America’s culture has been tragically warped by the progressive left, which no longer accepts the colorblind standard of Martin Luther King but instead has persuaded the country to believe that whites are guilty before the fact and blacks are innocent even when the facts show otherwise. A racial morality play of white supremacy and black oppression has transformed the civil rights movement from a campaign against the denigration of individuals on the basis of their skin color, into a demand for preferences and privileges based on skin color.

In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world’s premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority.

In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality.