Civil-rights laws have always been a weapon—it’s just that conservatives have finally decided to wield them.
In 2020, the author Christopher Caldwell changed the conversation with his book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. The book argued that the civil-rights regime established in the 1960s marked a fundamental departure from America’s constitutional tradition. Though launched with the noble intention of stopping racial discrimination, Caldwell argued, the Civil Rights Act—and the bureaucracy it spawned—gradually consumed core American freedoms and became a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions.
In the decades that followed, the right’s response was marked by ambivalence. Some libertarians called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, but—like many libertarian proposals—this was never a political possibility, given the Act’s broad public support. The establishment right, meanwhile, largely suppressed its private misgivings. Republicans repeatedly voted to expand the civil-rights regime, further embedding dubious concepts like disparate impact theory (the idea that discrimination can occur even inadvertently) into law.
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of America's Cultural Revolution.
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