Progressive Racism: A review of the latest collection by David Horowitz. From a review of David Horowitz’s new book, “Progressive Racism,” by David Tapson.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in no small part because of the compelling possibility that this biracial harbinger of hope and change would finally bring America into an epoch of post-racial unity.

But over seven years later, America is on the verge of a race war. …The left want to pin this ugly decline on what they perceive to be the right’s racist refusal to accept a black man as President; but in fact, it is left’s own corrosive, inherently racist, identity politics, spearheaded by Obama himself, that has exacerbated rather than healed our racial divide.

Horowitz’s book has nearly fifty essays that

…expose leftist hypocrisy about race and dismantle the false narrative that the left is fighting for justice and equality against an irredeemably racist right, the guardians of a supposedly systemic white supremacism in America.

Some examples:

In the section “Progressive Racism,” Horowitz addresses the left’s agenda to recreate “a race-conscious political culture in which blacks and a handful of designated minorities were singled out as the groups to be racially privileged,” while “whites were made targets of exclusion, suspicion, and disapprobation.”

In “The Death of the Civil Rights Movement,” he writes that there is no such movement any longer, and in its place “there is only a self-righteous, fact-denying lynch mob looking for white victims and law enforcement officials to make the targets of their wrath.”

In “Freedom From Race” in the final section, Horowitz takes on the left’s hypocrisy about racial profiling, which leftists favor when it suits their agenda (job placement, school admissions, scholarships, and the like), and which they decry when it does not (in law enforcement and deterring terrorism). This hypocrisy is due to the left’s obsession with power: “Whatever serves their need for power is right; whatever frustrates it is wrong.”

Racial privilege enforced by government violates the long standing ideals of equality before the law and one law for all:

Building racial bias into the framework of the nation compromises the neutrality of the law that governs us all… and creates a racial spoils system that is the antithesis of the American Dream.”

In a free society, composed of individuals who are unequal by nature, the highest government good is neutrality in the treatment of its citizens before the law. One standard and justice for all. This is the only equality that is not at odds with individual freedom.

hat-tip Stephen Neil