Month: January 2020

Let the word go forth:

Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020

This is the most conservative of all the Democratic presidential candidates, note well.

So, as the man says, let’s be clear: if you think it might be a bad idea for biological males to compete against your daughter in the high school women’s sports league, or that biological males do not belong in your daughter’s or wife’s locker room, or even if you dissent from gender ideology at all, as the left-wing feminist J.K. Rowling did publicly late last year — then you are on the same side as Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, and will deserve the hatred you receive.

This is how left-wing identity politics works today. The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell’s dark, provocative new book illuminates how the concept of “civil rights” has been weaponized to demolish constitutional principles. If you’ve heard anything about the book, it’s probably something along the lines of this Jonathan Rauch review in the NYT. Excerpts:

In Caldwell’s telling, the Civil Rights Act, which banned many forms of discrimination, was a swindle. Billed as a one-time correction that would end segregation and consign race consciousness to the past, it actually started an endless and escalating campaign of race-conscious social engineering. Imperialistically, civil rights expanded to include “people of color” and immigrants and gays and, in short, anyone who was not native-born, white and straight — all in service of “the task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out — the top-down management of various ethnic, regional and social groups.”

With civil rights as their bulldozer, in Caldwell’s view, progressive movements ran amok. They “could now, through the authority of civil rights law, override every barrier that democracy might seek to erect against them”; the law and rhetoric of civil rights “gave them an iron grip on the levers of state power.”

Perhaps the author should have come up for oxygen when he found himself suggesting that the Southern segregationists were right all along. Reading this overwrought and strangely airless book, one would never imagine a different way of viewing things, one that rejects Caldwell’s ultimatum to “choose between these two orders.” In that view — my own — America has seen multiple refoundings, among them the Jackson era’s populism, the Civil War era’s abolition of slavery, the Progressive era’s governmental reforms and the New Deal era’s economic and welfare interventions. All of them, like the civil rights revolution, sparked tense and sometimes violent clashes between competing views of the Constitution and basic rights, but in my version of history, those tensions proved not only survivable but fruitful, and working through them has been an engine of dynamism and renewal, not destruction and oppression. I worry about the illiberal excesses of identity politics and political correctness, but I think excesses is what they are, and I think they, too, can be worked through. Being a homosexual American now miraculously married to my husband for almost a decade, I can’t help feeling astonished by a history of America since 1964 that finds space for only one paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights movement’s social and moral achievements — before hastening back to “But the costs of civil rights were high.”

Perhaps most depressingly, Caldwell’s account, even if one accepts its cramped view of the Constitution and its one-eyed moral bookkeeping, leads nowhere. It proffers no constructive alternative, no plausible policy or path. The author knows perfectly well that there will be no “repeal of the civil rights laws.” He foresees only endless, grinding, negative-sum cultural and political warfare between two intractably opposed “constitutions.” His vision is a dead end. Unfortunately, it also seems to be where American conservatism is going.

Rauch is not wrong in his description of the most controversial part of Caldwell’s book. Caldwell really does see the Civil Rights regime as where things went badly wrong. But Rauch, in my view, doesn’t take on Caldwell’s actual argument, but only asserts that these conflicts “can be worked through.” Boy, is that ever whistling past the graveyard. However, I have to admit that I never would have read a book that claimed the Civil Rights movement went wrong had it not been written by someone I respect as much as I do Christopher Caldwell. I read the book last week, and I’m glad I did, though I doubt I will read a more unsettling book all year………..

I strongly urge you to read Caldwell’s book, and not to assume that you understand it from reviews. Let me get one thing out of the way now: Caldwell does NOT say that segregation was right. For example, he denounces the Jim Crow South as a confederacy of “sham democracies,” and agrees that its apartheid system had to change. Yet the manner in which the state demolished segregation had dramatic unintended consequences. Caldwell’s argument is more like that of Sir Thomas More in this famous exchange from the Robert Bolt play A Man For All Seasons:

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Caldwell argues that to get at the devil of segregation, we cut down constitutional principles that are now destroying constitutional principles that few people in 1964 imagined would one day be at risk.