“The changes of the 60s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible- and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.”
– The Age of Entitlement
A convergence of events led to the growing need for a response to racial discrimination and unrest in the South. Defiance and civil disobedience over existing Jim Crow laws resulted in Rosa Parks’ famous refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, perhaps encouraged by the overturning of segregation in schools in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Then a series of sit-ins and marches accelerated into the Birmingham bombing and ensuing riots in 1963. Threatened by continuous agitation and fear, an exhausted America hoped for a change.
First came the end of the Poll Tax, a practice used to prevent blacks from voting in the South, with the passage of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in January 1964. Then came the Civil Rights Act, also passed in 1964, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. But what began as an opportunity for racial harmony and the need to bring the South to heel, would not bring a happy ending. While Americans expected an end to the race wars, what they got instead would lead to even greater division.
In Christopher Caldwell’s 2020 book, “The Age of Entitlement”, Caldwell provides a detailed analysis of the cultural transformation over the past fifty years following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and how a hope for racial integration ended instead with a reimagined Constitution, that increasingly bypassed the democratic process and grew government beyond recognition. Instead of reconciliation, a trojan horse of ~ism grew into a body of legislation encompassing not only race but sex, gender, gay rights, and immigration. A watershed moment that resulted in the loss of rights, freedoms, and the protections guaranteed in the Constitution.
The Civil Rights Act aimed to promote equality and justice through race neutrality and the redress of prior injustices. As such, many believed it was limited to the enduring discrimination in the South. Instead, came extensive and continuous political reforms, with the template to undo racial bias reapplied to a growing list of grievance groups with its obvious perverse goals to change politics and not address perceived biases. In fact, it created a rival Constitution from the 1788 original. From God-given natural rights to government mandates often bypassing Constitution limits while increasing the size and scope of government through the use of coercion, the dismantling of institutions, and often without fiscal constraints. Once introduced into the private sphere, all differences in outcomes were automatically deemed evidence of inequality.
As civil rights expanded, basic rights were surrendered. The First Amendment guarantees of free speech and the freedom of assembly were targeted by censorship and the abolition of private spaces as government surveillance over the private doings of free people exploded. History began to be reinterpreted as the dissembling of traditional institutions grew with positive rights (government actions) overriding Constitutional negative rights (rights that exist outside government control).
Caldwell described the twin pillars of the civil rights movement as affirmative action and political correctness. Affirmative Action was the flip side of Jim Crow and used anti-racist racism to level the playing field, removing merit and neutrality, while threatening the pursuit of happiness. Political Correctness became the enforcement arm labeling cultural mores as oppressive and in need of restructuring, changing long-established norms along the way. If it was an act of condemnation to put a scarlet letter A on loose women for the sin of Adultery, the Civil Rights aftermath sought to put a letter R on everything quintessentially American as Racist.
The big winners under the de facto Constitution were Democrats who sought to increase their base, by using newly found identity politics and inequality to expand the government’s reach in increasing areas of society. As such, civil rights have replaced the idea of sovereignty, first in education, then in corporations and private spaces, and finally in government.
As for the losers, they are aplenty. Whites, and in particular, white men, were completely excluded from the shadow Constitution, as they were deemed winners in whatever situation they were in. Fiscal responsibility was lost as the American taxpayers were expected to pay the rising cost of the welfare state, reparations, and other leveling efforts. Civility and civil order dissolved as family, charity, and church were replaced by the government. Cancel culture put individualism and the right to dissent on the chopping block under the guise of white privilege. The American Constitution increasingly lost its checks and balances, saw a dwindling in the separation of powers, and loss of democracy by representation. But the real irony is that blacks lost the most as the promise of parity and unity was never allowed to flourish.
Today’s polarization is best defined by the struggle between these two Constitutions. One that puts the individual at the center, while the other looks only at immutable characteristics. The promise of the Civil Rights legislation turned out to be a Faustian bargain. Instead of racial integration, came the largest government grab in history. A lose/lose for all.
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