MARTIN L. KING TO RODNEY KING: THAT WAY LIES BOSNIA

"The original American ideal, so revolutionary in scope, was that it didn't matter who your father was." So said Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz, in a telling recent reminder.

Abraham Lincoln redefined the American experiment when he said, at Gettysburg, that we Americans were "... a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." (Were he writing today, he would have said "all men and women ...").

Stop and think how revolutionary these ideals sounded to 18th and 19th century ears. Before America, the world over, human society had known little but grinding poverty and brute force, slavery and religious wars, ruthless oppression and ignorance. Before America, men had known arbitrary rule, government by an established state church, government by force and terror and by the divine right of kings. But here, for the first time, was a "shining city on a hill" called America, an experiment in liberty, where power inhered in the people, and where, in Norman Podhoretz's happy phrase, "It didn't matter who your father was."

Here indeed was the meritocracy with all its imperfections that Thomas Jefferson envisioned. By dint of hard work, education and thorough preparation, ordinary people of low birth could achieve whatever their talents and determination could produce. It was this same imperfect experiment that Lincoln led us through a terrible Civil War in order to preserve.

Now, though, three decades' liberal dominance of our culture if not always our government have placed all this at risk.

Consider: Between the November election and the early part of this year, we witnessed an American President forming a cabinet and a new government with one guiding principle. That principle a revolutionary overturning of Podhoretz's "original American ideal" is this naked fact:

"The only thing that matters is who your father was." Race. Ethnicity. Gender. Aggrieved status. Victimhood. The new guiding principle is that only a black can represent blacks, as only a black woman can represent black women; that only hispanics can represent hispanics, and likewise for Asian-Americans, and Native Americans, and every other conceivable sub-grouping. This is the new law of group rights; of group grievances; of identity and consciousness based solely on claimed membership in one or another aggrieved class of victimhood.

Martin Luther King preached, with unanswerable eloquence and moral force, that he dreamed of an America where young children "... will be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." The moral force of King's argument proved unanswerable precisely because he called America "to live out the true meaning of her creed." In an important sense, Dr. King's crusade was to complete the American Revolution by extending its promise 180 years late to blacks and other oppressed minorities.

In less than the 30 years that have elapsed since King inspired millions with those words, modern liberals have rejected King's teaching and perverted his legacy, informing us that your gender, your race, your religion and your ethnicity are all that matters.

It is quite possible to forget how much damage this notion is doing to our society and culture, to the America we all grew up in and the America we all love. We are all diminished by the new categories into which the liberals want to force us.

Item: Congressman Harold Ford of Memphis, Tennessee's only black member of Congress, stands trial for bribery and various other criminal charges. Rep. Ford whipped up noisy demonstrations and stridently argued that only black jurors could avoid the racism inherent in a corrupt court system. He spent years blistering a Justice Department, judge, jurors and the media as racists. Militant black "leaders" from across the country rallied to his side.

In a crowning irony, this past week, a Tennessee jury of 11 whites and one black acquitted him, and Harold Ford went free. But the damage to an ideal of color-blind justice lingers in the minds of thousands, if not millions of citizens.

Item: "The Rodney King case" in Los Angeles. Not only did last spring's verdict touch off the most deadly rioting any American city has ever seen. Not only did the violence and brutality that ensued visit death and destruction on Korean immigrants working 80- and 100-hour weeks to achieve the American dream. Not only did more than 60 people die and scores of businesses get burned out many never to reopen.

As bad as any of these is the fact that the whole sordid episode stampeded our government into diminishing our cherished right to avoid double jeopardy the right not to be tried twice for the same alleged offense. The guarantee against double jeopardy is in the Bill of Rights. This marks it as one of the "ancient rights of Englishmen" our Founders fought a war to secure, in the process risking as Jefferson phrased it in the Declaration "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

Like a lingering malignancy, the Rodney King episode has had other grim results as well. Recall Reginald Denny, the hapless truck driver unlucky enough to find himself in South Central L.A. as the rioting broke out? Stopped at an intersection, Denny was set upon, dragged from his truck, beaten, kicked, punched literally stomped within an inch of his life.

A bystander's videotape permitted police to positively identify Denny's tormentors, and they will stand trial. Here's the truly horrific part: A black Chicago Tribune columnist who grew up in South Central L.A. sadly relates talk in the neighborhood that if these hooligans are convicted of the offenses they can be seen on videotape committing, the community will erupt once again in riotous protest.

In Memphis, the Harold Ford trial. In Brooklyn, blacks and Jews are at each others' throats in the urban jungle that New York City has become. In L.A., the chilling, deadly, riots that followed the Rodney King cases. Down this road lies an American Bosnia a racial and ethnic "cleansing" that will fester and worsen until principled leaders demand a return to the original, color-blind ideals of Martin Luther King and Norman Podhoretz "that it doesn't matter who your father was."