Before beginning, it’s worth noting a few things about author Richard Hanania.
First, he is, to his credit, in the midst of apparently long term ideological evolution. He was outed by a journalist at the Huffington Post last year as a 2008-early 2010s anonymous racist/misogynist internet personality. In the meantime, he’s evolved along liberaltarian (left-libertarian) lines towards a kind of embrace of LGBT-inclusive global capitalism; he’s apparently given Chinese and Russian style authoritarian political ideas their due consideration and decided that the American model is ultimately best in terms of outcomes, especially regarding management of Covid-19. And, for what it’s worth, he’s got a point: if libertarian freedom is so uncertain and possibly disruptive, how come the US–with its culture of individual liberties, etc.–were able to recover from the pandemic, while authoritarian–and culturally more deferential–China had more trouble managing the outbreak? He’s his own intellectual animal, but he’s essentially a Cato-style libertarian, a kind of “enlightenment fundamentalist,” though with an internet Anon’s willingness to push limits of what is open for discussion. He appreciates IQ-obsessive Anatoly Karlin, who has similarly embraced “rainbow globalism” after a career as a hard right Russian nationalist.
Second, he is open about being “on the spectrum” and has a law degree.
Therefore, it’s not surprising to find that his book is primarily concerned with the way law has problematically shaped the culture of the United States–that is, it’s not surprising this libertarian lawyer thinks that the government has made a big mistake. The book is not a history of ideas, like Chris Rufo’s “America’s Cultural Revolution”; it is, according to the author, a kind of how-to guide for how conservative activists and donors can change the culture in the same way progressives have.
His primary claim is that progressive cultural hegemony on questions related to race, gender, orientation, etc. exist because of civil rights law, especially so-called “disparate impact,” and he shows in a hundred ways how the law was never intended to create quotas or incentives for reverse-discrimination (indeed, its authors explicitly demanded that it not do those things), how it has a self-funding mechanism in the form of limitless awards against big companies, and so on. To Hanania’s credit, a lot of these discussions are didactic and detailed, and interested lawyers will do well to follow up on his research; to this non-lawyer, his understanding and research seem realistic though I am not prepared to check his work.
All of that said, Hanania’s focus on civil rights law as the source of so many big corporations kneeling to kiss the ring of left wing social theory in 2020 seems like a means of blaming government for a culture problem, which is to say: a libertarian needs to blame government for a negative phenomenon that appeared to arise freely within the “marketplace of ideas.”
The ability of the marketplace of ideas to appropriately value/price ideas appears to remain in tact in Hanania’s mind. To my mind, this pricing problem is enormous—possibly invalidating it altogether.
Furthermore, like in the writing of so many libertarians, there is a sense of immaturity and impatience with legitimate authority that runs throughout the book. For instance, he returns over and over to the injustice of not being able to make crude jokes in the workplace; he similarly treats not being able to make a pass at coworkers as a major problem with Title IX protections. I’m not so sure that these aren’t positive results of civil rights law: while I agree that in theory there is something off-putting about the government or HR departments attempting to intervene in these very private and subjective personal situations, I have also worked among people who have almost no self control—especially by the standards of white collar and university educated Americans. I have been an enlisted soldier; I have worked as a blue collar tradesman, and I have worked in urban public schools. Hanania on the other hand appears to have spent almost all his professional time in (elite) academia, where people with low impulse control exist in fewer and fewer numbers. At some point, civilization requires a means of regulating and penalizing bizarre and unwelcome personalities that do not know how to read social cues. I’d be happy if these penalties were extended beyond racism and sexism and into bad taste, obnoxiousness, or arrested emotional development.
I can also understand how this view might feel like an attack to many libertarians.