When I started writing about the problems with civil rights law, few people had any idea what I was talking about, even in right-wing circles. Most understood the Civil Rights Act as the bill that got rid of Jim Crow and banned explicit discrimination. It did in fact do those things, but as I argue in The Origins of Woke, civil rights law has over the years expanded to mandate differential treatment based on race and sex, and institutionalize concepts like affirmative action and disparate impact.
It seems that I’ve succeeded in changing the conversation around these issues. Now, conservatives know that the whole thing is a con and understand that when someone is a “civil rights advocate” they’re not simply demanding equal treatment for women and minorities, but in favor of policies that lower standards, restrict freedom, and discriminate against whites, men, and Asians. “Diversity” and “DEI” have similarly become politicized terms.
I feel like the conversation around unions within many intellectual spaces is about where the civil rights discourse started. I’ve heard people defend organized labor on freedom of association grounds. Why can’t workers get together and engage in collective bargaining with their employers? Don’t they have a right to do so? This lack of understanding has coincided with people on the right starting to say nice things about labor unions, including JD Vance, Josh Hawley, and the intellectuals around American Compass. It may be that conservatives who have taken on organized labor in the last decades have been too successful, to the point that young people on the right don’t even know what unions are anymor