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August 14 - October 15, 2025
Strauss warned: “The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society, in a word, the destruction of liberal society.”
One example is Rosa Parks. Over decades, Black History Month has taught millions of schoolchildren to think of her as a “tired seamstress,” whose need to rest her weary legs in the white section of a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus unleashed a storm of spontaneous protest. But she was considerably more than that. Five months before the Montgomery bus boycott began, she had attended the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee, an academy that the Congress of Industrial Organizations had set up for training social agitators.
there is a reason most countries are not multi-ethnic countries and why most of those that have tried to become multi-ethnic countries have failed.
Starting in the early 1960s, an astonishing spike in crime, in which blacks made up a disproportionate share of both perpetrators and victims, took on aspects of a national emergency.
By 2011, toward the end of Barack Obama’s first term in office, blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, still accounted for 39 percent of the arrests for violent crime.
The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women.
The editors had made a radical assessment: The male-dominated medical profession was so biased, so lacking in empathy, that a woman was safer seeking medical advice from her uncredentialed peers. This was the ethic the internet would be built on a quarter-century later.
Nineteen percent even believed that “separate public toilets for men and women will not be allowed,” though three quarters of the country dismissed that idea as fanciful.
The 1970 census, the first in which all the Boomers were present, was the only one since the founding of the republic two centuries before in which the foreign-born population was below 5 percent.
A big problem with immigration was that it bred inequality. Its role in doing so was as significant as that of other factors more commonly blamed: information technology, world trade, tax cuts.
But immigrants came with other huge costs: new schools, new roads, translation (formal and informal), and health care for those who could not afford it. Those externalities were absorbed by the public, not the businessmen who benefited from immigration.
If we were judging open immigration and outsourcing not as economic policies but as U.S. aid programs for the world’s poor, we might consider them successes. But we are not. The cultural change, the race-based constitutional demotion of natives relative to newcomers, the weakening democratic grip of the public on its government as power disappeared into back rooms and courtrooms, the staggeringly large redistributions of wealth—all these things ensured that immigration would poison American politics right down until the presidential election of 2016.
Political engagement and economic stratification came together in an almost official attitude known as snark, a sort of snobbery about other opinions that dismissed them as low-class without going to the trouble of refuting them. Why offer an argument when an eye roll would do?
When a dictatorship deserved to be toppled, its benightedness was often illustrated through its ignorance of technology. During the U.S.-led war on Serbia in 1999, stories circulated that soldiers of the rump Yugoslavia who had raided a Belgrade opposition radio station had ordered journalists to “hand over the internet.” By contrast, any twenty-first-century uprising—from Cairo to Qom to Kiev—that could be presented as the work of young people communicating via social media received the benediction of pundits and the State Department.
Introducing the 1962 lecture by Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” that we mentioned earlier, Strauss’s friend and collaborator, the political theorist Joseph Cropsey, confessed himself fascinated by the way Strauss’s question, in the light of modern science and politics, “can easily be transformed, with some modifications, into the question of why anybody should remain anything he happens to be to begin with.”
Bakke’s scores on the multi-part Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) would normally have won him admission to even the most elite medical schools. They were in the 96th, 94th, 97th, and 72nd percentiles. The averages for Davis admittees were 69, 67, 82, and 72. The averages for minorities admitted through the university’s set-aside program were 34, 30, 37, and 18.
Civil rights, as it developed after the Bakke case, required censorship. The imputation of free-standing, spontaneously arising racism—racism with no cause or justification, like some force of nature, and which no reference to history or custom could mitigate or justify—was the only logical channel for the exercise of power that the “diversity” doctrine had dug. If people were permitted to take positions like Glazer’s, to argue that any part of the difference in outcomes between the races was attributable to anything other than racism, the entire logic of civil rights law would break down. So
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Discouraging or disciplining racist attitudes was no longer enough—it had become necessary to destroy the life and livelihood of anyone even suspected of harboring them.
Over the decades, one hapless white after another would see his career brought to a sudden stop when a tantrum, a drunken slip, or some imperfectly calibrated phrase revealed wrong attitudes about race, gender, or sexuality.
Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.
Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had.
Affirmative action and political correctness were the twin pillars of the second constitution. They were what civil rights was. They were not temporary. Affirmative action was deduced judicially from the curtailments on freedom of association that the Civil Rights Act itself had put in place. Political correctness rested on a right to collective dignity extended by sympathetic judges who saw that, without such a right, forcing the races together would more likely occasion humiliation than emancipation.
