The Dividing of America - Part 1

 by

       M. Richard Maxson*

      American society today is divided by party and by ideology. The current divide began happening in the 1960s. First there was the Kennedy assassination which played out on television like a bad soap opera with an unbelievable ending. Then came the Warren Report which was discarded by many as fictitious. The CIA and it’s commission member Allen Dulles coined the phrase “conspiracy theorist” to describe the doubters. It has been a part of the world’s lexicon ever since.

      Then there was the war in Vietnam. There was loop hole in the draft laws - student deferment. What it meant was that if you were rich enough to study art history or whatever, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich Progressives saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were privileged, but because they were more decent than others.

      Then there were the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. So-called emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These gave Washington the authority to override what Americans had traditionally thought of as their ordinary democratic institutions. It was widely assumed that the emergency mechanisms would be temporary and narrowly focused. But they soon escaped democratic control altogether, and they have now become the most powerful part of our governing system.

      It made for an unprecedented concentration of power. It gave Washington tools it had never before had in peacetime. It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges. It took many decisions that had been made in the democratic parts of American government and relocate them to the bureaucracy or the judiciary.

      The ability to set racial quotas for public schools was not in the original Civil Rights Act, but offices of civil rights started doing it, and there was no one strong enough to resist. Busing of schoolchildren had not been in the original plan, either, but once schools started to fall short of targets established by the bureaucracy, judges ordered it. Affirmative action was a vague notion in the Civil Rights Act. But by the time of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, it was an outright system of racial preference for non-whites.

     These mechanisms gave birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, a special class of an under-class with privileges which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. 

NEXT: Part 2 - The special class uses the new legislation for advantage.

*Special thanks to Christopher Caldwell Senior Fellow, The Claremont Institute for insight into this topic