I will confess that, at first, I was a bit puzzled about how to respond to Thomas Powers’s review (September 2024) of my book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. I am glad that he notes (correctly) that it has been “embraced by many opinion leaders on the right, and it’s not hard to see why.” Likewise, I am pleased that he writes that I deserve readers’ “gratitude for honestly confronting this troubling dimension of contemporary life and for documenting its existence beyond any reasonable doubt.” Given that demonstrating this was by far the most important goal of my writing The Unprotected Class, and that it is the issue to which the vast majority of the book’s content was devoted, I was at first tempted to just declare victory and be done with it.

However, Powers then proceeds to devote almost the entirety of his review not to expanding on this praise or further analyzing my central contention but to attacking my views on topics that are ultimately peripheral to my book’s plainly stated core purpose, and on which he strongly disagrees with me. That he chooses to do so illuminates fundamental arguments in how the Right should handle sensitive questions of race. There, Powers seems radically out of step not just with me but with almost every one of the hundreds of other readers and professional reviewers who have left a public review of my book.

The Unprotected Class is not written primarily for fire-breathers — indeed, I wrote it quite intentionally for those whom I would consider typical National Review readers, perhaps skeptical of the recent turn of the GOP but aware nonetheless that something is amiss in our racial politics and looking for a serious analysis of the situation that offers a way forward. It is a book written to convince the undecided, not preach to the choir.

Powers points out the importance of speaking carefully about sensitive issues regarding race, but there is a difference between care and cowardice.

Powers writes that my book “calls on whites to see themselves as victims,” and yet in numerous interviews about the book I have explicitly said exactly the opposite. One can extensively document a wrong being done to a group, as I have done, while choosing to focus on claiming one’s equal rights as a citizen rather than one’s status as a victim. This is more broadly important because Powers’s strategy — in which elaborating a problem is immediately equated to “being a victim” — means there is no way to realistically discuss injustices. If someone whose relative is murdered writes a book about the murder and suggests ways that we could stop future murders, is he simply “portraying himself as a victim”?

I do agree that whites should “politically organize” and “speak up unapologetically for their own rights,” but I make it clear on multiple occasions in The Unprotected Class that they should do so not in the name of racial tribalism but in order to vindicate their equal rights, which all Americans are owed. I explicitly invoke Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that they should do this in conjunction with allies of other races. While MLK has come under criticism by some on the right in recent years, pursuing such an MLK strategy could hardly be called extremist, dangerous, or outside of American political traditions.

I do talk about America currently being “a systematically anti-white environment” and discuss the importance of “the destruction of cultural symbols,” among several other provocative phrases that Powers unearths — but I offer extensive evidence for my claims in my book. Powers simply presents them out of context in an attempt to shock the reader, as if they were conjured from thin air. I’d urge anyone reading this to read my book and decide for himself whether these claims are well supported.

Finally, and most important, because it directly falsifies Powers’s thesis, I do indeed, as Powers himself notes, believe that white progressives “are the most powerful and most uniquely toxic group in American society” and that they must be “confronted, exposed, and shamed.” The toxic white Left is so important in setting America’s racial dynamic that it will be the subject of my next book. One can, of course, agree or disagree with that statement, but explicitly casting the white Left as the principal villain in America’s race-relations drama is the opposite of a racialist narrative.

While Powers doesn’t like my proposed solutions to tackling anti-white racism, he does not offer any of his own, other than mentioning a few ideas that I explicitly embraced in my book, such as engaging in lawfare to use existing civil-rights laws to attack anti-white discrimination and “pruning back” those same laws.

This failure to develop real political solutions is unfortunately a hallmark of Powers’s work in this area. As one reviewer of his book on a similar subject noted: Powers states that “‘we are . . . compelled to hope’ . . . that the antidiscrimination regime can be thwarted. Yet he gives no real foundation for his hope.” Or as another reviewer wrote, Powers consistently underestimates the “role of political power in forcing dissenters into submission.” It is this failure to grasp the nature of political power that is ultimately the fatal flaw in his arguments.

Much conservatism from the mid 20th century until the Trump era devoted itself more to abstract ideas than to power relations. James Burnham, other than William F. Buckley Jr. probably the foremost intellectual force in the founding and growth of National Review, never made this mistake and was in fact the 20th-century Right’s foremost student of the role of power in politics; but too few on the right have followed his example, and as a result, much of the Right’s rhetoric on race is simply a matter of wishful thinking rather than a serious analysis of the Left’s motivations and incentives.

Powers’s excess of caution is particularly stunning because he works in Kenosha, Wis., arguably the center of recent anti-white activity in America, all of which arose directly from white timidity. Rather than unapologetically defend the correct conduct of the white Kenosha police officer in shooting violent felon Jacob Blake, local officials dithered, enabling subsequent riots. When Kyle Rittenhouse joined a group of local citizens attempting to restore order and tragically was forced to shoot rioters in self-defense, local officials gave in to racial blackmail and charged him with a crime despite clear video evidence showing his innocence. When Rittenhouse’s correct acquittal likely motivated Darrell Brooks’s murderous attack on the Waukesha Christmas parade, which killed six and injured dozens more, including numerous children, local officials seemed more interested in temporary calm than permanent justice.

