The Civil Rights Act empowered white resistance by legitimizing anti-government conservatism.

Evidence

This same federal intervention, however, provoked an equally powerful and equally important reaction in the opposite direction. To no one’s surprise, the Civil Rights Act outraged segregationists. But in fundamental ways, countless other whites—in the South and elsewhere—found themselves disturbed not by the act’s goals but by the means used to reach them. Whatever these whites may have felt about the significant changes the act enabled in race relations, they were much more troubled by the revolutionary ways in which the new legislation expanded the power of the federal government and constricted the prerogatives of private businessmen. Indeed, in the eyes of many Cold War–era conservatives, the Civil Rights Act seemed to be nothing less than communism, because it undermined capitalism, limited individual decision making, accelerated the growth of the centralized state, and further entrenched the federal bureaucracy. And so, just as liberal and moderate Atlantans had traveled to Washington to support and celebrate the passage of the Civil Rights Act, conservative Atlantans also journeyed there to challenge the legislation before the Supreme Court. In the end, their challenge failed, but the conservative counterrevolution continued to grow. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 467

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This core mechanism — that legal desegregation victories paradoxically fed the nascent color-blind/anti-federalism conservatism — directly supports the reader’s stated thesis for the book.
• XREF: connects to: White backlash against the Civil Rights Act delivered the South to the Republican Party — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 519; Massive resistance birthed the New Right’s future-oriented conservative politics — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 309; The Civil Rights Act paradoxically strengthened southern white resistance and elected its champion. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 515 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The Civil Rights Act paradoxically strengthened southern white resistance and elected its champion. #corroborates (0.95) — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight, 515
• Post-civil-rights conservatism reframed anti-discrimination remedies as reverse racism #expands (0.80) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1287
• White opposition to racially targeted policies is substantially racially motivated #expands (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3753
• Neoconservatism began as a rightward racial realignment breaking with the civil rights movement #expands (0.75) — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 56
• Antiracist reforms repackaged white supremacy as color blindness #expands (0.72) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 91