Civil rights laws killed the Constitution

A minor panic has broken out among the chattering class after a few conservative commentators showed an interest in questioning the civil rights revolution and its accompanying legal framework. Liberal and conservative publications alike have expressed grave concern that anyone might question the need for an oppressive bureaucracy that has spent trillions of dollars and wielded unprecedented state power to detect the slightest amount of wrongthink in the public and private sectors.

While the ideological core of wokeness may have involved a heavy dose of cultural Marxism, the juridical and moral vehicle used to advance the ideology was clearly civil rights law. The fear of being called mean names has driven conservatives away from many critical battles, but if the right cannot face the fact that civil rights law has played a central role in the destruction of the nation, then the movement simply has no future.

Many conservative leaders pretend that if the Civil Rights Act were repealed tomorrow, Jim Crow laws targeting black people would suddenly sweep the nation.

Christopher Caldwell, in his excellent book “The Age of Entitlement,” lays out the process by which civil rights law supplanted the U.S. Constitution. According to Caldwell, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was adopted in good faith by a then-overwhelmingly white American population as a temporary emergency measure designed to solve the problem of discrimination. Politicians sold the bill as a way to end the ugly practice of segregation that lingered in the South and to help put black people on an equal legal footing.

Most of the legislation’s supporters could not imagine how the law would apply to their neighborhoods or affect their children. Voters were in for an ugly surprise when, just a few years later, the federal government implemented forced busing and racial quotas across the nation.

The unprecedented authority granted by the CRA was used to establish a vast enforcement bureaucracy with the power to govern every organization in the country. Government offices, corporations, and private institutions were required to keep meticulous records detailing the racial characteristics of those they employed or served.

Soon, companies instituted racial preferences and warped their hiring policies around the goal of avoiding lawsuits based on a lack of “diversity,” which gave birth to the all-powerful human resources departments that terrorize conservatives today.

Basic instruments of employment screening, like aptitude tests, were banned due to their “disparate impact” on minorities who routinely scored lower despite no evidence of intentional discrimination. This is the primary reason that ultra-progressive universities have become employers' dominant form of legal credentialing.

Civil rights law destroyed or curtailed several core constitutional rights, including freedom of association, property rights, and freedom of speech, while circumventing the amendment process. A web of executive orders, judicial decisions, and litigation replaced the legislative process and became the standard by which every organization defined its own policies.

The Civil Rights Act, moreover, played a critical role in the growth of the administrative state, where experts implemented their plans for social engineering through the dictates of unaccountable federal agencies. In an era of democratic gridlock, civil rights law became the permanent state of exception through which the government could shape society without regard for the Constitution’s limitations.

The cause of civil rights was a holy crusade. Anyone who questioned the method of its implementation could simply be labeled a heretic — a racist — and cast out of polite society.

Activists of every stripe recognized the power of this new political weapon and adjusted their strategy accordingly. If you wanted to avoid the messy task of convincing the voting public and passing legislation, you could instead gain access to the new and more powerful constitution by turning your issue into a civil rights issue.

Immigration, feminism, gay marriage, and transgender inclusion made amazing strides by appealing more often to the architecture of civil rights law than to the will of the voter. When the question was put to the voters of ultra-liberal California in 2008, they supported Proposition 8 and its restriction on same-sex marriage. Activists responded by bypassing the democratic process and ensuring that the Supreme Court would enact their will through the civil rights constitution.

Despite the obvious fact that civil rights law has destroyed the U.S. Constitution, many conservatives feel compelled to defend it as a sacred institution, which would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

Like every cancerous growth of government power, the Civil Rights Act was sold to the public as a temporary measure, but Republicans treat the law’s enforcement apparatus as the one government bureaucracy that can never be questioned.

Many conservative leaders pretend that if the CRA were repealed tomorrow, Jim Crow laws targeting black people would suddenly sweep the nation. It’s the same logic Joe Biden uses when he is race-baiting. (“They’re gonna put y’all back in chains!”) It reveals that Republican leaders believe the same thing about their base as Democrats do: Conservatives are all secret racists, and without a giant web of government monitoring their every interaction, they would revert to their natural state.

The sad truth is that institutional racism does exist under the CRA. Corporations hold mandatory training on how to be “less white.” Organizations offer scholarships, internships, home loans, and small business assistance that are all marked “whites need not apply.” And these institutions proudly proclaim their bigoted initiatives as part of a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Such discrimination exists comfortably under civil rights law, as did affirmative action until a few months ago. While we can hope change is coming after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Harvard’s admission standards, racial hiring quotas and institutional bias continue.

We can debate the intellectual origins of wokeness, but what is beyond debate is that civil rights law established a second constitution that allowed a progressive crusade to conquer America rapidly.

The Civil Rights Act was a temporary fix for a temporary problem. Instead, it has grown and mutated to the point where it dominates every institution. It needs to go.