Chapter One: The American Creed Imperiled "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one." ― Richard Hofsadter America's founding ideals--America's soul--used to be called the American creed. The creed's origin is the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, ...." In Samuel Huntington's words, the creed embodies "the political principles of liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property." Europeans who looked with hope to America in the nineteenth century grasped a simpler meaning: In America, they would be the equals of anyone else--equal before the law and possessing the same inherent human dignity as anyone else. In America, they would be judged on what they were as individuals, not by what social class they came from or how they worshipped God. That promise drew immigrants by the millions who believed that in America you could go as far as your own hard work and talent would take you. Our history is riddled with failures to achieve our ideal, starting with the Declaration's failure to condemn slavery, but the American creed itself has always been powerful. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both the abolitionist and the feminist movements drew their moral authority and their ultimate successes from appeals to live up to the American creed. In the early 1940s, writing in his landmark book, An American Dilemma, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal capitalized the term and marveled at the creed's continuing universality. "Even a poor and uneducated white person in some isolated and backward rural region in the Deep South who is violently prejudiced against the Negro and intent upon depriving him of civic rights and human independence, has also a whole compartment in his valuation sphere housing the entire American Creed of liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody," he wrote. The creed was what made America America. Myrdal was writing a decade before the civil rights movement gained momentum in the mid-1950s. The most dramatic single moment of that crusade, Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech on the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963, evoked the American creed from start to finish. "In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check," King said near the opening. "When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir." Reaching his peroration, King proclaimed his first dream, that "the 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.'" The iconic line from the speech, King's dream that his four children would one day "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," was a reification of the creed. That speech was the capstone to a compelling appeal that had raised the consciousness--the phrase is appropriate, for once--of White America over the course of the preceding decade. You have to be quite old to remember how uncomplicated it seemed to many of us, White and Black alike, in 1963. African Americans had been wronged for centuries, during slavery and after. It was time to set things right and it wasn't going to be that hard to do. Ten months later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by Lyndon Johnson. It had passed by overwhelming margins in both houses of Congress, with almost all of the opposition coming from Southern members. There. We had done it. We had set things right. Some who voted for the bill had misgivings about a few provisions. Titles II and III, banning race discrimination in public accommodations and public facilities, entailed obvious restrictions on freedom of association. Title VII, on equal employment opportunity, made employers vulnerable to legal scrutiny if they didn't think in terms of groups. But in the floor debates and in the press, these provisions were described as one-time exceptions justified by the unique injustice done to African Americans. It's not as if the act would seriously infringe on traditional American freedoms. As Hubert Humphrey, the Senate's leading liberal, put it when discussing the section on employment discrimination, the wording of the bill "does not limit the employer's freedom to hire, fire, promote, or demote for any reason--or no reason--as long as his action is not based on race, color, religion, national origin, or sex." The act had to be a good and necessary thing. As a college junior at the time, I certainly thought so. Nonetheless, a philosophical wedge had been driven between those who wanted strict adherence to the ideal of treating people as individuals, equal before the law, and those who advocated group-based policies as a way to achieve social justice. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had added a caveat to the creed. Within a few years of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the founding ideals of the creed began to be recast more comprehensively as the struggle for social justice. Title VII of the law was interpreted as permitting preferential consideration for African Americans in admissions to colleges and in employment. And it turned out that the act was not merely a one-time exception to remedy a unique injustice. Group-based exceptions for special treatment were widened to include not only women but also the physically disabled, the mentally disabled, the elderly, and eventually homosexuals. The gap between liberal and conservative interpretations of the creed widened as well. The term itself fell out of use. The twenty-first century saw the growth of a new ideology that repudiated the American creed altogether. It began in academia as intersectionality and critical race theory conjoined with a bastardized vision of socialism. By 2016, it exerted significant influence within the left wing of the Democratic Party. As I write, the new ideology still goes by several names. "Woke" originated within the African American community. "Critical race theory" and "antiracism" are the most widely used terms. But there's one label that covers it all: identity politics. Excerpted from Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