If Powers raised his voice in public forums when these events were happening in response to these deadly anti-white racial provocations, I can find no evidence of it. Powers, of all people, should realize that appeasement always fails, and this applies even more to domestic adversaries than to foreign ones. This lack of moral clarity (in which he was joined by several local GOP establishment figures) was cowardice masquerading as high principle. The Left ruthlessly exploited the Right’s weakness, leading to far more racial violence, disorder, and anger than would have resulted had officials simply issued a robust and unapologetic response from the first.

The problem with Powers’s preferred strategy to combating anti-white racism is that it does not rise to the level of being political at all. It is the politics of the seminar room, not the situation room. There are two politically realistic options: one, that we have whites organize with allied non-whites to vindicate the constitutional rights that they, like all other citizens, are entitled to — and this is what I have explicitly advocated in The Unprotected Class — or two, that whites advocate on explicitly racial grounds in the name of white-identity politics. The latter is what Powers’s preferred strategy eventually leads to, his protestations aside.

What the rise of Trump, among many other phenomena, has illustrated clearly is that there is no politically realistic option in which whites continue to acquiesce to their existing second-class legal or cultural status. The political agenda will either be seized by responsible leaders and thinkers, as I have tried to do in The Unprotected Class, or it will be seized by demagogues. But in no circumstances will it ever be controlled by cowards.

Thomas F. Powers responds:

Against my claim that he advocates “a combative program of white racial grievance,” Claremont Institute senior fellow Jeremy Carl now distinguishes what he says is his position, one calling on whites to “organize with allied non-whites to vindicate their constitutional rights” (good) from one in which “whites advocate on explicitly racial grounds in the name of white-identity politics” (bad). I don’t think this restraint actually captures the spirit of his book, but I’ll take Carl’s apparently newfound appreciation for prudence in racial matters as a step in the right direction.

My general response to what he says is to ask readers to look again at my review. I provide plenty of evidence for my characterizations of his positive program of action.

Carl’s angry political stance means that he throws around accusations of cowardice pretty readily. He thinks my approach to pushing back against anti-whiteness does not go far enough. But I have to wonder about his claims to courage when he does not ever raise, let alone answer, the main criticism that I make of his book, namely, that he encourages whites (and conservatives) to fight the anti-discrimination Left by embracing its poisonous outlook and political style. He either needs to disavow that (which would render his campaign a nullity) or own up to it and all that follows from it.

But I have to confess that Carl’s book — and other fairly obvious evidence — indicates that something like a complete embrace of nasty woke politics by the Right is coming and is indeed already here. Soon all of American politics will be so dominated by the logic of the anti-discrimination revolution that there will be no other way to think about democratic life. Carl will get his way; whites will become just one more grievance group playing the divisive and acrimonious game of identity politics, cancel culture, and political correctness.

I suppose I ought to be able to accept the kind of change Carl and his many admirers foretell. In my own recent book, I make the case that an anti-discrimination “regime” has been shaping the way we think about politics and one another for a long time. My own analysis suggests that what Carl represents is the more or less inevitable product of our political order. But I also make clear that the new regime succeeds only by displacing a much superior approach to politics and group politics — that of our “liberal democratic” tradition of constitutional government. (See my review for the weakness of Carl’s engagement on this plane.) Maybe the future is on Carl’s side, maybe every American group will soon do nothing but clamor for respect and inclusion and equity for itself. But that prospect is so awful that I cannot but root for liberalism, its old-fashioned wariness of faction, its low but solid standard of toleration, its separation of public and private, its wariness of legislating morality, its dedication to individual freedom — all of which goes by the board under the anti-discrimination regime.

What Americans today need is not for everybody to get in the group-grievance game. What is needed is for conservatives (it will have to be conservatives) to figure out, and then to teach, how much harm the radicalization of anti-discrimination politics has done to our democratic order and to life within it. As it is, many conservatives (not Carl, I grant) are distracted or deceive themselves, identifying the problem as anything but civil-rights politics — neo-Marxism, postmodernism, literary theory, etc. Once we are able to reckon with the shaping power of the civil-rights revolution adequately, no small task, what will then be needed is a broad program of civil-rights reform. Protecting whites from discrimination would be part of that reform. But much more important would be a comprehensive effort to tame the moralistic, hypersensitive, pedantic, and punitive character of civil-rights politics, a politics that pits Americans against one another in a dynamic of bitter mistrust and blame-casting. That is not the work of a day, and it will require not just intelligence but a certain amount of calm detachment. If that large effort of analysis, civic education, and legal reform is not attempted, we will unavoidably continue to be shaped for the future by this extremely powerful and disruptive legal and political order to the exclusion of all else.

Encouraging whites (and of course then men and Christians, too) to dive into the fray just like all the other “groups” will only hasten the day when the ugly logic of anti-discrimination politics truly takes over modern democratic life. Liberal democracy, weak already, will be well and truly dead. And then the wait for the day when a broad project of civil-rights reform might take hold will be a very long one indeed.

Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Thomas F. Powers chairs the political-science department at Carthage College. He is the author of American Multiculturalism and the Anti-Discrimination Regime: The Challenge to Liberal Pluralism.