What no one expected in 1964 was that the Civil Rights Act would herald not the end of racial tensions in the United States, but their aggravation. As a result in large part of the act, segregation ended in the South and equality of opportunity was virtually assured, with stiff penalties for those who denied it. Yet even as actual racism was becoming unusual, civil rights activists began to insist that racism was so deeply embedded in the psyche of the nation that had done more than any other to eradicate it that much more legislation was required, including measures giving not just equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome, which would require special boosts and privileges to minorities. This all but guaranteed that racial friction would remain a feature of the American landscape.

Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty replaced segregation in the South with nationwide programs that were even worse for the poor, as they took away incentives to work and created a permanently unemployed underclass in which an ever-larger group of people essentially became wards of the state.

hat may have been the idea all along. The famously coarse Johnson is said to have boasted about the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “I’ll have those n—-rs voting Democratic for two hundred years.” Between that act and the War on Poverty, he certainly did create a bloc of black Americans who could be counted on to vote Democratic – at least until the advent of Donald Trump. Whether or not those votes were in the best interests of those who cast them was highly debatable, but no one dared debate it.

Then came Barack Obama. Throughout his tenure, Obama stoked racial tensions rather than calming them. When he took office, the Justice Department was pursuing a case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, abruptly dropped the case in May 2009 and refused to cooperate with further investigations, giving the impression that the Black Panthers were getting away with voter intimidation because of their race.