
By Aaron Sibarium
In January 2020, five months before the wave of left-wing activism unleashed by George Floyd’s death, the writer Christopher Caldwell published a provocative book about the brewing cultural war. Titled The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, the book traced contemporary identity politics back to the Civil Rights Act, which, in Caldwell’s telling, had created the enforcement apparatus for modern progressivism.
It was civil rights law, Caldwell argued, that spawned the HR bureaucracies that would become DEI. It was civil rights law that forced companies to censor speech that could create a “hostile work environment,” and civil rights law that had given rise to racial quotas via the concept of disparate impact. Conservatives often contrast the color-blind standard articulated by civil rights luminaries with the racial preferences embraced by their successors. For Caldwell, there was a direct line from the former to the latter.
The Age of Entitlement initially divided the right. But as the Biden administration sought to institutionalize cultural progressivism—in part by using the civil rights bureaucracies Caldwell had criticized—what began as an outré thesis soon became passé in conservative circles. Center-right scholars published essays, legal articles, and books on the connection between anti-discrimination law and “wokeness,” including transgender issues and the rise of DEI. A new consensus seemed to be emerging among conservative intellectuals: “Woke institutions,” as the writer Richard Hanania put it, “is just civil rights law.”
But six months into President Donald Trump’s second term, that nascent consensus has been shattered. The Trump administration has launched an unprecedented campaign against diversity programs, affirmative action, and transgender initiatives—and its weapon of choice has been the civil rights state…
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