In 2009, the Obama Administration imposed a sweeping consent decree on Westchester County, New York, settling a lawsuit that alleged the county had engaged in racist housing policies. “Settled” may not be quite the right word. “Imposed—under threat of losing millions in federal funding and prolonged litigation” might be more accurate.
The Lawsuit That Wasn't About Racism
While this particular case was brought under the False Claims Act, its ideological roots trace back to a very different lawsuit filed in 1980 by the Carter Administration—against the City of Yonkers—alleging racial segregation in housing. Both cases share a common thread: nowhere was it proven—or even seriously alleged—that any law, regulation, institution, or public official was or engaged in overt racial discrimination or harbored racial animus.
Indeed, such a claim would have been implausible. While majority white, these communities were far more diverse than the country as a whole. In 2004, Westchester County established an African American Heritage Trail. In 2006, Andrea Stewart-Cousins—a Black progressive woman—was elected to the New York State Senate from the region. And in both 2008 and 2012, Westchester gave overwhelming majorities to Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.
Whatever else they were, these lawsuits were not expressions of local will. They were federal attacks on democracy. Impositions on communities that had already voted—with their ballots and their behavior—for racial harmony and progress.
Were there isolated incidents of racism? Of course. There are fools and bigots in every community—including in the federal government. But in all the legal wrangling over nearly three decades, no evidence had ever emerged that any such individuals had any control over housing policy in Yonkers or Westchester.
How could such a policy be justified? On what philosophical basis could the federal government relentlessly pressure a racially diverse and politically progressive community—one that had shown, repeatedly, its commitment to inclusion?
Dismissing it as madness is tempting and would be true enough. But that would be too easy.
In truth, the actions of the Obama administration in this case reflect something far more insidious and far more influential: the philosophical method and moral logic of Critical Theory, and in particular, its racialized variant—Critical Race Theory.
From Philosophy to Power
Philosophy, at its best, is a search for truth. But before such a search can begin, we must define our terms: what is truth, how can it be known, does it exist at all? These are not trivial questions. They have occupied the minds of humanity’s greatest thinkers for millennia.
My own view is that truth is real and universal. We begin our inquiry not in ideology, but in the axioms of knowledge implied and embedded in our every naïve perception. From there, we each proceed—by reason, logic, observation, through error and correction—toward what is good, what is beautiful, and what is true.
Critical Theory turns this process on its head. It begins not with inquiry but with conclusion. One starts with a preferred outcome—usually grounded in power, identity, or grievance—and then constructs a scaffold of theory to justify it. It is a philosophy of ends over means. The pursuit of truth is replaced by the analysis of power; objectivity is dismissed as a pretense of the privileged. This epistemic posture did not arise by accident. It draws directly from the legacy of Marx and Engels, who taught that knowledge is not neutral, but always embedded in class interests—and therefore should be understood and wielded as a tool of struggle.
In my view, Critical Theory denies even the possibility of common understanding—not because we don’t share a reality, but because it severs the link between the individual mind and the world it seeks to know.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” —Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerback, Thesis XI (1845)
That single sentence may be the most honest and dangerous expression of Critical Theory’s ethos. It does not seek truth. It does not trust deliberation. It demands change for change's sake—regardless of whether or not anyone consents to anything.
In 2009, the Obama administration wasn’t responding to acts of racism in Westchester County. There were none. No mobs. No slurs. No discriminatory ordinances. What it responded to was a set of numbers—a demographic distribution that failed to match its ideological template.
The people had voted for progress. They had built multiracial coalitions. They had supported a Black president by overwhelming margins. But none of that mattered. Obama didn’t intervene to stop or punish harm. It intervened because it could—because its theory demanded action, and because imposing change, not solving a problem, had become the point.
And if you objected—if you argued that local governments, absent any overt discrimination, were better positioned to serve their own communities—well, maybe you're just a racist.
The Logic of Critical Theory in Action
In that sense, it wasn’t the logic of justice that animated the federal action. It was the logic of Critical Theory—the conviction that reality itself is unjust, and must be overthrown.
Traditional philosophy seeks to understand the world as it is. Critical Theory dreams of the world as it ought to be—and demands the power to impose it. It does not persuade. It compels. It does not tolerate gradual change. It imposes immediate transformation. It sees democratic resistance not as a sign of pluralism, but as proof of systemic rot.
