America’s successor ideology

The ‘Ideology With No Name’ Has a Name (It's 'Civil Rights')
Submitted by Thomas Powers

For decades American conservatives have been struggling to name a set of powerful anxieties, “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” being the labels of the moment. But earlier terms revolved around related worries: cancel culture, identity politics, political correctness, critical race theory, intersectionality, multiculturalism, the politics of diversity, of difference. All capture aspects of a kind of “successor ideology” reshaping our world.

Explanations too abound, as in John McWhorter’s claim that some new “religious” impulse stirs us. Others focus on “intellectual” history, looking back to Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, etc. Thirty years ago many would have just said: “postmodernism.” Today, leading anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo explains all by reference to neo-Marxist mastermind Herbert Marcuse (“Conservative Book of the Year”).

All of these designate something disruptive, something challenging our liberal democratic political tradition. Freedom of speech, of association, of thought; the idea that legislating morality is wrong; due process; the public-private divide; respect for constitutionalism and the rule of law—all of these are somehow suddenly under pressure.

Our difficulty in naming what Peggy Noonan has termed an “ideology with no name,” is not historical or analytical or theoretical. It is not to be found in the complexity of the thing to be described.

Our problem is moral and psychological. For naming the phenomenon is at the same time to announce a general critical stance toward it. And what must be named is “civil rights. 

Because “civil rights” indicates something so large, obvious, and revered, we balk at facing what identifying it with these anxieties would mean. Is civil rights at odds with our liberal tradition? John Locke himself used the phrase!

The original ideal of civil rights—the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause—may indeed have connections to the liberal tradition. But when the fight against discrimination was launched in earnest, in 1964, a political force was unleashed in American life that neither its authors nor we, by now its products, could claim fully to understand. 

First and foremost, civil rights was and is a moral powder keg in American life. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” President Kennedy said in a 1963 speech on civil rights, which he called America’s “moral crisis.” The most important cause of civil rights energy has always been our sense that (some) group-based discrimination is arbitrary, irrational, and wrong—bigoted, prejudiced. That insight now seems to represent a permanent feature of democratic morality. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke for many when he said: “if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”

But civil rights reform is not only a vital moral impulse. It is, in addition, a representation of the interests of the groups associated with the fight against discrimination—and a new logic of “group politics” as well. It is surely a vast array of new laws and institutions. It is likewise associated with new “ideas,” indeed with whole new theories of democratic politics. Finally, it is a broad project of cultural norm-setting that reaches from government to the universities to the professions—and to Hollywood, journalism, the military, even religion (the “long march through the institutions”). These many large alterations in the order of things are made a unity as elements of a broad political change.

As writers like Richard Epstein, Clint Bolick, and David Bernstein have long noted, one feature in particular—anti-discrimination law—reveals both the moral power of the whole and its illiberal aspects. Since 1964, what Shep Melnick calls the civil rights state has grown by leaps and bounds. “Discrimination” was never defined in the law—but it has been redefined several times to increase significantly the reach of the new order. First group inequalities (“disparate impact”) were deemed unlawful discrimination, then “harassment” was, then “stereotypes” (in Supreme Court decisions of 1971, 1986, and 1989).

These expansions of the law were very consequential, but it is important to see how they point back to the causal power of morality: law itself cannot explain them. We are manifestly in the grips of something we do not fully understand, some new “spirit” of our laws, some force of “history.” (I note here that most of the key judicial opinions were written by conservatives.)

Along the way, enforcement of this expanding empire of laws was privatized, turning the public-private divide on its head. Since the 1990s, employers and universities, partly obeying the law’s guidance (EEOC directives, judicial doctrines), have deployed a host of enforcement mechanisms: policies, trainings, investigations, punishments (in the language of the law, “preventive and corrective measures”). All now experienced by Americans as somehow necessary, obvious—and right.

But also troubling. To say the least, putting morality to work through the law, empowering our neighbors (or HR workers) to regulate our interpersonal behavior—and associations and speech and thought—cannot be accounted for in terms of our liberal democratic tradition.

Our anxieties here are explained very simply: we are torn between liberalism and anti-discrimination. And it is this contradiction that holds us back from naming what we witness accurately.

This is not a small problem. Our liberal tradition teaches political sobriety and moderation. Wary of religious and extreme moral high-mindedness, our founders and our constitution teach us to aim for somewhat less to succeed better. Justice and moral perfection divide; freedom and prosperity unite. The record would seem to have proven this understanding of “limited government” right.

But the longing for something higher, something nobler, was always there, ready to burst out.

We face the fact that moral-political reform is a precarious undertaking; our forefathers have something to teach us yet. But the civil right revolution was necessary, its moral claim powerful—and its basic achievements will not be cast aside. 

Today the first task of statesmanship for those who care about the future of democracy is to face up to this dilemma. We believe in civil rights, but this project has not been unproblematic. Our task, that of reforming civil rights, will require courage and our forefathers’ sobriety.