American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime

“Critical race theory seemed to explode on the scene in 2020. The ground for today’s CRT was prepared more than fifty years ago with multiculturalism. And multiculturalism was just America's anti-discriminatory, anti-racist laws translated into education. Like Christopher Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement, Thomas Powers’s American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime shows how the laudable impulse behind anti-discrimination revolutionized education, law, morality, and finally the Constitution. No gimmick can rid the country of this deeply-embedded challenge to our institutions. Our anti-discrimination morality is radical and illiberal—and America must choose between being a free country and being an anti-racist country.”
—Scott Yenor, Professor of Political Science at Boise State University

“This excellent, groundbreaking book meticulously shows the need for an Aristotelian political science that analyzes the Civil Rights Regime, the actual regime that orders our lives and minds today, which has supplanted the natural rights regime of the Founders. Citizens and scholars wondering about the real causes that transformed America should turn to Powers as a guide.”
––Arthur Milikh, Executive Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life

"One of the most important insights [of this book] is how the civil rights revolution went beyond law and politics to permeate our educational institutions, moral  norms, and cultural identity. As Powers explains, the book 'is partly a story about the law and the effects of the law, but it is also one involving the independent efforts of citizens inspired by the promise of the law.' […] We need scholars like Thomas Powers, just as much as activists and pundits, to abandon the trite celebrations of the civil rights movement and to start thinking critically about what the revolution has done to our social, political, and constitutional order. We are all indebted to Powers for writing what is, to date, the most scholarly account on the subject."
––Jesse Merriam, associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and a Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute's Center for the American Way of Life