How can one estimate the severity of a civilization’s addiction to pathological sentiments? Surely one measure is the extent to which the civilization attacks, repudiates, or otherwise undermines its key cultural achievements. As far as we have been able to determine, this pathology is peculiarly Western. The political philosopher James Burnham spoke in this context of the “suicide of the West.” Burnham thought the phenomenon inseparable from a certain species of frenetic but world-weary liberalism. Examples are not far to seek. The great factory for the production of such poisonous ideas, and the emotions upon which they feed, is the modern university, which seems never to have discovered an anti-Western idea it could not endorse.

But what began in the university long ago seeped out into the culture at large. Think, for example, of “The 1619 Project,” that lavishly funded darling of The New York Times and anti-American educators across the country. We reported at length on the initiative a few years back when it took the world by storm. Arguing that the United States was founded as a “slavocracy” and that the American Revolution was fought to preserve the institution of slavery, The 1619 Project made up for its utter lack of historical accuracy with an abundance of nauseating, politically correct smugness. Widely excoriated by responsible historians across the political spectrum, it nevertheless won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times and went on to insinuate its anti-American toxin in thousands of schools across the country.

The 1619 Project follows the template established for such malevolently frivolous exercises in nihilistic disestablishment: seize upon some ostentatiously successful political or cultural endeavor, and then subject it to the pressure of ideological inversion. The American Revolution was the consolidation of a world-historical political event: the conflict out of which a constitutional republic where the people were sovereign was born. How tedious to come along and say “Oh, no, what really mattered was the Portuguese slave trade.”