Contemporary incivility demonstrates a hidden civil war between adherents to the de jure constitution of 1789 and woke proponents of the de facto regime which has grown up since 1964. The latter has captured the establishment and is winning.

Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) undermined the First Amendment’s freedom of association; Griggs vs. Duke Power (1971) next authorized government to address racism where there was no obvious intent; Bakke vs. Univ. of California (1978) sanctioned aspirational ‘remedies’ for hidden racism (i.e., diversity). Extralegally, rioting was part and parcel of the civil rights movement from the late 1960s, while feminism held lieutenancy of the aggrieved cohorts, now led by the homosexual lobby.

Postwar government and society had modeled itself on the military, but the Vietnam War’s unpopularity shifted credibility to the Baby Boomers, also buoyed by demography. Reagan arranged a truce between the new left and Americans unwilling to finance the Great Society via taxation, by converting its basis to debt, thereby handing away the fruits of the 1970s counterinsurgency. But social peace frayed anyway as entitlements grew. Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall, which had acted to preserve capital in local banks, transferred debt financing to the credit markets, ushering government regulation (e.g., Community Reinvestment Act, ESG measures) into the marketplace.

Under the shadow constitution, postmodernism and fellow travelers in the media delegitimize tradition and political institutions; woke institutions champion new orthodoxies on behalf of subversive-cum-favored minorities; and working-class whites see New Deal / union economic benefits reallocated. Once-Republican plutocrats have recast their (inevitably) minority status as one sympathetic to the civil rights protagonists, embracing lobbying via foundations to thwart democratic majorities – a phenomenon which FDR resisted for the very reason. (Caldwell describes he subset of Internet titans as oligarchs of digital natives who cannot opt out.) The Tea Party and Trump reject this arrangement.

Speaking of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxembourg observed revolutionary tactics are the way to democratic majorities, not democratic majorities the conduit to revolution. The civil rights partisans supplant popular sovereignty with mandate: ‘biases’ are held to be unconscious, and so government is justified in overriding them. (At the time of Brown, Strauss was among those who observed liberal society ought to condone ‘discrimination’.) Caldwell raises the possibility that the American experiment with democratic self-government has already ended.

Compelling but occasionally careless of fact (e.g., 1986 immigration pact, pace Vin Cannato). A very good first draft of the progressive influence on political thought and government circa 1960-2020.