Affirmative Action Splitting America

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

— Declaration of Independence (1776) 

Equality. Equal opportunity. Under God, all hold equal worth. One person, one vote. Rulers rule with the consent of the governed. Justice is blind. Legal guardrails help us make the most of our God-given talents.

Or Equity? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Karl Marx’s communist ideal (1875), once the creed of one-third of the world and still of China, Vietnam, and others. In the U.S., called affirmative action.

Christopher Caldwell’s epic The Age of Entitlement helps us understand the dominant role race has played in America since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We invest race, Caldwell writes, “with a religious significance.” It’s “the main ideological legacy of the last fifty years.” Race was, after all, “a contradiction of America’s constitutional principles and an affront to its Christian ones.”

Civil rights laws led to affirmative action, setting off what “proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen.” 

Caldwell adds:

It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of the transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil.


What evolved was, in Caldwell’s words, “not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.”

With the 1960s civil rights acts,  Americans thought they had fulfilled the nation’s original promise. The Jim Crow Deep South was a “sham democracy,” an embarrassment to America’s self-image. The times demanded a radical adjustment in African-Americans’ legal status. Northern whites were comfortable forcing southern whites to treat black Americans as the North did — formal recognition of equality, theoretical protection of the law.

Black Americans, however, saw the civil rights acts as promising fundamental change. To Blacks and civil rights activists of all races, whites had “entered a guilty plea in the court of history.”

Thus, Caldwell argues, two constitutional regimes came to occupy the same space. The first one stresses individual equality before the law; the second uses affirmative action’s racial preferences and judicial authority to achieve equity. Affirmative action empowered the federal government and its allies to monitor America for proper racial balance. 

Government’s agencies and courts took action against racism “even if there was no evidence of any racist intent,” moving the country to affirmative action’s “explicit system of racial preference.” Large, organized groups then used civil rights to gain power for their own causes: women’s rights, sexual preference, even gender identity. “The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people,” Caldwell writes, “became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life.” 

During the early civil rights debates, opponents worried the law would even apply to the right of Mrs. Murphy, a hypothetical boarding-house operator, to choose who lives under her roof. Liberals dismissed this “slippery-slope” argument. Yet here we are. It seems clear that the slippery slope argument was valid.

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