Better in their words…

It isn’t that the complaints of black Americans weren’t or aren’t valid. But common sense tends to be a casualty of political story lines. When DuBois published his statement about the color line, Jim Crow ruled in much of the country. It certainly was the law in Georgia, where blacks didn’t dare try to vote and where white men rode around in sheets and terrorized the countryside. The South in those days was, for blacks, totalitarian indeed.

Yet more than 100 years later, in a decisively changed America, President Biden annulled the interval between 1903 and 2021 and pronounced Georgia’s new voting law to be “Jim Crow on steroids.” It was demagogic nonsense. The Georgia voting law bore no more resemblance to Jim Crow than Mr. Biden bears, let us say, to Neil Kinnock.

But in the 21st century, the country has been all but lost to the politics of whoppers. It’s always Saturday morning in America now, and the TV is always playing cartoons. Donald Trump has a genius for the form. Since November, his big story line has been that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

What Mr. Biden attempted with the phrase “Jim Crow on steroids” had nothing to do with reality. He was only playing at whoppers. The demagogue’s best friend is a good story line. Mr. Biden’s “Jim Crow on steroids” became interwoven with other strands in the tapestry of the left’s 2021 story line. A dominant motif is American blacks as the victims of “white supremacy,” or American blacks oppressed by a pandemic of police brutality more devastating than Covid. It isn’t statistically true, but if you repeat it often enough, with video, it becomes, so to speak, folklorically true. Derek Chauvin did his part to make it so.

In all this, there’s the fallacy of stopped time. When fabulating Bidenites, reporters at the New York Times and others on the left refer to “systemic racism,” they mean to conjure the sum of all American white people’s badness going back four centuries to 1619; and, when all that meanness is assembled in one trope (slave owners Washington and Jefferson and Lee and Stonewall Jackson on their bronze horses) to lay it before white America as indictment.

There is no difference between 1619 and 2021. There was no Civil War, no civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965, no President Obama. White guilt comes with the white skin; the evil is frozen in time—like the sin of Adam, like the woolly mammoth in the glacier. Race trauma is sanctified—permanent, outside time.

Grown-ups, both black and white, find something fishy in this metaphysics. They know that history is a journey. In today’s race politics, there is neither journey nor redemption. There is only the cartoon of blacks in chains. Notice, however, that those victims are attended by white patron saints. Miraculously, the story grants an exemption to the virtuous white elites who have taken on black people as their moral wards—whites who preen and shake their fists and lament the iniquity, inequity and shame of it all. Where’s Charles Dickens when we need him? Robin DiAngelo, author of “White Fragility,” makes a fine Mrs. Jellyby.

The left’s narrative now rules the land in the form of “critical race theory,” “antiracism” and invidious variations. Feelings of rage and indignation have coalesced as dogma and settled science, embedded in the house rules of almost every institution in the country. One questions them on pain of expulsion, excommunication. The Age of Information is the era of hysterical story lines. Twenty-first-century technology supercharges feelings, not thoughts, and registers them instantaneously on hundreds of millions of screens and minds.

Such narratives serve neither history nor justice. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” now taught in schools all over the country, is, in its essence, racist propaganda. Its story lines are instruments for the consolidation of political power. Marxists discovered long ago that class doesn’t work as a great divider in America. But race does work.

Race is the McGuffin—the pretext. Our moral generals are fighting the last war. The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness—a politics that manages to be both prissy and vicious, a totalitarian social design that flies the flag of everything good and nice—fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”