It is a philosophy that treats persuasion and consent as irrelevant and objectivity as oppressive. Once embraced, it justifies any intervention—not because harm has been done, but because reality fails to meet the vision. And once that kind of power is normalized, it doesn’t stay on one side of the aisle for long.
While President Obama may have offered the most articulate expression of Critical Theory, he was not alone in adopting its logic. The method—the use of institutional power to impose a vision of justice—would soon be embraced from the other end of the conventional political spectrum. Which brings us to President Trump and his policy of deportations.
Trump’s Turn
Allow me to state my priors on this topic. I am an advocate of open immigration—open borders, even—not out of some sentimental notion of compassion, but because immigration is an unalloyed good. It benefits both those who arrive and those who welcome them.
I have heard self-described free-marketeers propose top-down limits on this or that cohort of immigrants—cosmically rejecting their own oft-stated principle that centralized economic planning never works and, indeed, is always counterproductive. If they trust markets to allocate capital, housing, and toothpaste, why not labor?
I believe the market for labor—not Congress, not a federal agency, and certainly not a president—should determine who enters and leaves this country.
And finally, despite generations of wild-eyed, dystopian warnings that immigration is destroying American culture, the United States is strong, economically and culturally, not in spite of immigration, but because of it.
That said, no one seriously argues that individuals convicted of serious crimes have a right to remain in the communities they’ve harmed. Even an immigration maximalist like myself supports deporting non-citizens who pose a genuine threat to public safety.
But that is not the Trump administration’s deportation policy.
Trump campaigned—and governed—on the claim that previous administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, had abandoned American values. Crude and often performative, his rhetoric nonetheless struck a chord. He criticized cultural decline, attacked elite institutions, and promised a return to the rule of law. And in some cases, he delivered: corporate tax reform, regulatory rollback, and the elevation of three constitutionalist justices to the Supreme Court.
But the Constitution is not a Chinese menu. It does not permit a leader to pick the parts that flatter his ideology and ego and ignore the rest. The same document that protects property, contracts and national sovereignty, also guarantees the rights of the accused. Due process is not optional. It is foundational.
Criminal defendants—citizen or not—have the right to hear the charges against them, confront witnesses, and receive a fair trial. That’s not squishy. That’s strength. If America is to be great, it must first remain America: a nation of laws, not of men.
We now find ourselves with an administration eager to brand its adversaries as enemies of American values—while cloaking itself in the rhetoric of constitutional fidelity. But listen closely, and the mask slips.
Here is the Vice President of the United States:
“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.”
That’s not constitutionalism. That’s calculus. It reduces rights to variables—negotiable, elastic, situational.
This is not a case of administrative pragmatism. That, at least, might be defensible. It is something deeper—and darker. It is the rejection of the very idea that rights exist independently of power. In the Vice President’s formulation, due process is not a guarantee. It is a negotiation. What is “due” depends not on principle, but on resources. On status. On whim.
But due process is not a slogan. It is not a mood. It is not whatever serves a given politician’s interest on any given day. It is a recognition that reality exists outside of anyone’s preferences, and that justice demands we meet that reality with consistency, not improvisation.
What Vance offers is not constitutionalism. It is a species of whim-worship—the belief that force, wrapped in jingoistic certainty, justifies itself. It is, philosophically, Critical Theory in a red tie.
The method comes right out of the Obama playbook: define justice ideologically, treat resistance as illegitimate and use the brutal machinery of the state to impose a preferred outcome.
Or maybe you just support the criminals?
A principled government, interested in changing immigration policy within the bounds of constitutionalism, might have worked to expand due process capacity—by increasing the number of judges, expanding detention facilities, and clarifying statutory authority.
But that would have required persuasion, transparency, and respect for the rule of law. This administration chose instead to deny reality and embrace force. It chose to abandon process in lieu of its desired outcome.
And this, somehow, will make America great.
What Power Can't Be Allowed to Forget
The true danger of Critical Theory, whether Obamian or Trumpist, is not its ideology, but its method. It does not seek to understand reality—it seeks to replace it. It denies objectivity, recasts disagreement as injustice, and reduces truth, value and rights to the shifting terms of power.
The world exists independently of our wishes, our fears, and our theories. Truth is not an instrument of power. It is the thing power must answer to.
To reject Critical Theory is not to defend the status quo. It is to defend the possibility of honest thought, principled disagreement, and moral law. It is to insist that truth and justice must begin not with the world we imagine, but with the world that is.