Collectivism in any guise, including its postmodern progressivist variety, has been historically antithetical to a free society.
The idea of the self-constituting citizen, endowed with rights and constrained by law, has been indispensable to the forging of a stable democratic political system in America, legitimizing its institutions and ultimately birthing a cohesive nation bereft of the prerequisite of an underlying common ethnicity. This principle has been the source of America’s unprecedented success for over two centuries.
In contrast, each time in recent history that governments have favored group-based systemic solutions, despotism has followed and, ultimately, the implosion of the state built upon it. And yet this is where America’s elite class seems hell-bent on taking the nation.
The past several decades have witnessed an implacable drive by our leadership class to make group identity the dominant category in our thinking about and practice of politics. Few at the top seem to care how the public is likely to respond to collectivist solutions that not only preference one group of people over another but, in effect, would bury once and for all the quintessentially American assertion that ultimately history can be redeemed only by the individual, for it rests with the content of one’s character and not on government action.
The oligarchization of American elites and the parallel pauperization of the citizenry is the real but uniformly suppressed story behind the country’s ongoing Balkanization, while the preferred narrative has been that alleged racial and gender injustice must be overcome by executive fiat. The relative impoverishment of the American middle class has degraded the power of the citizenry to self-govern and has emboldened an increasingly detached elite to indulge in group-based political experiments, with the reengineering of the nation in accordance with ever-shifting notions of “equity and social justice” the ultimate goal.