MLK Jr.’s Vision For America Is Still The Only One That Can Work

The left has long since abandoned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a colorblind meritocracy — if they ever believed in it at all. After seventy years of dismantling our institutions, they have created a world much like the past, where immutable characteristics trump talent and perseverance at every turn. It’s easy to fall into despair given the state of things — but no solutions will be found there. The timeless optimism of MLK is still the only viable option to save America.

Everyone knows the several lines that have ostensibly defined post-racial America:

“I have a dream,” MLK declared at the 1963 March on Washington, “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 one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.”

The power of these words lies in their appeal to our Founding ideals — freedom from tyranny, equal justice under the law, the natural equality of man. These ideals are both universal and just as the Founders conceived, but had merely been imperfectly applied to black Americans throughout all of our country’s history. The civil rights movement won over white America by arguing that these ideals would only be actualized when they applied to black Americans as well.

In truth, MLK was a complex figure. His radical politics are certainly well-documented, if less well-known. But these lines came to represent a type of mythology — a second founding of America to rally behind. Multiple generations of Americans have now been brought up on these stories, leading to the least racist population in history. Gen X and millennials were raised to not see color —and they never have.  (RELATED: CALLISTA AND NEWT GINGRICH: Americans Still Believe In Reverend King’s Dream)

 

Yet the inheritors of the civil rights movement almost immediately moved onto dismantling this vision. The modern left still uses equality and justice as lofty goals. They claim to be further perfecting the founding vision all while denying its foundations entirely.

Equality is now said to be a white supremacist myth, and so the left has re-defined it to suit its own goals. Equity — the cause du jour — means treating individuals unequally based on the color of their skin. Only when historically disadvantaged groups receive favoritism (and vice versa) can true equality be achieved. The equality of the Founders transforms from a natural condition to a government hand-out.

So even as individual racism went all but extinct, society has become more divided by racism as a result of this cynically-motivated putsch. The Biden administration has re-calibrated the many heads of the federal hydra to all pursue equity at the expense of equality and merit. Our interactions are hyper-regulated to prevent so-called microaggressions in the public and private sector. The left has made us nothing more than a bunch of warring tribes competing for resources within the same geographic boundaries. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) as currently practiced amounts to little more than a racial supremacist movement for the modern age.

Well-meaning people cling to the “dream” that we are but one more final step away from ending racism, when the truth is that we have been moving in reverse for quite some time. Too many are unwilling or unable to see this, and despite their good intentions, continue to support the people and policies that lead us in the wrong direction.

Under this condition, the myth of MLK’s vision can only keep us together for so long, but eventually, reality will win out. In fact, we already see significant damage to the social fabric as the left has been allowed to re-write the rules largely unchallenged by a docile conservative opposition. From early affirmative action to the George Floyd riots of 2020, mainstream conservatives — either buying into or too afraid to confront the left’s DEI regime  — have been unwilling to champion the cause of true equality. But despite effectively a bipartisan consensus, many see the distortion for what it is.

This new, younger and very online bloc is predisposed to either one of two responses, but it’s not necessarily confined to the right or the white working class.

Either they fall head first into nihilism — the implicit idea America is too far gone to save. They appropriate the 1960s mantra “turn on, tune in, drop out” against the culture of the 60s, which itself now dominates society and tells straight, white men that their mere existence is sinful. We see this manifest largely apolitically, as the opioid and suicide epidemics target predominantly single and childless young men.

The other is more explicitly political. It embraces the left’s own post-liberal principles — that human equality is a myth, the Founders were wrong and most insidiously, that the only way out of our racial impasse is for white America to re-discover its own racial consciousness. This offers no path to salvation, but only more of the same.  (RELATED: Eight People Shot At Florida MLK Day Event)

The only thing that ever kept American society together was our universal principles and the mythology around it. It allowed people of countless religions, ethnicities, cultures and backgrounds to come together under the same creed and find a common purpose. While their differences still existed of course, the mythology of our creedal unity gave us a noble reason to look past them. We believed in the same lofty principles, and that’s what truly defined us as American.

An identitarian approach from the right will only make our tribal division worse, with groups jockeying for favor even more than they are now. It is also immoral, placing the individual’s self-worth in his color rather than his character. Yet if for no other reason, this path is not viable because the American public psyche is not primed to accept it. The left only succeeded because they disingenuously claimed to be inheritors of the Founders and MLK. The right must win by doing the same.

The right’s only chance to save America is to further expose the DEI regime for the grift that it is, and recapture MLK’s dream of a colorblind meritocracy for the conservative banner.