The social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory. If, like certa… - Christopher Caldwell

Civil rights survived because it proved an extraordinary tool—unlike any in peacetime constitutional history—for contravening democratic decision-making. By withholding money, by suing states and businesses, the federal government can use civil rights law to coerce local authorities ­into changing policies; it can alter the behavior of private citizens. When Bill Clinton broadened the remit of civil rights, he didn’t have to spend money to do it. His predecessor, George H. W. Bush, had taken the first steps down this road. Bush’s Civil Rights Act of 1991 introduced punitive damages in a broad range of civil rights cases, creating major incentives to file lawsuits for race and sex discrimination.

Democrats are the party of the university-educated. As university-generated high technology moved to the center of the American economy, Democrats quite naturally consolidated their position as the party of the country’s business and financial elite. But Democrats are also dependent on black voters, who are, on the whole, disproportionately dependent upon government programs. The alliance between university know-it-alls and hard-pressed minorities can be an effective one, but only so long as government spending is rising. And it was not. Clinton was able to keep the alliance alive in an era of cuts by making adroit use of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the regulations, executive orders, and court-ordered expansions stemming from it. He shunted the cost of black advancement into the private sector through affirmative action and housing finance subsidies. He opened civil rights to other groups, particularly women and gays. And—the first president to do so—he made an almost religious appeal to diversity as an American calling, casting as unpatriotic any allegiance to the traditions and cultures of the majority.

In order to work, free-trade systems must be frictionless and immune to interruption, forever. This means a program of intellectual property protection, zero tariffs, and cross-border traffic in everything, including migrants. This can be assured only in a system that is veto-proof and non-consultative—in short, undemocratic. That is why it is those who have benefited most from globalization who have been leading the counterattack against the democracy movements arising all over the West.