The liberal obsession with identity politics and “intersectionality” has begun to turn on itself. Like an uroboros of a pasty white bespectacled college student swallowing herself, recycled hemp TOMS shoes first, the petty pique of the privileged is coming undone.

Black Lives Matter, that loose cohort of racially aggrieved leeches, showed its true colors; or rather color, which is a black so solid and opaque it’s immune to reason. During an event featuring Claire Gastañaga of the American Civil Liberties Union at the College of William & Mary, the group crashed the stage, shutting down the speaker. Gastañaga came to the university to speak on free speech, only to be hushed up by amateur actors pretending to be oppressed.

Then the chants -- there are always chants, aren’t there? --  began. “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too," went one iambic call, referencing the ACLU’s defense of the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville, Virginia. There was the classic, “The oppressed are not impressed," a nonsensical understatement at college disruption scenes like these. Cries of “blood” and “shame” also popped up in the collective incantation.

Then came the kicker: "liberalism is white supremacy."

Hallelujah! By George, they’ve got it!

Robby Soave of Reason calls such a notion “obviously incoherent.” Leftist economist Noah Smith used a chin-rub emoji to denote his befuddlement of the accusation.

For self-styled liberals, being accused to promoting white supremacy is the equivalent of a vegan being called a murderous meat-eater. It’s a mindbender; an aporia. It’s defining your life by a code of beliefs, and then being told “no,” you stand for everything you stand against.

And yet, I can’t help but think there’s a lot of truth in the idea that liberals try to impose a white-centric worldview. To understand why, the very term “liberalism” should be unpacked, as its meaning has melted into definitional liquid over time.

The American founders used liberal when referring to free and open inquiry. During the19th century, liberalism was synonymous with what’s referred to as libertarianism today -- that is, the unrestricted flow of goods and information. From the post-war era on, liberalism dropped its economic signifiers and stood only for the freedom of expression, be it written, spoken, sung, or even sexually enacted.

In the modern era, an American liberal is married to the concept of civil equality. All politics flow from this intellectual attachment. This equality is the fruit produced from the hard grind of progress. Liberalism’s openness, freedom, and aversion to regulation on personal behavior reached its culmination in the 21st century idea of equality before the law. Any hint of deviation from this leveled path cannot be countenanced.

The universality of the liberal vision is informed by the Christian concept of individual dignity. But in liberalism’s relentless pursuit of breaking authority, it broke with the Christian God, adopting a namby-pamby humanism in His place.

That gets us to the liberal of today: self-righteous, sanctimonious, idealistic, and almost always white as cheap Crest toothpaste. Why is this? How did the ideology of indiscriminate equality become so -- pardon if I channel Ta-Nehisi Coates -- intertwined with whiteness?

The only logical answer that I’ve been able to pin down is that American liberalism is the product of centuries of European thought. From the enlightenment, to deism, to the doctrines of natural law, to the advent of common law, to the Magna Carta, to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to the Declaration of the Rights of Man -- liberalism was formed in this crucible of European epistemology.

To express it in another way: Liberalism is the colorblind vision of a specific color. It’s meant for all, but was developed, and fully understood by just one. So, it is, in a sense as the BLM agitators say, white supremacy.

The great Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington saw the same thing. In his early career, he preached the doctrine of America being a creedal nation, united in the beliefs of equal rights and liberty for all. He quickly changed his tune following the immigration influx created by the abolition of national quotas and Euro-favoritism in immigration policy. “There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English,” he wrote in his 2004 book Who Are We?

Does that mean America is a country only fit to be a home to those of European ancestry? Not at all. Experience and history tell us that the American disposition can be learned. Only the age-old practice of assimilation is required. This assimilation, unfortunately, contains all the things modern day liberal frowned upon: teaching American history in public schools, emphasizing the learning of English, reverence for our founding fathers, embracing historical traditions and holidays, a de-emphasis on diversity, and celebrating the country as one people and not an amalgam of mini-nations within arbitrary boundaries.

The same goes for liberalism, which, like it or not, is still a fundamental part of the American experiment. Liberals shouldn’t shun the origins of their philosophy. They should embrace its historical origin and how it benefits all those willing to adopt it.