Tag: Claremont Review of Books

09/21/25

A Bus Too Far



Summer 2025
MYRON MAGNET

Beneath the righteous, reforming passion of the civil rights era that suffuses Michelle Adams’s The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, one can’t help perceiving how unexamined and sometimes simplistic the University of Michigan constitutional law professor’s fundamental assumptions are. Consequently, after closing this painstakingly argued tome, the reader almost inevitably thinks past its conclusion—pondering, beyond the particular failure of the civil rights movement that Adams laments, the radical way that movement changed American society not only for the better but also for the worse.

The Containment tells the story of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision against school busing in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), from its beginnings as a district court case in 1970 to its epilogue in the high court’s Milliken II ruling in 1977. Adams sets the stage with a fiery 1967 debate at the Detroit Board of Education about how to reform the city’s awful public schools, which had been majority black since 1963. Asking why black pupils were disproportionally failing and dropping out, Albert B. Cleage, Jr., pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna and an admirer of Malcolm X, highlighted white teachers and principals as the problem. They systematically destroy black kids’ “self-image and racial pride,” making them feel intellectually inferior and sapping their motivation. The last thing these kids need is more integration. What they need is community control of their schools, with black parents overseeing the hiring and firing of black teachers and vetting the curriculum, textbooks, and discipline. This prescription was part of Cleage’s larger vision of a black “nation within a nation,” in which blacks would own and patronize their own businesses, professional services, and farms, set their own goals, and forge their own culture.

Hotly opposing Cleage’s black nationalism was the civil rights orthodoxy backed by the board’s future president, Abraham Zwerdling, a white labor lawyer and longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) member. He and his liberal board allies espoused the argument underlying the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, which held—based on psychologist Kenneth Clark’s flimsy study of black kids’ preferences for white dolls over black ones—that segregation, by separating black children from their white peers, did them deep emotional harm, generating “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Separate schools, therefore, were inherently, unconstitutionally unequal, and integration was the sine qua non for black educational success. Continue reading →

03/14/23

The Antiracist Racket

The Antiracist Racket
And its mind-forg’d manacles.

Beyond its falsity, there is no current idea so destructive as the fiction that America is systemically racist. It harms black Americans by shrinking their horizons and stoking their resentment; it has fueled crime and disorder in our cities; and by replacing our national faith in the unique excellence of our self-governing republic with a sense of its pervasive injustice and oppression, it makes us more vulnerable in a dangerous world. Confidence that we have a civilization worth defending is vital to our future.

After all, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s succeeded. In what was the defining political experience of a generation, that movement turned the nation inside out in order to remedy the overt racism that then marred America’s promise of civil equality. Two decades of sit-ins and marches, of sermons and voter registrations, yielded changes that fully opened political, educational, and employment opportunities to blacks, while society grew dramatically more welcoming. Just compare the advertisements or movies—or college alumni magazines—of the 1950s to today’s to get a sense of the revolution in racial attitudes that occurred. Or consider the change in the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage—4% in 1958 versus 94% in 2021.

But as the number of Americans who remember the civil rights era dwindles, the harangues of Black Lives Matter and the critical race theorists have obscured that era’s accomplishment. The Gallup Poll tracks this trend: in 2014, respondents’ satisfaction with U.S. race relations reached a high of 55%, versus 35% dissatisfied, but it began dropping thereafter, in the wake of Eric Garner’s death in July of that year. Only 28% expressed satisfaction in 2022.

Because what people believe affects their actions as much as their real circumstances do, the imaginary world these propagandists have conjured up—in which racial injustice pervades everything, racist insults wound blacks at every turn, racism closes off advancement and shuts out fellowship—really does constrict black opportunity by denying it exists. Continue reading →

10/14/21

The Making of the Administrative State

 

Claremont Review of Books

Summer 2021

summer 2021 book reviews

The Making of the Administrative State

The Progressives bequeathed us a regime without legitimacy.

by Myron Magnet

reviewed

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism

America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism by Ronald J. Pestritto

The 1787 Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin famously said, gave America “a republic—if you can keep it.” We couldn’t. It’s not that the framers’ wonderful structure of self-government slipped away by carelessness. Rather, single-minded men purposely usurped it, and Ronald J. Pestritto’s America Transformed tells the tragic tale of how the Progressives, as they called themselves, deformed and abolished one of the greatest triumphs of the Western Enlightenment, in the name of Hegel, Darwin, modernity, and efficiency, all under the magician’s scarf of hocus-pocus fake democracy. The end result of this sleight-of-hand, though Pestritto’s gripping book is too polite to say so baldly, is that we now live under a regime without legitimacy.

We could not ask for a better debunker of Progressive trickery. The graduate dean and a professor of politics at Hillsdale College, Pestritto has been among the leading pioneers in the revisionist study of this era, notably with his earlier, groundbreaking Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005). Indeed, the chief magus of this drama is Wilson, our first professor-president, who formulated the Progressive creed in his academic works of the 1880s, before he assumed Princeton’s presidency, with embellishments from ivory-tower colleagues Frank Goodnow, president of Johns Hopkins and founding president of the American Political Science Association, and the much younger Harvard law professor (and later dean) James Landis, who as a New Deal bureaucrat helped transform Progressive theory into a gargantuan governmental reality. Earlier in the political arena came pungent, energetic contributions from Theodore Roosevelt, and Progressivism transformed the messages that came from the elite pulpits and schools, as well. Continue reading →

10/14/20

Poverty Won

When government presumes to reshape society, the result is likely to be gory.

Reparations for slavery, you say? Well, we tried that experiment, in the $20-plus trillion spent on welfare, Medicaid, housing, and food stamps for the mostly minority poor since Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty in 1964. As Amity Shlaes shows in her cautionary Great Society: A New History, those trillions only made matters worse. As the clamor swells to compound LBJ’s mistake, Shlaes provides a sobering postmortem, dissecting how and why, when government presumes to reshape society, the result is likely to be gory.
It took LBJ a lifetime to learn that lesson, and he learned it the hard way. He began his government career as an ardent New Dealer, first as a tireless functionary charged with pressing Texas farmers to limit their crops, on Franklin Roosevelt’s cockeyed theory that overproduction caused the Great Depression, and then as one of FDR’s most energetic congressional lieutenants, ramming through New Deal programs—many of doubtful constitutionality. He firmly believed that the New Deal had heroically wielded the power of the federal government to defeat the slump, though as Shlaes showed in her earlier best-selling book, The Forgotten Man (2007), it only prolonged it. Continue reading →