RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-woke-rackets/

The “longshoreman philosopher”  Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.

One of the great causes in our history was the Civil Rights Movement begun in 1954. The people who comprised it made a dignified moral and historical argument against segregation, onederived from Christian ethics and the Prologue to the Declaration of Independence, and eschewing the parochial identarianism and violence of leftist activists. The results were the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It didn’t take long, however, for that noble cause to become a business, then degenerate into a racket that exploited discriminatory government polices like affirmative action, all predicated on a made-up “compelling state interest” called “diversity”––an Orwellian term that relied on crude racialist, superficial group characteristics, while ignoring the true diversity of individual hearts and minds.

The Civil Rights Movement then became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party and government agencies backed by federal law and enforced by hordes of bureaucrats. Consultants, trial lawyers, administrators, educrats, and diversity “trainers” waxed fat on political power and redistributed taxpayer loot.

Today’s diversity 2.0 DEI cartel has expanded the reach and power of Diversity INC to corporate C-Suites and Boards of Directors, magnifying the corruption. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.” 

This corruption of our constitutional order and foundational principles–– the assaults on the integrity of the First Amendment rights to free speech and religion, or the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “due process,” the “equal protection of the laws,”and the accountability of power to the people ––is a dire threat to our ordered freedom and political equality, for such debasement relentlessly subjects our republic to regulatory tyranny.

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rise-of-the-civil-rights-constitution/

Editor’s Note: We cannot forget that the group quota regime is just that: not merely an ideology but a proper regime, a civilizational and constitutional rival to the American regime. It has its own legal and organizing principles, which directly challenge those of our own Constitution. These operating principles of the group quota regime have long been taking hold in our society and in our governing institutions.

Jesse Merriam, a legal and political philosopher, recently joined Tom Klingenstein to discuss that quiet revolution: its roots, its current state, and the possibility for reform. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

TK: Welcome Jesse Merriam. Jesse is an associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and a research fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. Jesse holds a J.D. from George Washington University Law School and a Ph.D. in judicial politics and legal philosophy from Johns Hopkins University.

JM: It’s good to be with you.

TK: Jesse, you are a man of controversy. Among your controversial opinions are: 

The legal conservative movement has been much less successful than most conservatives believe.
Diversity and anti-discrimination are the twin pillars of today’s Constitution which makes it fair to say that today America operates under the Civil Rights Constitution. 
We should revive, to a degree, freedom of association, which you believe to be a right necessary for self-governance. 
The Federalist Society, despite notable successes, has not provided what the legal conservative movement needs to be successful.
Originalism has not, as intended, advanced a distinctly conservative agenda.
The recent Supreme Court affirmative action decisions are not likely to reduce affirmative action by very much. 
Harvard and Affirmative Action

TK: Let’s take the last claim first. My impression is that most analysts think that the recent UNC and Harvard affirmative action decisions will have a much greater impact than you do. Why are you so skeptical?

JM: My skepticism boils down to three reasons. One reason has to do with the unique status of affirmative action. We can understand this uniqueness in terms of both law and policy. Affirmative action law is unique in the sense that, since the civil rights revolution, affirmative action is the only type of governmental discrimination based on race that the Supreme Court has permitted. Affirmative action is also unique in American policy in that it is the only public program in all of American history—to my knowledge at least—that has expanded in breadth and strengthened in force in the face of growing resistance from the American people, state legislatures, and federal courts.