The lesson I draw from all this is a pretty simple one: Marx’s work deserves study today because of a handful of insights and Marxism’s uniquely murderous role in human history. But if you are going to cancel a thinker for bigotry by today’s standards, Marx is far more cancelable on leftist grounds than any of the Enlightenment figures under assault.

And yet he remains a core source for the woke worldview, after being strained through the nihilism of postmodern thought and repackaged for American undergrads. Marx, in fact, is the most assigned economist in college. Among the top schools, The Communist Manifesto is the third-most taught book in history, and first in sociology. The NYT, for his bicentennial on May 5, 2018, ran an op-ed titled, “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” — right because “educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement [over] Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle. … Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx.” And that’s a good thing!

Once you begin to see these deliberate and grotesque omissions, you realize just how deep the bad faith lies. And just how desperate the left now is to root out the Enlightenment principles that make America a free country. While good liberals continue to look the other way.