Did the Civil Rights Movement Go Wrong?

The civil rights revolution, to Caldwell, is nothing less than constitutional in scope — or, more precisely, anti-constitutional, because it overturns “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it,” replacing it with a “new, minoritarian constitution” that pushes race-consciousness into every cranny of society. White men, the losers in the new order, responded by adopting their own identitarian, victim-group mind-set. “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.”

And so here we are, not one country but two, governed by two constitutions, not one. “Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws. The combination was a terrible one — rising tensions along with a society-wide inability to talk or think straight about anything.”

Nor is even that miserable dispensation the whole of it. Engaging in what Marxists call “heightening the contradictions,” Caldwell argues that the oppressive imperialism of civil rights laws is not incidental. Citizens, he writes, must “choose between these two orders.” There never was a moderate, limited way to keep the promises of integration. “Civil rights was always this way: Dignity was an integral and nonnegotiable part of what was demanded, and a government interested in civil rights must secure it, no matter what the cost in rights to those who would deny it.” Associational freedoms and property rights were always on the chopping block, incompatible with the 1964 act. Caldwell notices that “it tended to be segregationists who philosophized in this vein” — and yes, he does go there, quoting an old-time Southern segregationist to the effect that a merchant’s right not to serve blacks is “simple justice.”

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.