Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

But the opinionated and cocksure young Bork didn’t stay in his lane. Economic libertarianism was also the basis of his argument in 1963 and 1964 against the proposed Civil Rights Act.*3 At the very moment when Martin Luther King, Jr., was leading the watershed pro-civil-rights March on Washington in August 1963, Bork published an article in The New Republic arguing that any law requiring businesses to serve people of all races would be “subversive of free institutions” by “self-righteously impos[ing] upon a minority”—that is, upon racist white businessmen—“the morals of the majority.” The Civil Rights Act was based on “a principle of unsurpassed ugliness,” Bork explained, that might lead to an even more nightmarish future for businesses—requiring “not merely fair hiring of Negroes in subordinate positions, but the choices of partners or associates…without regard to race” (emphases added). It was these statements that lost him the seat on the Supreme Court.