How the Civil Rights Act destroyed America’s cohesiveness

What keeps a society together?

The 14th-century Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun coined the word 'asabiyyah to describe a quality that stable groups must have to survive. The best translation I (or anyone else, for that matter) can suggest is “group cohesiveness,” but that doesn’t quite capture it. So much more is implied here, for though this cohesiveness arises spontaneously in small groups that share blood or custom, it also defines some large groups, such as successful nation-states or religions.

And there lies the problem, for large groups are always covertly incoherent. The smaller groups haven’t gone away; they’re just buried. This means that the 'asabiyyah that holds large groups together is always precariously balanced and remains only as long as the cohesion of the overarching group is never weakened.

If there is both a fundamentally admirable and a fundamentally fatal characteristic of the American people, it is the desire for decisive action.

What this meant to Ibn Khaldun is that diversity means fragility.

Do we in the United States have group cohesion now?

No. Our 'asabiyyah has collapsed and remains only in portions of our society. Instead, we have a country being torn apart by divisions. Not just one division — many. Any division is allowed. Even blatant racism is permissible. That’s the trouble when social cohesion collapses. It isn’t just one division that raises its ugly head. It’s all of them. All the divisions, once ignored in the cause of solidarity, now become licit. Why not? What cohesion is there to fall back on, except the lesser, local ones?

If we cast our minds back and try to think of a time when our country displayed cohesion between the groups that make it up and thus coherence in its actions and policies, we would need to return to the 1950s. It was not a time of perfect peace, and it was also a time of great injustice. But 'asabiyyah does not require either peace or justice. It simply requires faith, conviction, and loyalty.

It’s always hard to argue for first causes, let alone proximate causes, for society is an example of a complex chaotic system. Nothing ever happens on its own. Nor are results ever simple or even singular. All this is the nature of chaos.

But single acts can trigger unpredictable results and thus begin the process of collapse. In my view, the trigger of our terrible current predicament was the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Was the Civil Rights Act necessary?

It was a quintessentially well-meaning act. The situation of black people in America was profoundly unjust and needed to be altered. The question was how this was to be done: incrementally or decisively.

If there is both a fundamentally admirable and a fundamentally fatal characteristic of the American people, it is the desire for decisive action. We saw this quality play itself out in the Civil War. By 1860, any discerning person could see that slavery would soon be unacceptable anywhere in the Western world. In Brazil, though not officially banned until 1888, slavery was in steep decline as immigration increased, and the majority of black and mulatto people were free. Even in the South, it could only usually be defended by recourse to civilizational mission and morality, which made no sense at all. Its days were numbered.

Instead, in the search for a decisive solution, the country careened into a Civil War that killed at least 620,000 men, and this does not even count noncombatants who died of starvation or disease. The effect was a South in ruins, bitterness that lasted for decades, and a bankrupted federal government.

Was this war necessary? Probably not. The South would have been forced to give up slavery in the next few decades anyway. It just wasn’t tolerable any more in a Western country.

So let’s turn and ask this same question of the Civil Rights Act. Was it necessary?

Some action was required, of that there can be little doubt. Discriminatory laws and regulations had produced a black population that was demeaned and humiliated daily.

The politicization of racial and sexual group divisions calls to every possible group to join in.

But because a decisive action was deemed necessary, the Civil Rights Act went far beyond what was essential, in two ways. First, it exceeded the constitutional authority of the federal government. Consider: The founders were very chary indeed of an unconstrained federal government, and the Constitution shows this. It even states in the 10th Amendment — ratified in 1791 — that all powers not expressly given to the federal government are to be reserved to the States.

So on what constitutional basis did the 1964 Civil Rights Act pass? The Commerce Clause, which states Congress has the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

Here is where we observe one of the effects of the damage done by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration, when, under the unrelenting pressure of New Deal proponents, the Supreme Court suddenly discovered, at the point of a gun, that the Commerce Clause allowed the executive to do practically anything it wanted. The Civil Rights Act was passed under this very same aegis. Even members of Congress who were against racial discrimination, like Barry Goldwater, voted against it because of its unconstitutionality.

It would be tough to find an impartial individual who would agree that the Commerce Clause, as written, justifies the Civil Rights Act. Of course, that doesn’t matter, since so long as the Supreme Court allowed it — and, dominated by liberals, it did — the putative unconstitutionality of the law is irrelevant. All that is important is that we have an American solution. A decisive solution.

The trouble with the law

And this is where things start to go awry. Here we see the first crack in our old solidarity: If a blatantly unconstitutional law can be passed and permitted by the courts based on ideological expediency, what is our faith in our judicial system based on? Is it just all a sham, and judges are really making decisions made on expediency rather than the Constitution?

But what did the real damage was not the enforced removal of discrimination. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that racism was ever fundamental to social cohesion in America, though it was certainly rife. The Civil War proves that. The troubles lie rather in portions of the Civil Rights Act that are designed toward enforcement.

These resulted in an immediate politicization of the Civil Rights Act, in that it encouraged opposing groups to acquire advantage by claiming prejudice. There was now an advantage in identifying with a part of the whole against the rest of society. If you can take others to federal court claiming they’ve discriminated against you, resentment becomes a palpable good.

In fact, resentment becomes inevitable because even those who did not face discrimination previously now seemingly face it everywhere. The desire for reparation is a powerful motivator.

As soon as 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, following an executive order by John F. Kennedy in 1961, began requiring government employers to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

Jobs are zero-sum things. You either have a job or you don’t. How can one “affirmatively” give a job to a member of one group without depriving a member of another of it? And how can you do this without generating resentment? A white man passed over for a promotion in favor of a black man has good reason to feel injured.

With the incorporation of sex discrimination into these civil rights laws, men were set against women. The Civil Rights Act, taken to its logical conclusion, is a recipe for universal entitlement — and universal resentment.

Diversity and division

Worst of all, the politicization of racial and sexual group divisions calls to every possible group to join in. Minorities and women are now protected? Well, gay people face unconscionable discrimination, too. What about lesbians? Or transvestites? Or the disabled? Each group has its own solidarity and thus calls out for others to join them in their oppression and thus claim the protected status that the Civil Rights Act has created.

Good intentions? Yes. But remember the terrible effect that good intentions have in people, in that they make it virtuous to castigate unbelievers.

To the righteous, the very existence of the Civil Rights Act proves how unjust our society is, how racist, how misogynist, how homophobic. There’s no argument that you can use against racism that isn’t just as valid against any other minority group. Even polygamists can use it.

The little groups have all found their 'asabiyyah: everyone against whiteness and especially against white males. Everyone can join in hating. Or in anti-racism, as it’s euphemistically called.

And where is the old 'asabiyyah that once existed in the USA, the belief in the rightness and justness of our country? If you can’t see it, that’s because it isn’t there any more. The Civil Rights Act destroyed it.