The Plot To Undermine America’s Institutions

Less than a decade ago, my high school hosted a naturalization ceremony. Each time a new citizen, donned in red, white, and blue apparel, approached the stage to receive his certificate of citizenship, the rowdy crowd of hundreds of teenagers—myself among them—broke into irreverent but welcoming and patriotic chants of "USA! USA!"

Those days are long gone. National pride fell to an all-time low in 2020, with just 20 percent of American adults ages 18 to 29 saying they were "extremely proud" to be an American, according to a Gallup poll. And though the coronavirus pandemic and protests following the death of George Floyd factored into that number, the poll marked the sixth consecutive year of decline in patriotism.

The right blames this trend on progressivism and, more recently, critical race theory. But is CRT really to blame for this drastic shift in anti-American sentiment? Jonathan Butcher offers a guidebook on the subject in Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth.

Splintered presents critical theory as a pedagogy, or a framework through which one understands the world around him. From its origins in the 19th century German academy to its application in American kindergartens, Butcher, an education fellow at the Heritage Foundation, spells out what critical pedagogy means for the future of American education.

He begins with the German Marxists, including Felix Weil, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer, who laid the foundation for critical theory by fusing Marx’s anticapitalism and understanding of history as a persistent class struggle with the postmodernist concept of subjective truth. As a "worldview," Butcher writes, critical theory is "meant to criticize the traditional uses of language and reason to describe the world around us."

Critical theory found its way into American law during the 20th century. Critical legal theory claims "America’s laws are systemically oppressive and...

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