“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote (Requiem For A Nun). “It’s not even past.” Since Faulkner published that line in 1951 he was hardly writing about the 1960s, but it provides an apt summary of Doyle McManus’s column in the Los Angeles Times today, “‘Selma’ and why, half a century later, we’re still struggling with the 1960s.”
A commendably penitent tweet appears at the top of the online version of McManus’s column: “@doylemcmanus To err is human; to err twice a week, it helps to be a columnist. My annual confession of bum calls and bad guesses: http://t.co/Ci81Ufb1Fz.” I suggest that next year’s version of this annual tweet begin with a glaring omission from today’s otherwise interesting column.
McManus asks “why are we still arguing over who did what” in the 1960s? The reason, he writes, with some appropriate examples, is that “[i]n part because half a century later, we’re still struggling with the ’60s.” By pegging his column to the movie “Selma,” and the ire it has provoked among LBJ’s defenders, McManus clearly sees the issue of civil rights as central to the 1960s experience, and our experience of that decade now. And yet he nowhere mentions that most of the 1960s were characterized by a widespread consensus that has now disappeared over what “civil rights” meant and entailed — treating Americans “without regard” to race, creed, or color.
That consensus informed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and even both presidential executive orders calling for “affirmative action.” Both Kennedy’s 10925 (March 6, 1961) and Johnson’s 11246 (September 28, 1965) executive orders required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” [emphasis added]
That consensus began to break down as the 1960s drew to a close, and its abandonment has fueled our current disagreements over race and even produced incoherence regarding the meaning of civil rights and the sort of equality it is supposed to protect or ensure. That incoherence is on display almost daily as those who claim the mantle of the old civil rights movement demand that some institutions — such as the police and the justice system — treat all without regard to race at the same time they demand that others — schools, colleges and universities, employers — provide preferential treatment based on race. Indeed, they now all too often regard those who favor “without regard” equality and oppose preferential treatment as racists.
The “without regard” principle, so central to Martin Luther King’s career (“I have a dream … ,” etc.) and the moral foundation of the civil rights movement from the 1830s through the 1960s, has been rejected root and branch not only by today’s “civil rights” activists but also by virtually — maybe even literally — all elected Democrats, from the White House down, even though the principle continues to enjoy substantial majority support according to polls and survey data.
Any examination of “why, half a century later, we’re still struggling with the 1960s” that fails to note the effects of Democrats and liberals discarding the “without regard” principle in favor of “disparate impact” attacks on invisible “structural barriers” to equality misses the elephant in the room (or perhaps misses the fact that the elephant is no longer in the room).
