Interpreting The Civil Rights Act
In American Greatness, Roger Kimball discusses the progressive juggernaut. He also has a question: After a congressman gave an official statement, accusing Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric of being divisive, disparaging, and too often rooted in grievance, the congressman accused Kirk of having evangelized normalized fringe views on race, sex, and immigration. …
Unfortunately, accused the congressman, Kirk’s rhetoric resurrected dangerous prejudices of a dark past.
Which leads Roger Kimball to ask,
- What sort of grievance would someone have to entertain … to describe someone who simply sought to engage young people in conversation as “divisive” and “disparaging?”
- Follow-up question: Did Charlie Kirk try to “normalize” fringe ideas about “race, sex, and immigration?”
- Were Kirk’s views perfectly normal that reflected the beliefs of millions of Americans, even if those ideas departed from the Washington consensus?
Expanding Civil Rights
When a student asked Kirk whether he wanted to get rid of the Civil Rights Act, Kirk responded:
… we should have a one-page bill that outlawed racial discrimination and left it at that.
Most Americans, Kirk noted, don’t support forcing women’s sports teams to allow men pretending to be women to compete. But the Civil Rights Act has been interpreted to say just that.
Charlie Kirk agreed with the intention of the Bill. He argued, however, that the Bill was too broadly written and played into the hands of people who wanted to expand and weaponize the bill to enforce a radical progressive agenda that included so-called “affirmative action,” i.e., reverse racism in the form of discrimination against whites and Asians.
How’d That Work?
The Civil Rights Act turned into a 100-page bill that created “a permanent anti-racist bureaucracy within our federal government to go find racism where it doesn’t exist and create it in new places where it otherwise did not exist.”
In his book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell notes how the Civil Rights Act was a great victory for equality and social progress. Common in academia and the media, Caldwell notes, was to regard the Civil Rights Act as a great victory for equality and social progress. “After all, was it not a potent weapon in the battle against Jim Crow and other expressions of racism?”
Kimball agrees with Caldwell’s argument that extension (or exaggeration) of the 14th Amendment (“due process,” “equal protection”) helped sow the seeds of our present discontents.
The Civil Rights Act did not simply enhance certain provisions of the Constitution. It soon became “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.”
As originally drafted, the Constitution’s aim was to limit government authority and protect citizens from the coercive power of the state. The Civil Rights Act, explains Kimball, “underwrote the indefinite extension of governmental power and opened ever new avenues through which progressive activists could meddle in precincts of life hitherto reserved to private discretion.”
As Caldwell noted, the Act “emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the ‘eyes and ears,’ and even the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.”
No realm of social intercourse was off-limits. “Over time,” Caldwell wrote, “more of the country’s institutions were brought under the Act’s scrutiny. Eventually, all were.”
Unintended Consequences
The Act, continues Caldwell, “transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil.”
Leo Strauss correctly observed, …
… a true liberal (as distinct from a progressive) society depends on the maintenance of the distinction between the realm of politics and that of private initiative.
Roger Kimball maintains that the Civil Rights Act all but erased that distinction, opening … every sphere of social endeavor to federal interference.
As one reviewer quipped when Caldwell’s book was first published, the Civil Rights Act was “the law that ate the Constitution.”
The Civil Rights Act did not take place in a vacuum, reflects Kimball.
Its progress was directed by the essentially Marxist ambitions of those radicals who plotted the “long march through the institutions” of the 1960s and beyond. I wrote about this in my book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. Christopher Rufo brings the story up to date in his most recent book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
“Everything” Is No Exaggeration
If the Civil Rights Act is the engine behind the transformation of liberal society into an illiberal, proto-totalitarian compact, the designers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—from Frankfurt School Marxists like Herbert Marcuse on down—provided both the plan and the fuel.
The result is a weird, almost surreal situation in which the most common realities and institutions are undermined, transformed, and inverted.
What is a family? What is a man or a woman? What is free speech?
We used to be able to answer with confidence. Can we still?
The limitless, disestablishing agenda of sixties radicalism is now backed by the coercive power of the state, transforming the “very fabric of society,” continues Kimball.
How should conservatives respond?
As Daniel McCarthy noted in 2023, the most bootless—also the most contemptible—response is that of those “conservatives” he calls “accommodationists”:
Their job is to make liberals seem tolerant for tolerating conservatives who attack the same right-wing targets that liberals attack. Accommodationists . . . will thunder in outrage any time [other conservatives] join forces against the Left.
Why are accommodationists terrified of being mistaken for populists? in an essay called “The Promise of Populism,” Margot Cleveland notes the irony here:
… those conservatives who most loudly declared populism at odds with conservatism—a refrain repeated ad nauseam to distance themselves from Trump and his supporters— soon abandoned conservatism itself.” The step from accommodation to capitulation is always a short one.
Kimball: The Double Irony
Most conservatives think of Williman F. Buckley as their patron saint.
… what if not “populist” was Buckley’s declaration that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty? If in years past conservatives shied away from defending conservative prerogatives for fear of being castigated as populists, today they must embrace that more radical conservatism or be utterly absorbed by the progressive juggernaut.
At a time when the abnormal is championed as the new normal, conservatives cannot act to uphold the established order without being silenced or destroyed by the progressives who control that order.
What is perhaps paradoxical today but nonetheless true is that the most vital form of conservatism today is a form of radical populism willing to challenge a corrupt and encroaching status quo.
And challenges are nigh. For Cleveland is right: the “increasingly emboldened elite” that would subdue us is facing “an increasingly angered populace.”
The answer to “how angry” lies in the 2024 presidential election.
Ponder the popularity of Charlie Kirk and the dual outpouring of grief and resolve that greeted his assassination. (Rep.) Bennie Thompson pretends that Kirk was a “divisive” figure. But, if I may borrow from the congressman, “in fact™,” he was a supremely unifying one.
Not so, for “socialistically inclined figures like Bennie Thompson or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the other 118 Democrat House members, adds Kimball, who refused to condemn his assassination or for celebrity pundits like Jimmy Kimmel or Emmy attendees.” For them, notes Kimball, “Charlie really was a divisive figure.”
But for millions upon millions of Americans, especially young, college-age Americans, he was a unifying figure who “normalized” not fringe ideas but supremely normal ones.
As many have observed, the murder of Charlie Kirk by a deranged leftist silenced one individual, but it awakened the voices of a movement that hitherto had hardly known it had a voice.
