As Collins sees it, American society is trapped in a style of thinking and decision-making that makes bad choices seem rational. Called a prisoner’s dilemma by game theorists and a hermeneutic trap by Collins, this way of thinking has led to policy choices that make everyone worse off, in part by creating hostility between communities that could productively work together and form powerful coalitions. The work of the anti–civil rights movement, led by figures such as Edward Blum and Christopher Rufo, has repeatedly found ways to undermine the shared interests of the American people by splitting coalitions and pitting marginalized groups against each other even while claiming and perhaps feeling the highest of motives. From racial segregation in the 1960s to the modern boogeyman of critical race theory, conservative elites have wielded cultural and political wedges to expand their power to set the political, educational, and legal agenda.

Affirmative action has long been a weapon of choice in conservatives’ arsenal against social progress, and few have leveraged it as successfully—and detrimentally—as Edward Blum. In 2014, the year after he helped gut the affirmative action aspect of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Blum created Students for Fair Admissions and brought a suit against Harvard University for discriminating against Asian Americans. A decade later, this latest effort in a long string of traps and dilemmas became the Supreme Court case that upended affirmative action.

Collins’s groundbreaking work is a field guide to the personalities, funding, and dilemmas that characterize the ongoing war between the civil rights movement and the anti–civil rights movement—between the forces represented by figures such as Thurgood Marshall, a hero of the civil rights movement, and his replacement on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, a hero of the anti–civil rights movement. This book will help readers better understand the battles that have been fought in the past, where the next fight might take place, and what will be necessary in order to win.