Dimensions: 6'' x 9'' 218 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: April 2008 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8447-4263-2 Price: $ 25.00 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

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 Special advisory: Peacock on Obama and race identity politics 

 Read the press release for Deconstructing the Republic

Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did more to fortify American republicanism than any other civil rights legislation in American history--finally securing the right to vote for black citizens in the Jim Crow South almost one hundred years after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment--as currently implemented, the landmark law actually undermines the Founders' vision of American government.

Deconstructing the Republic: Voting Rights, the Supreme Court, and the Founders' Republicanism Reconsidered contends that the Founders' vision rests on the idea that individual citizens can choose their representatives based on public debate and argument, without regard to their race, creed, or class. Peacock argues that the way the Voting Rights Act has been implemented undermines this vision, replacing it with judicially-mandated multicultural politics.

According to Peacock, the politics of multiculturalism is an elite vision of America in which race and ethnicity are permanent features of American politics that require certain groups--blacks and Hispanics, particularly--to be awarded seats in the House of Representatives and state legislatures in proportion to their share of the population. By institutionalizing political identities based on illiberal conceptions of race and ethnicity, today's Voting Rights Act displaces the Constitution's emphasis on individual rights in favor of corporate, race-centered rights--and removes the public good from the calculus of representation.

Praise for Deconstructing the Republic

"Following the Founders' original meaning ought to be the touchstone of American politics and jurisprudence, yet Congress and the courts frequently cast aside their wisdom. Anthony Peacock's book shows how judges and politicians are misinterpreting the Voting Rights Act, replacing the Founders' vision of democratic self-government based on individual rights with a multicultural republic based on group rights. His argument should concern anyone who loves American democracy."

--Edwin Meese III, former attorney general of the United States and Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy at the Heritage Foundation

"Professor Peacock has produced a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated account of the Supreme Court's voting rights jurisprudence. Peacock traces in detail the tortuous course of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which began as an attempt to protect voting rights against racial discrimination but under the Supreme Court's tutelage became a vehicle for requiring racial discrimination. The equal right to vote became the right to an effective vote understood in racial terms and measured by a racial results requirement. Understanding voting rights in terms of racial class rights, the Court has undermined the central principle of equal protection: that rights belong to individuals and not to racial classes. All in all, a virtual tour de force of constitutional analysis."

--Edward Erler, department of political science, California State University, San Bernardino

"Deconstructing the Republic is an extraordinary book. For anyone who wants to truly understand the Founders' concept of 'inalienable rights,' Professor Anthony Peacock has given us a new textbook. The American people are reshaping our national political landscape, reconstituting the civil contract that we have with each other and the relationship that we have as citizens to our government. Deconstructing helps us understand our history, the dynamics of current conflicts involving our 'rights,' and the consequences of making decisions that further erode republicanism as the centerpiece of America's governmental system. You owe it to yourself to read Deconstructing the Republic."

--Ward Connerly, cofounder and president, American Civil Rights Institute

Anthony A. Peacock teaches public law in the political science department at Utah State University.