Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has a Washington Post op-ed titled, “I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real”.

If you believe in systemic racism, you’re not a conservative. Though I should also add that if you write for the Washington Post, the odds that you’re a conservative are vanishingly slim.

If America is systemically racist, that is evil and in need of not just reform, but demolishing, what about your worldview is conservative?

On a basic level, the divide between the Left and Right in America was over whether the country needed radical reform or whether it needed to be conserved from the reformers. After over a century of this stuff, it’s very clear where the battle lines lie even if the battle has shifted.

The problem isn’t just that Gerson accepts the critical race theory definition of racism, systemic racism, and segregation, which he does when he opines that, “By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, St. Louis no longer had legal segregation. But my suburb, my neighborhood and my private high school were all outcomes of White flight.” This is a prelude to Gerson confessing his white privilege, “I wish I had realized earlier that these systems had created me”, though he doesn’t use that term, possibly hoping to put one over on some of his more naive readers.

It’s that he has very little use for the America that was, not just of his childhood, but of its history. His one reference to an American historical figure is Thomas Paine whom he dismisses as “foolish”. His references to the Constitution appear disingenuously Obamaesque at best. 

“As a conservative, I believe that equal opportunity, rather than mandated economic equality, is the proper goal of a free society,” Gerson writes.

Gerson, who is not Jewish, uses the familiar “as a X” construction so commonplace to anti-Israel persons with Jewish last names who decry Israel with the similar, “as a Jew”. If you have to begin with “as a X”, you’re using perceived membership in a group you don’t belong to in order to undermine that group.

As a conservative, Gerson believes in equal opportunity, but then he goes on to argue that it’s impossible to actually have it.

If America is systemically racist, if racism pervades everything because too many Americans are white, then indeed equal opportunity is hopeless. All we can do is impose a leftist dictatorship that will handle wealth redistribution, purge enemies of its utopian ideals, and prevent the evil privileged group from having any further say by eliminating their ability to vote, seizing their property, and perhaps their lives.

That’s the inescapable logic of critical race theory and some of its proponents are fairly open about it. Others choose to gaslight Americans by pretending that racial evil is just the new liberalism.