Leaders of the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century portrayed their cause as fulfilling America’s original promise of equality. Not so, argues Thomas Powers in his vital new book, American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime: The Challenge to Liberal Pluralism. Powers shows, convincingly, that the anti-discrimination ideals of the civil rights movement initiated an ongoing regime change that few Americans perceive or even want to acknowledge. “Anti-discrimination politics is architectonic,” Powers argues. The result is a country caught between two irreconcilable regimes: one informed by traditionally liberal ideals of individual merit, the other by the ethic of anti-discrimination.

Powers complements and deepens the work of James Lindsay, Chris Rufo, and others who trace the origins of wokeness to critical theory. Such penetrating histories do not address the prior, more interesting question of why America was susceptible to critical theory. Critical theory, according to Powers, follows from anti-discrimination politics, though it also radicalizes those politics. Hence the nation is in a paradoxical situation, wherein Americans are generally proud of the anti-discrimination laws that enable the radical wokeness undermining American civic life, which they generally disapprove of.

Our liberal constitutional order, which placed private discrimination beyond the scope of public power, could not, it seems, solve the race issue. Employers could discriminate against hiring minorities. Restrictive covenants were tolerated. Private colleges could discriminate in admissions, and businesses could do so in public accommodations. Anti-discrimination politics, then, was necessary to erase racial prejudice from American institutions. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other associated acts marked “the crucial turning point,” writes Powers, in that it took “the fight against discrimination into the private sphere” and insisted on a “dramatically different settlement of the question of race and race discrimination in America.” Its soul-shaping, mind-shaping influence made illegal and almost unthinkable what was normal under the previous regime.

A bureaucratic apparatus arose to implement anti-discrimination ideals. Workplaces were regulated under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, increasingly with privatized legal enforcement and through human resource departments. Civility codes were implemented. Certain expressions became grounds for corrective firing. In addition, most national agencies developed four layers of bureaucracy dedicated to rooting out discrimination: an Office of Civil Rights polices discrimination; “Equity Teams” to set hiring goals; an Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to dispense government contracts according to the dictates of equity; and an Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization to encourage minority and women-owned businesses. The number of groups covered under civil rights laws has expanded markedly since 1964.

Nowhere has this anti-discrimination ethic percolated into practice more than in public education, where certification standards, teacher training, textbooks, and curriculum standards have been increasingly centered on “multicultural education” since the mid-seventies.

The goals of multicultural education are captured in the redefinition of cultural deprivation as cultural difference. There have long been extraordinary education gaps between whites and blacks. Initially, conventional wisdom was that education gaps resulted from differences in resources in education. The Coleman Report (1966), however, showed that there were no causative inequalities between schools attended by students of minority and majority groups. Educators initially explained racial gaps in terms of “cultural deprivation,” which held that black students had been isolated and insulated from the mainstream of American life for so long that they needed remedial programs to catch up. That explanation, however, seemed to blame minority students for their failures. Critics of the deprivation thesis emphasized instead “system fault.” The environment around students must be changed to recognize and respect the “cultural difference” represented by continuing gaps. Efforts to respect “cultural difference” would lead to multicultural education.

To illustrate, a student comes from Mexico speaking no English. The “cultural deprivation” model would fast-track the student in remedial English. The “cultural difference” model would instruct the student in Spanish and rewrite the tests in Spanish. National laws and state policies supported the “cultural difference” approach, pointing toward multicultural education.

Multicultural education is unimaginable without the anti-discrimination ethic, as Powers argues through a treatment of the writings of James Banks, the godfather of multicultural education. For Banks, a multicultural education fit for a multicultural political order would weaken the connection between the majority-legacy population and the country while celebrating the rise and importance of minority groups. As for weakening the majority, Banks offers “a new metanarrative” that deconstructs the “myth that the West is homogenous, that it owes few debts to other world civilization, and that only privileged and upper-status Europeans and European males have been its key actors,” while showing how the country really owes an unpayable “debt to people of color and women.”

An education for “structural inclusion” (as Banks calls it) is necessary to fight the systemic exclusion caused by discrimination. Techniques to accomplish this include renaming significant places and institutions, changing grading policies and teaching methods, revising curriculum to center minoritized voices and experiences and de-center celebratory history for the dominant culture, interrogating tests, and generally explaining minoritized failure as systemic failures of the broader culture. Multiculturalism is chiefly and self-consciously a moral education pointing citizens toward a new concept of virtue, centered on respect for the excluded and skepticism about the dominant majority’s privileged status. In all of this, anti-discrimination politics, not postmodern critical theory, animates Banks’s outlook. He sees multiculturalism as “a way of viewing reality and a way of thinking” that would teach people not to discriminate, prepare them for civic activism on behalf of the minoritized, emphasize cross-cultural and global competencies, and above all promote new ideas of honor and shame.

Multiculturalism has been sown into the educational system for decades. Yet Banks’s self-consciously moral multiculturalism was soon to be swallowed by its critical postmodern variant, which exaggerates but builds on anti-discrimination goals. Today’s wokeness, writes Powers, “reimagines modern democracy and American life from the point of view of a radicalized notion of the fight against discrimination.” Like Banks’s soft multiculturalism, Powers shows that post-modern multiculturalism sees society itself as a set of power structures supported through the dominant group’s self-serving metanarratives.

Critical postmodern theorists operated with more zeal and energy than anything the workmanlike, institution-building Banks ever did. Unlike the Banks variant, postmodern multiculturalism cannot offer a goal for what society should look like once the metanarratives and power structures are deconstructed. Anti-discrimination—re-translated as the purity of the oppressed and the evil of the oppressors—fills the political and moral void left after the postmodern solvent has destroyed old metanarratives. The most aggressive form of postmodern multiculturalism centers the critical spirit to attack “Whiteness,” which critics call “nothing but oppressive and false” or “synonymous with domination, oppression, and privilege,” according to Powers. The minoritized are exalted as holy and pure. “There is nothing wrong with black people,” as critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi writes.

Wokeness appears paranoid, neurotic, unscientific, and reckless (to use Powers’s words), and many hope to defeat it through argument and waiting for the mass psychosis to fade. This is a lullaby. Successfully peeling back the critical postmodern multiculturalism leaves us with Banks’s more moderate—though still revolutionary—core. Something like Banks’s vision seems necessary if we honor and elevate the goals of anti-discrimination. But at the bottom of multiculturalism in both its forms are, Powers insists, civil rights laws. No return to more liberal institutions or an updated Old America is possible without revisiting anti-discrimination goals and laws, but there is no appetite to re-engage the contradiction between liberalism and anti-discrimination as Powers catalogues in his book, much less to resolve it in the direction of one or the other.

This is America’s strategic impasse. The obvious solution involves, as Powers writes, “reforming and improving the anti-discrimination regime in a forthright and deliberate way.” Right now, this is being tried through trimming the excesses of the discrimination regime, such as race preferences in college admissions, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices on college campuses. Powers suggests scaling back employer liability, or reconsidering the privatized enforcement of hostile environment harassment, or punishing employers for censorship or corrective firing. His own analysis shows that such weak sauce fails to get at the heart of the matter (as Powers surely knows).

Nothing can be done unless people first see the nature of our regime. And then it will be up to a statesman of great imagination to transcend America’s impasse. If he comes, he could do a lot worse than follow the breadcrumbs in this book.