The ‘Ideology with No Name’ Has a Name: It’s ‘Civil Rights’

We seem to be getting a step or two beyond “wokeness.” The moment presents an opportunity to think about what it meant. “Wokeness” is one label we’ve given to the phenomenon—“DEI” and “cultural Marxism” are other leading contenders. Earlier terms trace a chronology of related worries: critical race theory, cancel culture, intersectionality, identity politics, political correctness, multiculturalism, and the politics of difference and of recognition. All of these try to capture a kind of “successor ideology” that somehow worked to reshape our world.

General explanations have been offered up as well, such as, for example, in the claim of John McWhorter and others that some kind of “religious” impulse has been stirring us. Others focused instead on intellectual history, looking back, for example, to Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others. Twenty years ago, most would have just said “postmodernism.” Today, many others, like leading anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo, explain it all by reference to neo-Marxist mastermind Herbert Marcuse (Rufo’s book on this topic was named the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s “Conservative Book of the Year” in 2024).

All these terms designate something disruptive, something assaulting our liberal democratic political tradition. Freedom of speech, of association, of thought; the idea that legislating morality is wrong; due process; the public-private divide; respect for constitutionalism and the rule of law—all are somehow suddenly under pressure.

Our difficulty in naming what Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan once termed an “ideology with no name” is not historical, analytical, or theoretical. Nor is it to be found in the complexity of the thing to be described.

Our problem is moral and psychological. For naming the phenomenon is, at the same time, to announce a general critical stance toward it. And what must be named is “civil rights.”

We need to begin to see better than we do, in very general terms, how the civil rights revolution unleashed forces we do not understand and a political logic that challenges our liberal democratic traditions in fundamental ways.

First and foremost, civil rights was and is a moral powder keg in American life. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” President Kennedy said in a 1963 speech on America’s civil rights “moral crisis.” The most important cause of civil rights energy has always been our sense that (some) group-based discrimination is arbitrary, irrational, and wrong—bigoted and prejudiced. That insight now seems to represent a permanent feature of democratic morality. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for many when he said, “If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.”

But the American liberal political tradition has long been wary of moral perfectionism. Perhaps the single greatest achievement of the civil rights revolution, for good or ill, has been to make a question of basic morality or justice central to modern democratic life. For civil rights, idealism takes what we may term an innocent view of the matter: of course, morality should be the aim of politics and of law.

But the civil rights revolution was not only this moral impulse; to reckon with it is to see how it has drawn together, in addition, several different kinds of phenomena into a unified whole. The fight against discrimination has also been, very noticeably, a vast array of laws and institutions of great social power. It was always, at the same time, a representation of the interests of groups held to require the protections of the law—and a new way of thinking about groups and “group politics” very different from the traditional liberal understanding (individualism, toleration, the “separation” of groups and the state, the public-private divide). Indeed, civil rights politics has been the source of a host of new “ideas” and whole new theories of democratic politics (the “politics of” identity, recognition, difference, social justice, etc.). Finally, it was a broad project of cultural norm-setting and social institution-building, reaching from government to the universities to the professions—and to Hollywood, journalism, the military, and even religion (what conservatives, borrowing from the neo-Marxists, now call the “long march through the institutions”).

Law is one feature of the whole that perhaps most usefully reveals the extent to which the new order challenged the liberal democratic understanding of things (as Richard Epstein, Clint Bolick, David Bernstein, and Christopher Caldwell have pointed out). Since 1964, what Shep Melnick calls the civil rights state has grown by leaps and bounds. “Discrimination” was never defined in the law, but it has been redefined several times to increase significantly its reach. First group inequalities (“disparate impact”) were deemed unlawful discrimination, then “harassment” was, and then “stereotypes” (in Supreme Court decisions of 1971, 1986, and 1989).

Along the way, enforcement of this expanding empire of laws was privatized, turning the public-private divide on its head. Since the 1990s, employers and universities, partly obeying the law’s guidance (EEOC directives, judicial doctrines), have been instructed to devise a host of enforcement mechanisms of their own: policies, trainings, investigations, punishments (in the language of the law, “preventive and corrective measures”). Here, too, are many expansions of the project, and many more tensions with liberalism.

