ing the gap between the black middle class and the poor. The politics of resentment and reparation also widened the gap between liberals and the American public, which supported laws against segregation and disfranchisement but drew the line at busing and affirmative action. In the absence of a public consensus in favor of reverse discrimination, as it came to be called, liberals had to rely more and more on the courts, which proceeded to create a new category of prescriptive rights and to expand their own authority into the field of social engineering. As Leslie Dunbar pointed out in 1966, "not every valid interest is a right.... A right is a defense against social power, not a prescription of the kind of society there must be." Judicial decisions forbidding religious instruction in the schools or requiring the schools "to compensate for all the evils inherent in housing segregation" tended to "usurp the community's instinctive feeling of responsibility for rearing the young" and eventually brought the law itself into contempt. In their eagerness for legal remedies, liberals had forgotten that "we must... live as a people bound together by ties of mutual trust, not as a people armored against each other."

Dunbar's warning against excessive reliance on judge-made law has gained cogency with the passage of time. He found it curious that liberals should be the ones to applaud when the Supreme Court overruled a Colorado plan for legislative reapportionment, even though it had been approved by the electorate, on the grounds that it violated the court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Can this be the authentic voice of liberalism?" Dunbar asked. Such decisions encouraged the "sense of estrangement between the superstructure of an institution and its constituent body which is a fearsomely prevalent and growing feature of American social life."

The growing "separation of leadership from its primary constituency," Dunbar thought, was the most ominous development of recent years. Noting that the Protestant clergy had played an active role in the civil rights movement, he commended their courage but wondered why they had invested so little of their energy in an attempt to change the racial attitudes of their own congregations. "Instead of seeking to reform their congregations directly, the Protestant leaders have given their greater energies to going outside them, witnessing in the streets of Selma or Chicago or the cloakrooms of Congress." When this pattern became "prevalent in one social field after another," Dunbar observed, it led to

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