Blacks voted almost unanimously for the party of civil rights, giving Democrats 90, 88, 95, and 93 percent of their votes in presidential elections after 2000. The civil rights regime could also claim the overwhelming loyalty of other minorities, those non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual groups to which it had been extended. It reserved a special role for the country’s moneyed leadership class, too, providing a haven from unruly democracy that members of that class always seek. Finally, civil rights, more than any American political movement since Prohibition, rested on a conception of
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