These developments of the law were consequential, but it is important to see how they point back to the causal power of morality: law itself cannot explain the law’s expansion. Indeed, as Amy Wax has written, anyone focusing on the law alone will “never adequately explain the source of woke’s power.” The role of “equalitarian convictions, . . . which few dare to challenge openly” is also crucial.

In fact, the moral and the legal dimensions of civil rights politics are very much bound up with one another. Four features of anti-discrimination law in particular hearken back to, and help to provide a kind of outline of, the moral impetus of the anti-discrimination project.

First, civil rights law seeks to regulate how people treat one another. It’s true that anti-discrimination and anti-harassment strictures are not quite the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, but they do govern our “social” relations. (Kennedy went on to say in the speech quoted above: “the question is whether . . . we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we wanted to be treated.”) Second, civil rights must regulate speech because what we say to one another is often held to be the harm, the injustice, to be policed. This is the meaning of hostile environment anti-harassment (which, according to the EEOC, includes “offensive” statements). More than a dozen other important civil rights laws restrict speech in other ways. Third, the new order pursues a vigorous campaign of political and ultimately moral education. Education has always been a central aim of the federal civil rights apparatus (see, for example, the pre-2025 mission of the EEOC Training Institute and its promotion of Management Directive 110). Multicultural education was made state policy beginning in the 1970s. Diversity and anti-harassment training (the products of policy) were, of course, made ubiquitous twenty years ago. Fourth, the regime’s punitive aspect—loss of employment, expulsion from college, and so on—may be veiled by its “private” enforcement, but this deployment of corrective justice follows directly from the law’s requirements.

All of this is now experienced by Americans as something taken for granted, something somehow necessary and obvious.

But also troubling. Putting morality to work by law, empowering our neighbors (or HR administrators) to regulate our interpersonal behavior—and associations, speech, and thought—cannot be accounted for in terms of our liberal democratic tradition. The punitive, censorious, and invasive nature of civil rights enforcement, the preachy, pedantic moralizing of its educational efforts, the hypersensitivity of those taught its lessons (in a word, “wokeness”)—our traditional liberal democratic sensibilities rightly find much that is questionable here.

Stepping back, one may say that our anxieties here are explained very simply: we are torn between vital aspects of our liberal democratic political tradition and the fight against discrimination. And it is this tension or contradiction that holds us back from naming properly what we are wrestling with.

This is not a small problem. Our liberal tradition has long been a teacher of political sobriety and moderation. Wary of religious and extreme moral high-mindedness, our Founders and our Constitution taught us to aim for somewhat less to succeed better. Justice and moral perfection divide; freedom and prosperity unite. The historical record would seem to have vindicated this understanding of “limited government.”

We confront the fact that moral-political reform is a precarious undertaking; our forefathers have much to teach us yet. The civil rights revolution was not perfect; our anxieties about its consequences are legitimate. But its basic achievements were necessary and will not be lightly cast aside. Today, the first task of statesmanship for those who care about the future of democracy is to face up to this dilemma.

The problem we seem not to be able to name today is the problem of civil rights. All the many terms we use instead of “civil rights”—woke, DEI, political correctness, and so on—may help us to vent our frustrations, but these are also evasions that obscure to some degree the nature of the challenge.

We need to be talking more honestly and forthrightly about the civil rights revolution as a transformative development in modern democratic politics that was not without significant unintended consequences and costs. Our task, our duty, is that of taking up the burden of reforming civil rights, a work that has now begun under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts. But even that effort, as transformative as it has been, must do more to name forthrightly the challenge ahead. Failing to name the coming period an era of civil rights reform will be to understate what has been done to date and to miss an opportunity to set democratic life on a much-needed long-term course correction.

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Thomas F. Powers is Visiting Lecturer at The Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Cleveland State University and author of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime (St. Augustine’s Press).