The GSEs’ underwriting standards became those of the whole industry. By 2006, 46 percent of new homeowners were making no down payment at all on their houses, and banks had trillions of dollars in loans on their books that would never have been made, absent government pressure. No well-informed accountant thought these loans could survive an economic downturn, and they did not.
Anti-racism, women’s rights, sexual liberation, world hegemony, government through technology—none of these was free. All would have to be paid for, which meant that they would be fought over. Some people, the public rightly began to suspect, would have to surrender what they considered their rights and submit to a political order designed for others’ benefit.
every TV watcher had learned to recognize the mise en scène: Crowley was being set up to have his life destroyed.
At the level of constitutional abstraction, it had always been true that civil rights laws created two classes of citizens. Now it seemed to be true as a matter of lived experience. Every tool of civil rights rhetoric had been used by the White House not to challenge privilege but to protect it.
The COMPAS algorithm tended to assess black inmates as more likely to reoffend than whites. Problem was, they were.
For half a century the victim perspective had been imposed by courts, backed with the threat of criminal and civil penalties. Eventually people lost the ability to tell the difference between inequality and racial discrimination. In almost all of the media coverage of the COMPAS controversy, the two terms were used as synonyms. Indeed, it was evidence of bad faith to assert that an inequality might ever result from something other than discrimination.
It seemed an aberration at the time, but in 2013, JPMorgan Chase alone paid $20 billion in fines. Since that bank was Obama’s most important early campaign backer, and since not a single major executive, there or elsewhere, was ever jailed for what, to judge from the size of the fines, would have been the largest financial crimes in history, it is natural to wonder whether this fining arrangement was disciplinary or collusive.
Socrates’s claim to know nothing is, to use a twenty-first-century term, a humblebrag. It may demean Socrates in the normal hierarchy built around questions of who’s smarter than whom. But it simultaneously establishes a more important hierarchy, a meta-hierarchy, in which Socrates arrogates to himself a role as supreme judge over what wisdom is. Once that role is granted, Socrates’s intelligence is not just better than the politician’s—it transcends it.
If people are blocked by bias from understanding the “true” nature of human relations, authorities have the license, even the obligation, to overrule them. Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it.
Just as the sky deck of the Shard gives the best view of London because it is the only high place from which one cannot see the Shard, the biases of those intervening against bias are invisible.
Nationwide public opposition had never been a reason to give up. The reforms of the 1960s had created mechanisms for forcing social change even against the democratically expressed wishes of the electorate.
Americans had been told what to think by judges, bureaucrats, and journalists, and, rather than rebel against official presumption, most had seemed to conform to it, after a little embittered grumbling.
Only rarely now did people at the top of society meet people who disagreed with them.
Here, for the first time in a systematic way, emerged the critique that an elite had hijacked the language of civil rights and used it to alter the country in its essence. “A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers,” Scalia wrote, “does not deserve to be called a democracy.”
A terrible irony of civil rights, obvious from the very outset but never, ever spoken of, was making itself manifest as the 2016 election approached. The civil rights approach to politics meant using lawsuits, shaming, and street power to overrule democratic politics. It encouraged—no, it required—groups of similarly situated people to organize against the wider society to defend their interests. Now it became clear that the members of any group that felt itself despised and degraded could defend its interests this way. Even whites.
Far from suppressing the Southern obsession with race and “blood,” civil rights conveyed it to every nook and cranny of the country. The entire culture—all journalism, all art, all books—was suffused with it.
In 2009, blacks, who made up 13 percent of the population, accounted for almost half the arrests (49.2 percent) for murder and more than half (55.5 percent) for robberies.
Those who lost most from the new rights-based politics were white men. The laws of the 1960s may not have been designed explicitly to harm them, but they were gradually altered to help everyone but them, which is the same thing.
They fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.
On literally dozens of occasions as president, Barack Obama described highly specific political opinions, always those of his own party, as expressing “who we are” as Americans. Not since the McCarthy era had Americans been told that to disagree with the authorities was to forfeit one’s membership in the American nation.
shame. There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.
White people were supposed to console themselves that their superior economic standing somehow “compensated” them for their inferior status as citizens.
