The civil rights movement was supported by the vast majority of the American people, including federal law enforcement and the military, and by ninety-percent pluralities in both congressional parties. Since those victories were achieved, public-opinion surveys have shown a dramatic increase in the goodwill of whites generally towards the African-American minority, and an equally precipitous decline in attitudes that could reasonably be called bigoted. Large increases in the number of black officials elected by majority white constituencies, and huge income transfers authorized by a predominantly white electorate to black communities, provide solid empirical evidence of these attitudinal changes. There would be no affirmative action preferences at all if not for the support of white officials elected by white voters seeking racial fairness.
The justification advanced for racial preferences is illogical on its face. The white majority that allegedly cannot be fair in the society at large is also a white majority in government. If government programs are required to compel whites to be fair, how can whites have designed and instituted those same programs? If the white majority is racist, how can the government it dominates be relied on to redress racial grievances? The question is absurd because the premise is absurd. In fact, it is America’s white racial majority that ended slavery, outlawed discrimination, funded massive welfare programs that benefited inner-city blacks, and created the very affirmative action policies that are allegedly necessary to force them to be fair.
The end result of racial-preference policies masquerading as affirmative action is also perverse. In the long run, subverting the state’s neutrality by eliminating the principle of color-blindness will work against minorities like African-Americans. Groups that are numerically larger are bound to benefit more from political redistribution schemes than smaller ones. Over time, as the displacement of blacks by Latinos in urban centers like Los Angeles already makes clear, the racial spoils system will transform itself into a system that locks blacks out.
Civil rights is just one battlefield in the left’s war against America. The big guns of this war are directed from the centers of intellect in the university, where tenured radicals have created an anti-American culture and used the academic curriculum to indoctrinate broad sections of the nation’s youth. The thrust of this curriculum was summarized in a text by a constitutional law professor at Georgetown, one of America’s elite universities: “The political history of the United States . . . is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life.”88
Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment, Duke University Press, 1994.
Of course, the political history of the United States is exactly the reverse. It is in large measure the history of a nation that led the world in eliminating slavery, in accommodating peoples it had previously defeated, in elevating nonwhites to a position of dignity and respect, in promoting opportunities and rights for women, and in fostering a healthy skepticism towards unworthy leaders and towards the dangers inherent in government itself. This view of American history is now called “conservative,” but only because leftists currently shape the political language of liberalism and have been able to redefine the terms of the political debate. There is nothing “liberal” about people who deny the American narrative as a narrative of freedom, or who promote class, race, and gender war in the name of social progress. But leftists have successfully created a political vocabulary in which “racist” describes those who defend the constitutional framework of individual rights, and attempt to guard it against the nihilistic advocates of a political bad faith.
May 20, 1999, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=24277.
1 Since this was written, the situation has changed fairly dramatically. A Pew poll taken in 2011 reported that 49 percent of 18–29 year olds had a positive opinion of socialism. This change had already taken place a few years earlier. See “Little Change in Public’s Response to ‘Capitalism,’ ‘Socialism,’” Pew Research Center, December 28, 2011. http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/.
2 Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, 2008.
3 “Pacific Islanders” are the one Asian group defined as an “under-represented minority,” not coincidently because they are the one Asian group that was the subject of American colonialism.
4 “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty,” Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation, September 5, 2012, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/09/marriage-americas-greatest-weapon-against-child-poverty.
5 Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 237.
6 Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, Basic Books, 2012.
7 “Increasing Minority Enrollment at the University of California Post Proposition 209: UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships,” Ramona Barrio-Sotillo, 2007, p. 57, http://udini.proquest.com/view/increasing-minority-enrollment-at-goid:304826328/.
8 Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment, Duke University Press, 1994.
Decline and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement
On a recent trip to the South, I found myself in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King, Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet just over thirty years ago. Memphis, I discovered, is home to a “National Civil Rights Museum,” created by a local trust of African-Americans active in civil rights causes. Tucked out of the way on a city side-street, the museum is housed in the building that was once the Lorraine Motel, the very site where Dr. King was murdered.
Except for two white 1960s Cadillac convertibles, the parking lot outside the motel is empty, part of the museum’s plan to preserve the memories of that somber day in April three decades ago. The cars belonged to King and his entourage, and have been left as they were the morning he was killed. Above them, a wreath hangs from a balcony railing to mark the spot where he fell. Beyond is the room where he had slept the night before. It, too, is preserved exactly as it was, the covers pulled back, the bed unmade, the breakfast tray laid out, as though someone would be coming to pick it up.
Inside the building, the first floor of the motel has vanished completely. It has been hollowed out for the museum exhibits, and the cavernous room has become a silent stage for the dramas of the movement King once led. These narratives are recounted in documents and photographs, some the length of wall frescoes, bearing images as inspirational today as then. In the center of the hall, the burned shell of a school bus recalls the freedom rides