If "diversity" is good, why do liberals congregate in lily-white enclaves like Vermont (the whitest state in the Union, according to the Census) and Marin County, California?  White liberals hector others incessantly about the need for "diversity," but most have no interest in living in neighborhoods with large numbers of blacks.  The ideal society in the liberal mind always seems to be a Scandinavian socialist one (which is to say that liberals strive to make the U.S. more like some of the most uniformly white nations in the world).

The liberal enforcers of racial correctness are quick to decry the evils of racism, yet they are quite willing to practice it themselves in the form of affirmative action -- and they are strangely silent when blacks engage in "hate crimes" against whites.  Conservatives have been increasingly willing to point out these and other hypocrisies of our racial orthodoxy, but they invariably fail to understand its true origins.

What drives our contemporary racial orthodoxy?  Many conservatives mistakenly believe that liberals obsessed by race are afflicted with "white guilt."  Not so.  The truth about racial matters in the U.S. is this: racial issues are not actually about race.  In the hands of the progressive left, race is a tool used by powerful whites against other whites; specifically, race is a weapon used by liberals to bludgeon conservatives and delegitimize conservative, patriotic values.

But it has not always been so.

Prior to World War II, progressives and leftists -- like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger -- viewed blacks as inferior human scum who should be eliminated through eugenic hygiene.  But after World War II, "progressive" thinking about race underwent an astonishing metamorphosis.  The American left forged a strategic alliance with blacks, using race to attack the core values of an American society they had now come to despise as the ultimate evil.

The dominant theme of the literature of the postwar era -- which 76 million Baby Boomers absorbed as the first generation to attend college en masse -- was the moral equivalence between the United States and the totalitarian regimes it had just fought.

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, the founder of the modern American feminist movement, wrote that the American suburb was a "comfortable concentration camp" for women.  (Friedan, a Jew, wrote this in 1963, less than 20 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.)

In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger's protagonist Holden Caulfield (narrating the story from an asylum after having been driven insane by the "phoniness" of American life) says of his brother D.B., a World War II veteran, "I really think he hated the Army worse than the war ... [h]e said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were."

In Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the real enemy is not Adolf Hitler or the Nazis, but the American military, the American officer corps, and American society.  Vonnegut's character Billy Pilgrim is a WWII vet who survives the bombing of Dresden as a POW; after the war, he becomes a respected citizen and a financial success.  Pilgrim absorbs conservative American values right down to the "Impeach Earl Warren" bumper sticker on his car -- and goes insane, just as his fictionalized son patriotically heads off to Vietnam.

But the author who provided the direct link between left-wing America-hatred and race was Norman Mailer, also a disillusioned WWII veteran.  In his 1957 essay "The White Negro," Mailer equated the atomic bomb with the concentration camp and urged whites to identify with black social outcasts as a means to escape the "totalitarian tissues of American society."  The "hipster" should encourage the "psychopath" within himself and "absorb the existentialist synapses of the Negro."  The white "hipster" would follow psychopathology-as-liberation "along the road of the homosexual, the orgiast, the drug-addict, the rapist, the robber and the murderer..."

"[W]hat makes [the "hip" ethic] radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience of the past[,]" Mailer wrote, "is immoderation[.] ... [T]he nihilism of Hip proposes ... that every social restraint and category be removed[.]"  (Emphasis mine.)

The White Negro is perhaps the most important work of literature in postwar America.  It provided a blueprint for the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and in hindsight, it explains nearly all left-wing, anti-conservative behavior since.  If blacks were social outcasts in American life, then the white enemies of traditional American values would align with them.  An immoderate drunk like the late Sen. Edward Kennedy -- who was kicked out of Harvard for cheating, then killed a young girl he was presumably cheating on his wife with, and got away with it -- could not possibly point the finger at blacks and tell them to be honest, chaste, and sober.  He could, however, falsely accuse Judge Robert Bork of wanting blacks to "sit at segregated lunch counters" to deflect attention from his own behavior.  And it worked.  (Today, following the same "enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy, leftists align themselves with Islamic terrorists and radicals, under whose rule they would never actually want to live.)

When white Americans finally began to see the justice of Martin Luther King's cause and the injustice of Jim Crow, leftists pushed harder and harder to include items under the rubric of "civil rights" that King, a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus, would never have approved of.  "Civil rights" became a foot-in-the-door that leftists used to attack and destroy all "social restraints and categories" in American society.

Want to kill your unborn baby?  That's a "civil right."  Marry another man?  "Civil right."  Dress in drag and use a woman's bathroom?  Another "civil right."  (It is hardly a surprise that while King remains a revered figure on the left, his Christianity has been airbrushed from his legacy.  He is almost always referred to as "Dr." King today -- rather than "Rev." King, a Man of God.)

The anti-conservative alliance between the left and blacks as described by Mailer neatly explains why Tea Party whites who admire the likes of Herman Cain and Allen West are nonetheless tagged as "racists" by the left.  It explains why Democratic Party leftists welcomed former KKK member Sen. Robert Byrd into their fold while slandering former Sen. Trent Lott as a "racist."  It explains why the Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party, routinely loses 95% or more of the black vote; it explains why the conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is the most hated man in black America -- hated more than the reprehensible O.J. Simpson.

It explains the virulent left-wing racial demagoguery surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting.  Everyone knows that blacks are not being profiled and victimized by white "vigilantes," as the politically charged indictment against George Zimmerman alleged.  But the shooting provided a perfect platform for white liberals like Michael Bloomberg and Charles Schumer to attack the traditional, conservative American institutions of gun ownership, the National Rifle Association, and the right of self-defense by smearing these things as "racist."

Most importantly, it explains the thinking of Barack Obama, a man thoroughly steeped in the culture of 1960s anti-American radicalism.  It explains why Obama made a fetish of race in his autobiography and joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-white, racist "church" -- despite the fact that not only Obama was well-treated by whites his entire life, but he was given preferential treatment by whites.  Obama's racial thinking is inexorably linked to his hatred of capitalism, his denial of American exceptionalism, his countercultural drug use, and his support for radical abortion rights and gay rights. 

Left-wing racial rhetoric about "fairness" and "equality" and "non-discrimination" has been used to conceal a subterranean leftist agenda of anti-Americanism and anti-conservatism for over fifty years.  Conservatives persist in stupidly taking this rhetoric at face value; hence, they always find themselves on the racial defensive.

Conservatives need to stop being suckered by this leftist con game, and they need to do it before November.