INDEED! Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation.

Everything great and iconic about this country comes when seemingly disparate parts are blended in revelatory ways. That merging simply doesn’t happen in places where people are separated by race and ethnicity and class. And it’s not only what makes American culture so rich, but it is also a big part of the reason America is so successful. When we see a good idea, we steal it; when we have a good idea, the rest of the world is welcome to it as well.

More than half of the countries in the world now have some form of democracy — a system of government we enjoy and have evangelized, but was invented by ancient Greeks. Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations. In 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protesters wanted to express their yearning for freedom, they erected a homemade Statue of Liberty. But even Lady Liberty isn’t purely American: We have France to thank for the statue.

These days our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth.

So-called Progressivism has grown so thuggishly provincial that it really ought to be renamed to something like “modern feudalism.”