of its aspects goals, values, membership and supporters the movement displays a puzzling and irreducible incoherence. There are only shifting coalitions around different issues. The idea of a progressive movement is but sound and fury, signifying nothing.

By the end of the twentieth century, most scholarly accounts of progressivism downplayed its constitutional dimensions and its effect on larger cultural conceptions of the private sphere. For some, progressivism represented little more than the cautious efforts of popular or at least non-elite interests to check elite dominance. This was, broadly speaking, the view shared by early liberal historians like Hofstadter, Schlesinger, Jr., and many more.

For others, populism had little to do with progressivism. The New Left historians, such as Kolko and Williams, attempted to upend the liberal or consensus narrative by insisting that corporate elites either drove or coopted progressive reforms in order to exercise ideological and political control over an otherwise unruly economic order.

For most everyone, progressivism was bound up with the desire for efficiency and expertise rather than the messiness of republican politics and with a faith in expanded state (especially national) power, as opposed to decentralized market forces or the spontaneous workings of civil society. Almost no one saw progressivism as a fundamental rejection of the Founders Constitution, embodying a new form of secular millenarianism rooted in a strong, relatively unified sense of historical unfolding and pointing to deep theoretical unity, rather than division.

Todays progressives, who occupy almost all the cultural high ground in America, were educated in institutions where the misrepresentations of historians still loom large. Despite these modern progressives positions of privilege and systemic advantage, a new constitutionalist critique of progressivism prevents them from claiming final victory. Only recently have scholars outside the historical profession mostly a new generation of political theorists identifiedprogressivism for what itwasand continues to be: afundamentalrupturewith the roots of American order.

This article is reprinted from RealClearPublicAffairs, with permission.

Bradley C. S. Watson is Professor of Politics at Saint Vincent College, where he holds the Philip M. McKenna Chair in American and Western Political Thought. His books include "Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence," "Progressive Challenges to the American Constitution: A New Republic," and, most recently, "Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea."

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Why You Can't Be A Progressive And Truly Love American History - The Federalist

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Budget Committee, said in an interview Wednesday that he remains optimistic about the bipartisan talks, but added that, if for some reason the bipartisan version doesnt work out, then we ought to be looking at a reconciliation bill thats at $4.1 trillion.

Any talk of such a backup plan, however, is in the early stages as Democrats await another week of bipartisan talks in the Senate. But the fight over whether to increase the party-line bill's price tag is one of several potential problems that would bedevil Democrats if those bipartisan Senate negotiations fail underscoring the tenuous peace that both Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi will need to hold throughout the falls high-stakes floor action.

Right now were trying to [see a] silver lining moving towards how we can get this done and not assume that we have members that are also going to be problems, said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) hold a news conference in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center May 17, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Still, Democratic impatience is mounting by the day, particularly on the House side. Many progressives there have spent months airing loud skepticism of Bidens talks with the GOP.

The whole thing is really disappointing. I think it does slow down the process, said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), adding that he hopes the Senates failed vote leads to a willingness on the part of a couple senators to go ahead and ditch the GOP talks in favor of a Democrats-only bill.

Theyre eating time, added Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), referring to the bipartisan Senate group. And having been burned back in 09 and 10 by the Republicans in the Senate on the Affordable Care Act, we are understandably wary.

Schumer set a Wednesday deadline to get all 50 Democratic senators to get on board with the $3.5 trillion package that's poised to include an expansion of Medicare and child care assistance, among other items. The majority leader has further vowed that the Senate would move forward on a budget before the August recess.

But the Wednesday deadline is likely to slip, in part because the $3.5 trillion proposals future is tied closely to the bipartisan negotiations. That's frustrating to many House Democrats who had hoped to see action before the lengthy recess begins.

House Democrats have, instead, acknowledged that theyll likely need to return to Washington mid-August to vote on the budget blueprint and potentially the Senates bipartisan infrastructure deal, should one be reached.

While Democrats are far from finalizing the specific policies they plan to add to the social spending package, party leaders plan to take the first step in the coming weeks by voting on a budget that will determine how much each relevant committee can spend. If the bipartisan deal fails, then, the party might have to raise its top line number in order to tackle physical infrastructure while leaving its social spending priorities intact.

I cant give you an exact timeline, but I think that we are going to have every Democratic senator on board, said Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). At the end of the day ... the $600 billion in physical infrastructure, you can do it in the bipartisan bill, or you can combine it with one bill. One way or another, its going to happen.

Sanders is not alone in pitching the idea that roads, bridges and broadband could be rolled into the social spending bill. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said this week she would push for the physical infrastructure plan to be included in the broader spending package if the Senate talks fail: That has to be incorporated.

But that Plan B is already drawing sharp pushback from moderates, especially in the House, who are anxious about signing on to a $3.5 trillion package amid concerns about the debt and GOP attacks over rising inflation.

Heck, no, said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), when asked about a top line number potentially above $3.5 trillion. We cant afford to keep spending money we dont have.

Another pivotal moderate, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), said that "I need to see specifics but that number is aggressive."

Other Democrats argue that placing everything in a $4 trillion package, if it comes to that, shouldnt matter to moderates.

I dont know why theyd change their mind on infrastructure spending depending on the vehicle through which its accomplished, said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.). That wouldnt be a very logical position in my view.

The White House privately warned Democrats this week that if the bipartisan talks fall apart, they could have to make some painful decisions related to the budget blueprint. Given that moderates are wary of going above $3.5 trillion, that could mean important progressive priorities have to be altered or cut to make room for infrastructure funding.

And not all Senate Democrats have even signed onto the $3.5 trillion number. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who is negotiating the bipartisan package, said Wednesday she hadnt made a decision yet on whether shed support that figure.

Im still focused on infrastructure, Shaheen said. Were going to reach a deal.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), another bipartisan negotiator, said that hed support moving forward on the $3.5 trillion package but added: Ill reserve the right to do whatever the hell I want once I see whats in the bill and how its funded and how its distributed.

While Republicans blocked Wednesdays vote to begin debating the bipartisan infrastructure plan, senators are aiming to reach an agreement by early next week. A group of 11 Senate Republicans sent a letter Wednesday to Schumer indicating that theyd be willing to move forward Monday, if they reach an agreement and have a score from Congress' nonpartisan budget scorekeeper.

Schumer on Wednesday voted against proceeding with the measure a move that allows the majority leader to bring the vote back up again at a later date. Senate Democrats said in interviews Wednesday that they expected Schumer to maintain his focus on the bipartisan plan before moving to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.

I dont know the exact sequencing, but the goal right now is to get that bipartisan bill done, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), another member of the Budget Committee.

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With bipartisan infrastructure talks in limbo, progressives eye $4.1T silver lining - POLITICO

Skip to contentAt the local level, sidewalk socialists represent a movement whose time has come.July 21, 2021

India Walton.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvels column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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In 1910, during the United States first Gilded Age, Milwaukee elected Emil Seidel as its first socialist mayor. For much of the next 50 yearseven during the Red Scare led by Wisconsins notorious Senator Joseph McCarthythe city elected and reelected socialist mayors. These mayors, author Dan Kaufman wrote in The New York Times, were known for their integrityuncompromised by the local business community that despised themand for their frugality, their commitment that public money should be spent carefully and not squandered in smarmy deals with private contractors. They installed hundreds of drinking fountains, prosecuted restaurants serving tainted food, and modernized public services. Seidel appointed a new health commissioner whose department oversaw a reduction of more than 40 percent of the cases of six leading contagious diseases.

Their opponents tried to deride them as sewer socialistsa term Seidel, his successors and their supporters soon would proudly adopt. Now, chapters of the ref, the Working Families Party and other progressives propelled by the energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns are gaining traction at the local level and recalling sewer socialisms proud history.

In Buffalo, India Walton, running as a democratic socialist, defeated a four-term incumbent in the Democratic primary for mayor, propelled by local activists and those of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. In Richmond, Calif., a small working-class community outside San Francisco with a population that is 80 percent people of color and a large immigrant community, the Richmond Progressive Alliance has succeeded in electing a majority slate to the city council while battling Chevron to counter the poisonous effects of its local refinery and force it to pay its fair share of taxes.

Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

Continued here:
Progressives Around the Country Are Recalling Sewer Socialism's Proud History - The Nation

On Aug. 3, both parties will hold primaries for two open Ohio congressional seats. But the outcome of the Democratic clash in the Cleveland-area 11th District may have greater significance than the identity of any of the days other winners.

Thats because the race between former state Sen. Nina Turner and Cuyahoga County Councilwoman Shontel Brown, both African Americans, is the latest in a series of contests stemming from efforts by self-styled progressives to push the Democratic Party to the left and increase liberal pressure on President Joe Biden.

So far this year those efforts have flopped, notably in last months New York City mayoral primary, where centrist Eric Adams was the winner and another moderate, Kathryn Garcia, finished second. Earlier, more moderate Democrats captured Louisiana and New Mexico congressional races, and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe won the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary over more liberal challengers.

Progressives have high hopes that Turner, a prominent 2016 and 2020 backer of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders insurgent presidential campaigns, will win the majority minority Ohio seat vacated when Rep. Marcia Fudge became Bidens secretary of housing and urban development.

