The Second Reconstruction and Its Discontents

Jeremy Carl’s The Unprotected Class sets out to invert one of the governing pieties of American public life. For half a century we have been told that post-1960s America remains a white-supremacist order, a structure of entrenched racial advantage that only a radically utopian anti-racism can hope to dismantle. Carl argues the reverse: that the American state is, in nearly all of its major functions, ideologically anti-white—sometimes by open avowal, more often by quiet institutional habit. On his account the left-wing political and cultural upheavals of the past decade are not a departure but an acceleration of tendencies fixed in American political economy for more than fifty years. From the preschool to the university admissions office, from corporate hiring to military training, from housing to immigration, and at last to the national self-understanding itself, the same anti-white disposition is at work. America, in Carl’s telling, has become an anti-white nation, and has been one for some time.

Carl follows the Claremont Institute senior fellow Christopher Caldwell, whose The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020) supplies much of the underlying argument. Both men concur that the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and, more consequentially, the administrative apparatus assembled in its wake—amounted to a kind of national refounding. What C. Vann Woodward called America’s “second Reconstruction” functioned as a rival constitution, not merely as a new body of law but as a new national teleology. The country’s animating aim was now the redress of anti-black discrimination, conceived not as a remedy for a finite set of specific wrongs but as the overcoming of the whole of American history up to that point. Anti-racism became a Great Commission, occupying the place that freedom had once held in the nation’s self-conception. None of this arrived at a single stroke. The new constitution, for Carl, cannot be located in any one event—the 1964 Civil Rights Act or a particular court ruling—except as the planting of legal and institutional seeds that began at once to grow far beyond their original bounds.