The deep division in America’s populace has been revealed to an even greater extent by the current Chinese virus pandemic.

The House’s loading up a Coronavirus bailout bill with typical left-wing pork is one example. The ultimate goal of all these machinations, as always, is to defeat President Trump.

While the U.S. and other nations around the world race to contain the China-created health hazard, citizens are being put in a bind as they change their routines and even put their way of making a living on the line in some instances through government ordered closures in attempts to prevent the spread of the disease.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives, of which California Democrat Nancy Pelosi is the head and the face, continued to play politics while the Senate was working to enact a lifeline for financially disabled citizens, Pelosi’s crowd added pork-laden amendments to the legislation to further its socialist agenda and pay off its friends.

“This is just what they do,” cynical observers comment, meaning business as usual, or as cynical former Obama advisor Rahm Emmanuel said, “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Or, as all cynics say, the end justifies the means.

Imprimus, publication of Hillsdale College in Michigan, carried a speech given by Christopher Fellow, senior fellow at Claremont Institute and a contributor to several national publications, in which he points to the roots of the nation’s partisan divide.

If the speech could be condensed to a few sentences in our reading of it, it is this:

It began essentially with Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then its theft by other segments of the society.

Fellow began his speech this way:

“American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called ‘The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.’ It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.

“I can end part of the suspense right now–Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s–they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.”

Among the points he makes were these:

The Broadening of Civil Rights

“The problem is that when the work of the civil rights legislation was done–when de jure segregation was stopped–these new powers were not suspended or scaled back or reassessed. On the contrary, they intensified. The ability to set racial quotas for public schools was not in the original Civil Rights Act, but offices of civil rights started doing it, and there was no one strong enough to resist. Busing of schoolchildren had not been in the original plan, either, but once schools started to fall short of targets established by the bureaucracy, judges ordered it.

“Affirmative action was a vague notion in the Civil Rights Act. But by the time of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, it was an outright system of racial preference for non-whites. In that case, the plaintiff, Alan Bakke, who had been a U.S. Marine captain in Vietnam, saw his application for medical school rejected, even though his test scores were in the 96th, 94th, 97th, and 72nd percentiles. Minority applicants, meanwhile, were admitted with, on average, scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th, and 18th percentiles. And although the Court decided that Bakke himself deserved admission, it did not do away with the affirmative action programs that kept him out. In fact, it institutionalized them, mandating ‘diversity’– a new concept at the time–as the law of the land.

“Meanwhile other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism, ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it.

“Finally, civil rights came to dominate–and even overrule–legislation that had nothing to do with it. The most traumatic example of this was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This legislation was supposed to be the grand compromise on which our modern immigration policy would be built. On the one hand, about three million illegal immigrants who had mostly come north from Mexico would be given citizenship. On the other hand, draconian laws would ensure that the amnesty would not be an incentive to future migrants, and that illegal immigration would never get out of control again. So there were harsh ‘employer sanctions’ for anyone who hired a non-citizen. But once the law passed, what happened? Illegal immigrants got their amnesty. But the penalties on illegal hiring turned out to be fake–because, to simplify just a bit, asking an employee who “looks Mexican” where he was born or about his citizenship status was held to be a violation of his civil rights. Civil rights law had made it impossible for Americans to get what they’d voted for through their representatives, leading to decades of political strife over immigration policy that continues to this day.

The New Constitution

“In explaining the constitutional order that we see today, I’d like to focus on just two of its characteristics.

“First, it has a moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics. As we’ve discussed, civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy. But the key question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe. Usually when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order. But in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. America can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.

A Party of Bigots and a Party of Totalitarians

Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading ‘Stop the Hate,’ and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage, and your children, can only have done so for terrible reasons. You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and they are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots.

“But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your 7-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. In fact, although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen. You also feel that this business has something to do with gay rights. ‘Sorry,’ you ask, ‘when did I vote for this?’ You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you and taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.

And that’s our current party system: the bigots versus the totalitarians.

“If either of these constitutions were totally devoid of merit, we wouldn’t have a problem. We could be confident that the wiser of the two would win out in the end. But each of our two constitutions contains, for its adherents, a great deal worth defending to the bitter end. And unfortunately, each constitution must increasingly defend itself against the other.

“When gay marriage was being advanced over the past 20 years, one of the common sayings of activists was: ‘The sky didn’t fall.’ People would say: ‘Look, we’ve had gay marriage in Massachusetts for three weeks, and I’ve got news for you! The sky didn’t fall!’ They were right in the short term. But I think they forgot how delicate a system a democratic constitutional republic is, how difficult it is to get the formula right, and how hard it is to see when a government begins—slowly, very slowly—to veer off course in a way that can take decades to become evident.

“Then one day we discover that, although we still deny the sky is falling, we do so with a lot less confidence.”