That has prompted several top Black Democrats, led by House Majority Whip James Clyburn and the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, to support Brown, who backed Biden in the 2020 nominating race. So have other top Ohio Democrats and Hillary Clinton. They fear a Turner victory would play into Republican efforts to portray their party as dominated by its left wing, led by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York congresswoman and fellow members of the progressive group known as the Squad have endorsed Turner, as has Sanders, who said the election has everything to do with the future of the Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez plans to canvass with her this weekend. In practical terms, a Turner victory would augment the ranks of progressives and make it even harder for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to manage the closely divided House, where the half-dozen Squad members already have substantial leverage.

Clyburn, who also plans a weekend appearance, said he endorsed Brown because of his long relationship with her and not because of antagonism toward either Sanders or Turner. Meanwhile, a pro-Israel Democratic political action committee is backing Brown because of Turners past criticism of Israel, a potential factor in a district with many Jewish voters.

Turner has refused to say if she voted in 2016 for Clinton, after the former secretary of state defeated Sanders for the Democratic nomination. And in an interview with Peter Nicholas of The Atlantic before the 2020 election, she said the choice between Biden and Trump was like saying to somebody, You have a bowl of [expletive] in front of you, and all youve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing. Its still [expletive].

Progressives seeking a greater voice in the Democratic Party have taken encouragement from the elections in 2018 of Ocasio-Cortez and Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and in 2020 of Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri and Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman of New York.

They have been able to command considerable attention, especially on Twitter and cable television. But most represent very liberal areas with substantial minority populations and are well to the left of the overall party, making them outliers in the House Democratic caucus. Still, Democratic leaders like Pelosi and Clyburn are concerned their outsized media presence is allowing Republicans to use the progressives advocacy of issues like defunding the police, the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All to paint Biden and the entire party establishment as tools of left-wingers and socialists.

Meanwhile, in a related move, House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries, the New York congressman seen as a potential Pelosi successor, is joining with two prominent moderate Democrats to form a political action committee called Team Blue PAC to bolster incumbents against potential left-wing primary challenges.

First on their list are two veteran urban Democrats, Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York City and Danny Davis of Chicago, who are facing 2022 primary challenges from their left.

These and the other recent clashes between progressive and moderate Democrats mirror the partys 2020 nominating fight between moderates like Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar and progressives like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. So have the results.

Despite pre-2020 speculation that progressives were taking control of the party, Sanders never polled more than about one-third of the primary vote and wound up being defeated even more decisively than four years earlier. And progressives have lost every significant primary fight so far this year, though they won some local New York contests.

The winner of the Turner-Brown primary contest 11 other Democrats are running will almost certainly be elected in the November general election as the 11th District voted nearly 80% for Biden last year.

Similarly, the GOP primary winner in the suburban Columbus 15th District will likely win the general election in that Republican majority district.

But it wont likely have the lingering impact of the latest showdown between the progressive and moderate forces within the Democratic Party, a battle destined to continue next year and into the 2024 presidential race.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News and a frequent contributor. Email: carl.p.leubsdorf@gmail.com

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Are progressives taking over the Democratic Party? - The Dallas Morning News

Like biting into a madeleine was reading a federal court injunction against the Biden administrations pandemic bailout program for restaurants, which favored some ethnicities over others. Memories came flooding back of South Africas apartheid in its waning days, with its absurd designation of certain Asians as honorary whites.

Slight difference: Under the Biden plan some became honorary whites for the purpose of being disadvantaged, i.e., sent to the end of the line for government aid. According to no rhyme or reason, said the court, spared the prejudicial status were Pakistanis but not Afghans; Japanese but not Iraqis; Hispanics but not Middle Easterners.

Youve noticed a herd of meme-performing pundits insisting that critical race theory is hardly even a thing. Radicals ritually downplay their radicalism as they sense their nearness to power, though perhaps prematurely in this case. Also likely to be voided by the courts is a Biden program favoring black farmers over white farmers.

Meanwhile, still intact is the administrations larger agenda of extending more entitlements to the middle class, inevitably making the entitled population whiter (and more Asian). Indeed, the more Joe Biden mouths the words Jim Crow, the more it seems hes trying to satiate a part of his base (mostly consisting of white progressive racial extremists) with rhetoric alone. Perhaps you believe todays voting rights kabuki is so Democrats can do even more to help blacks. Political realism suggests otherwise.

One premise of critical race theory is certainly correct: Today is built on a foundation of yesterdays. On the foundation of slavery, Jim Crow and housing segregation nowadays is built the exploitation of black communities by multicultural elites playing their defund the police games at the expense of blacks who suffer the lions share of violent crime.

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Progressives Punish Honorary Whites but Arent Helping Blacks - The Wall Street Journal