Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is exercised that Charlie Kirk once said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was “a mistake.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson sees AOC’s charge and raises it: “The fact is,” he said in an official statement, “Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was divisive, disparaging, and too often rooted in grievance. The beliefs he evangelized normalized fringe views on race, sex, and immigration. Unfortunately, his rhetoric resurrected dangerous prejudices of a dark past.”
Gosh. Here’s a question, Congressman. What sort of grievance would someone have to entertain in order to be moved to describe someone who simply sought to engage young people in conversation as “divisive” and “disparaging?” Follow-up question: Did Charlie Kirk try to “normalize” fringe ideas about “race, sex, and immigration?” Or were the ideas he espoused, in fact (you see that two people can deploy the “in fact” gambit), perfectly normal ideas that reflected the beliefs of millions of Americans, even if those ideas departed from the Washington consensus?
As for the Civil Rights Act, Charlie Kirk did say its expansion was “a huge mistake.” Here’s the context. A student asked Charlie whether he wanted to get rid of the Civil Rights Act. He replied that he thought we should have a one-page bill that outlawed racial discrimination and left it at that. Most Americans, he went on to note, don’t support forcing women’s sports teams to allow men pretending to be women to compete. But the Civil Rights Act has been interpreted to say just that.
He agreed with the original intention of the bill, he said, but argued that it was “too broadly written” and played into the hands of people who wanted to expand and weaponize the bill to enforce a radical progressive agenda that included so-called “affirmative action,” i.e., reverse racism in the form of discrimination against whites and Asians. Result? A 100-page bill that created “a permanent anti-racist bureaucracy within our federal government to go find racism where it doesn’t exist and create it in new places where it otherwise did not exist.”
Christopher Caldwell touched on an essential aspect of Kirk’s observation in his book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It is common in academia and the media, Caldwell notes, to regard the Civil Rights Act as a great victory for equality and social progress. After all, was it not a potent weapon in the battle against Jim Crow and other expressions of racism?
But, Caldwell argues, that extension (or exaggeration) of the Fourteenth Amendment (“due process,” “equal protection”) helped sow the seeds of our present discontents. For the Civil Rights Act did not simply enhance certain provisions of the Constitution. It soon became “a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.”
The Constitution, as originally drafted, aimed to limit government authority and protect citizens from the coercive power of the state. The Civil Rights Act underwrote the indefinite extension of governmental power and opened ever new avenues through which progressive activists could meddle in precincts of life hitherto reserved to private discretion. The act, wrote Caldwell, “emboldened and incentivized bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and political agitators to become the ‘eyes and ears,’ and even the foot soldiers, of civil rights enforcement.” No realm of social intercourse was off-limits. “Over time,” Caldwell noted, “more of the country’s institutions were brought under the act’s scrutiny. Eventually, all of them were.” The act, he noted,
transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history. Costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century, it rivals, in terms of energy invested, the peopling of the West, the building of transcontinental railways and highways, the maintenance of a Pax Americana for half a century after World War II, or, for that matter, any of the wars the country has fought, foreign or civil.
Leo Strauss was correct when he observed that a true liberal (as distinct from a progressive) society depends on the maintenance of the distinction between the realm of politics and that of private initiative. The Civil Rights Act all but erased that distinction, opening up every sphere of social endeavor to federal interference. As one reviewer quipped when Caldwell’s book was first published, the Civil Rights Act was “the law that ate the Constitution.”
The hypertrophy of the Civil Rights Act did not take place in a vacuum. Its progress was directed by the essentially Marxist ambitions of those radicals who plotted the “long march through the institutions” of the 1960s and beyond. I wrote about this in my book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. Christopher Rufo brings the story up to date in his most recent book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
“Everything” is not an exaggeration. If the Civil Rights Act is the engine behind the transformation of liberal society into an illiberal, proto-totalitarian compact, the designers of the cultural revolution of the 1960s—from Frankfurt School Marxists like Herbert Marcuse on down—provided both the plan and the fuel. The result is a weird, almost surreal situation in which the most common realities and institutions are undermined, transformed, and inverted. What is a family? What is a man or a woman? What is free speech? We used to be able to answer with confidence. Can we still?
Together, the limitless, disestablishing agenda of sixties radicalism, backed now by the coercive power of the state, has transformed the very fabric of society. How should conservatives respond? As Daniel McCarthy noted in 2023, the most bootless—also the most contemptible—response is that of those “conservatives” he calls “accommodationists”:
Their job is to make liberals seem tolerant for tolerating conservatives who attack the same right-wing targets that liberals attack. Accommodationists . . . will thunder in outrage any time [other conservatives] join forces against the Left.
Accommodationists are terrified of being mistaken for populists. But, as Margot Cleveland pointed out in an essay called “The Promise of Populism,” “The irony here is that those conservatives who most loudly declared populism at odds with conservatism—a refrain repeated ad nauseam to distance themselves from Trump and his supporters—soon abandoned conservatism itself.” The step from accommodation to capitulation is always a short one.
In fact, there is a double irony in this instinctive rejection of populism. Conservatives of all stripes hold up William F. Buckley Jr. as a patron saint. But what if not “populist” was Buckley’s declaration that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty? If in years past conservatives shied away from defending conservative prerogatives for fear of being castigated as populists, today they must embrace that more radical conservatism or be utterly absorbed by the progressive juggernaut.
At a time when the abnormal is championed as the new normal, conservatives cannot act to uphold the established order without being silenced or destroyed by the progressives who control that order. It is perhaps paradoxical but nonetheless true that the most vital form of conservatism today is a form of radical populism willing to challenge a corrupt and encroaching status quo. And challenges are nigh. For Cleveland is right: the “increasingly emboldened elite” that would subdue us is facing “an increasingly angered populace.”
How angry? Look at the results of the 2024 presidential election. Ponder the popularity of Charlie Kirk and the dual outpouring of grief and resolve that greeted his assassination. Bennie Thompson pretends that Kirk was a “divisive” figure. But, if I may borrow from the congressman, “in fact,” he was a supremely unifying one. Not, I hasten to add, for socialistically inclined figures like Bennie Thompson or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the other 118 Democrat House members who refused to condemn his assassination or for celebrity pundits like Jimmy Kimmel or Emmy attendees. For them, Charlie really was a divisive figure. But for millions upon millions of Americans, especially young, college-age Americans, he was a unifying figure who “normalized” not fringe ideas but supremely normal ones. As many have observed, the murder of Charlie Kirk by a deranged leftist silenced one individual, but it awakened the voices of a movement that hitherto had hardly known it had a voice.