According to many political scientists, America's governmental structure is so riddled with checks and balances that lawmakers are rarely capable of passing comprehensive legislation. Yet during one remarkable decade, between 1965 and 1975, public officials enacted unprecedented civil rights legislation, instituted affirmative action policies, stripped discriminatory provisions from immigration statutes, extended parity to women in education and sports, guaranteed opportunities for the disabled, and promoted bilingual education.

If it is so hard to achieve substantial change in American politics, sociologist John D. Skrentny asks, “how did we get a minority rights revolution notable precisely for its sudden, rapid, bipartisan policy development?” (p. 6). In The Minority Rights Revolution he attempts to answer this question and there-by “improve American democratic deliberation by informing participants in policy debates how we arrived at our current situation (p. v).” Accordingly, he explores how context—historical, global, political—influenced policy during the 1965–75 decade; the reasons that certain controversial developments, such as so-called identity politics, took root; and why some relatively weak groups “won big” while others lost out.

The book is dense with information culled from internal government documents, congressional debates, interviews, and legal documents. Its subject matter is fascinating, however, and Skrentny writes in a lively style and with a minimum of social science jargon; even nonscholars interested in American political and social history will enjoy reading his book.

According to Skrentny, the United States abandoned institutionalized racism largely in response to the perceived needs of national security. How could the country maintain credibility in its fight against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan so long as it retained its own odious racial policies? Then, during the Cold War, how could it prevent the Soviet Union from winning the hearts and minds of nonaligned (and largely nonwhite) people so long as its own black citizens were segregated and otherwise demeaned?

Once laws were passed addressing the needs of African Americans, the rights revolution took on a life of its own. Women, Asian Americans, Indians, and Latinos benefited apace from the antidiscrimination and affirmative action policies that blacks had fought long and hard to achieve. (As Skrentny says, “they got a free ride” [p. 141]). Why these particular groups? Apparently because governing elites considered them analogous to blacks. White ethnics and homosexuals, by contrast, were denied “minorityhood” status; the former were deemed insufficiently oppressed, and the latter, while oppressed, were beyond the public's zone of toleration.

Skrentny accounts for the 1965–75 rights revolution in ways that challenge, or at least go beyond, many of the generally accepted social-movement theories. For instance, many researchers maintain that revolutions—or what Sidney Tarrow calls “protest cycles”—take place from the “bottom up” (Power in Movement, 1998, p. 129). Skrentny counters, however, that such a model fails to explain the outcomes of social movements, the nature of the reforms they inspire, or the reasons that only some participants achieve their goals. Why did an ambitious law for the disabled emerge in the absence of any coherent movement? How was it that Asians won significant immigration rights without notable mobilization, whereas women, a well-organized and potentially powerful constituency, faced resistance and ridicule?

The answer, Skrentny asserts, is that the allocation of “rights” was not primarily determined by demanding protesters with fists raised high, or the “network of federated interest groups” that political scientist Theda Skocpol studied in successful earlier movements (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 1992). Rather, action came from governmental elites who engaged in what the author calls “anticipatory politics.” These elites were responsible for minority business incentives; Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, prohibiting colleges and universities receiving federal funds from engaging in sex discrimination; and, most notably, the Bi-Lingual Education Act of 1968, which represented almost a total break with the country's centuries-old “English-only” tradition, yet became official policy with scarcely a rumble. (According to Skrentny, the “intense, almost-anything-goes political strategizing of Nixon's anticipatory politics” presaged the way governing now transpires in this country, “driven by polls and Svengali-like political consultants who make educated, semi-scientific guesses as to what groups of Americans really want” (p. 329).

Skrentny generally supports affirmative action—which he describes as “the most important component of the minority rights revolution” (p. 85)—but he acknowledges its problematic legacy. It has replaced “difference-blind” policies with ones that have splintered society into “majority” and “minority” groups, and then “turned group victimhood into a basis of a positive national policy” (p. 353). With little forethought, government officials created a “new discourse of race, group differences, and rights” that have mirrored racist talk and ideas by reinforcing racial differences (most incongruously, the author points out, among Latinos) (p. 353).

Because race-based programs ignore class distinctions, moreover, they have elevated even the lowliest white ethnics into “privileged oppressors” and alienated them from the “official minorities” who could have been their allies (p. 353). As a consequence, Skrentny says, while affirmative action benefited official minorities, it “may have foreclosed more comprehensive reforms” (p. 353). To the extent it has done so, ironically, the minority rights revolution has in fact been a counterrevolution.

However much Republicans inveigh against race-based policies, they deliberately promoted and disproportionately benefit from measures that emphasize ethnic, rather than class, differences in the electorate. Even such stalwart conservatives as Barry Goldwater and Robert Bork urged Republican presidents to implement programs, such as bilingual education and minority-targeted enterprise grants, that were designed to woo key constituencies, particularly Latinos. By 1975, Republicans were eagerly courting disaffected whites, portraying Democrats as beholden to racial minorities. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan led what Skrentny describes as a “rhetorical counter-revolution” (p. 330), and throughout the 1990s, Bill Clinton and members of the middle-of-the-road Democratic Leadership Conference continued the retrenchment by co-opting much of the conservative agenda.

Still, the United States in no way resembles the country it was 40 years ago. Certain values have become virtually unassailable, reflecting the profound changes that have occurred in both domestic and world culture. Human rights (what Skrentny calls “this 20th Century invention” [p. 357]) are almost universally honored, at least in principle, and few Americans want to see national origin quotas reinstated anymore than they want to see policies resurrected that discriminate against minorities, women, or the disabled. While the rights revolution as such may have ended in 1975, then, Skrentny suggests that its repercussions will be long-lasting and largely benign.