It was a common trope of the extreme right in France before the war that no Jew could really understand Racine. This was because a Jew had no true homeland and none of the national roots (oddly enough, Racine means root in French) essential to a true, visceral appreciation of the great tragedian’s poetry. He could not feel Racine in his blood, however great his mastery of French: indeed, such mastery, if he had it, was regarded as sinister, dangerous, false, and probably treacherous. The Woke in America are increasingly like the extreme right in pre-war France, though they are more successful in that they have needed no German occupation and no Marshal Pétain to take control of the country’s intellectual life and impose their orthodoxy. They are just as obsessed with race and skin color as the French extreme right was with blood and roots. They believe, as did …