1\\ I'm reading "Age of Entitlement", which is a solid survey of post-1960s American culture

It stumbles fatally wherever it touches economics, so I can't recommend it in full

But it brought me a MAJOR epiphany about "political correctness" and its malignant offspring "wokeness"

2\\ The puzzling thing about PC culture is how everyone follows it while simultaneously mocking it

Its absurdities are obvious and contemptible, the butt of a thousand jokes

Time and again, I've asked myself, "How does this movement spread if only a few crazies believe in it?"

3\\ For a while I thought it was a case of institutions bowing to the pressure of loud college kids, merely to stay out of the papers

But watching society inflict real harm on itself by institutionalizing the new racism of "wokeness" made me question this simple explanation

4\\ The real answer is this:

PC is not a bottom up movement. It's a top down movement given legal teeth by the Civil Rights Act of 1964

For businesses, PC compliance is an existential issue

This is why we all snicker about it in private, then fall in line publicly

5\\ Title VII (equal employment) and related legislation did two things:

-Eliminated freedom of association as a fundamental right

-Created a legal basis for disparate outcomes of any kind to be interpreted by courts as prima facie evidence of discrimination

6\\ No doubt the early effects of Title VII were salutary; the low hanging fruit of Jim Crow was picked and discarded

But eliminating freedom of association and treating disparities as evidence of discrimination left the door open for ALL life outside the home to be politicized

7\\ This is how we ended up with gender quotas on corporate boards, men taking gold medals in women's track, and COVID-19 vaccines being allocated by race

A vast majority of Americans know these are ghoulish policies, but the power of the courts compels those policies

8\\ In a way, this realization is liberating. We can stop imagining that if only we can bury wokeness under enough parody and scorn, the zeitgeist will flip, and PC culture will crawl back in its hole

Public consensus is not why wokeness exists, and it's not how it'll die

9\\ But when you realize that wokeness was a *legal* movement that had to be developed by activists and courts over decades, you have the darker realization that it's here to stay

We've built it into the foundations of the house

10\\ Thankfully, we still jealously guard liberties in the home that we'd consider bigoted in a business or university

We understand that the decision of who to invite for dinner, or who to hire to fix the roof, is a matter of free association, and should not be politicized

11\\ People seldom try to reconcile their moral intuitions about home life with their moral intuitions about business life

Maybe the monstrosities of wokeness will prompt more courts to make that comparison, and to ask why the two spheres should be treated differently

12\\ h/t @charlesmurray whose mention of the book prompted me to read it

13\\ I wonder if @Mark_J_Perry can comment on the prospect of a SCOTUS case significantly dismantling the worst parts of the Civil Rights Act?

Anything interesting currently angling for the court's attention?