America is fractured. In the wake of the unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, we as a nation seem more divided than ever.

We used to have a common vision, agreeing on the founding principles of this great nation. Now, even those principles are under assault.

The radical left is on the march, trying to rewrite history and tear down the system this country was built upon. The New York Times’ so-called 1619 Project provides an example.

The project, built around the claim that America began with the introduction of slaves and that its founding occurred solely to preserve slavery and white supremacy, has been thoroughly debunked by historians, including Allen Guelzo, a visiting fellow with the Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

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Yet, the 1619 Project received a Pulitzer Prize and is now being inculcated into school curricula in some jurisdictions. The goal is for it to become the mainstream version of history taught in schools.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 56% of American voters think our society is racist.

Taken together, these are troubling developments in troubling times, but they do not tell us to go wobbly on the principles of our founding. Instead we must choose to double down on them, unite behind them, and fulfill the promise they represent.

The American founding is not evil. Yes, when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” African Americans were not recognized in the same way.

Yet America has strived, and should continue to strive, to live up to that great idea. We should not ignore America’s flaws, but we should not ignore its greatness, either.  

The idea that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” was and is quite radical.

As our 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, said, “This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary.”

The “assertion of the doctrine of equality” set it apart from the promises the Dutch and British governments, for example, had made to their citizens. It was uniquely American at the time.

America is as much an idea as a place, and central to that idea is the steadfast belief that “all men are created equal.” Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. recognized this.

Douglass called the Founding Fathers “brave” and “truly great men” even as he decried slavery and explained that the Fourth of July had a different meaning to enslaved Americans. King used the founding ideals to make the case for the civil rights movement. Both implored Americans to live up to those ideas, not tear them down.  

Yet, the radical left, through vehicles such as the 1619 Project, would like to do exactly that. They would have us move away from King’s idea—that we could all be seen as individuals, judged on the content of our character rather than on the color of our skin—rather than toward it.

These “progressive” systems deny the fundamental notion that “all men are created equal.” They deny that “men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Rather, as Ronald Reagan said, they “use the rhetoric of class struggle to justify injustice.”

Every past iteration of these alternative systems has been exactly that. They were not progressive, but regressive. The most prolific violators of human rights the world has ever seen came to power under such systems, killing an estimated 100 million-plus people in the 20th century alone.

In a time with such great potential for progress, we cannot afford such a backslide. We face a choice for the future. We can double down and unite behind truly great principles and demand a future in which America lives up to them, or we can lose it all to a system of lies and false promises that will divide us even further.

Uncompromisingly standing for America’s founding ideals is the only way to make true progress. Failure to do so, as Reagan said, could sentence us “to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”