This reminds me of the provocative argument made Jude Wanniski that conservatives should apply Burkean principles to their effort to dismantle the welfare state. In short, do it slowly, with gradual measures — because the welfare state has become so much a part of our society that destroying it in one stroke is too radical a change to level on a organic thing like a nation-state.

Leaving aside the plain fact that mainstream conservatives are not even concerned with applying principles to the effort to dismantle the welfare state, because they are not committed to any such thing, it is an interesting argument.

“After all, the U.S. Supreme Court is … only permitting them to continue the practice that they themselves have voluntarily chosen.”

Not quite true. It’s quite difficult for a university to avoid being a federal contractor — participation in a federal student loan program is enough — and almost any federal contractor has to have an affirmative action program. As a practical matter, he has to have quotas. (The usual rule is that you have to prove you weren’t discriminating — a difficult task in the present environment — if you have disproportionately few blacks or whatever.)

In addition, state universities are government agencies and as such are obliged to give everyone “equal protection of the law,” which means “no discrimination,” which as a practical matter means once again that if there are disproportionately few blacks they’re in a difficult legal situation. You have to explain to the judge why you don’t choose to hire blacks, and there are lots of experts who will testify for the other side that any justifications you put forward are transparent masks for racism.

Of course Mr. Kalb is correct. I should have pointed that out myself. This shows that Krauthammer’s argument is very much off base.

This time I disagree with Krauthammer.

1) He calls what the Court would do, if it decided against such discrimination, “judicial imperialism.” On the contrary, what it did do is judicial imperialism, by justifying discrimination by nonexistent Constitutional principles and by wielding powers that belong to legislatures.

2) He ignores the fact that court decisions, especially those handed down by our highest court, are educational instruments. Millions of Americans will think that, if the Supreme Court says such-and-such, it’s proboably right.

3) Whichever way the Court decides, it’s taking a side in the most explosive issue in domestic politics. It took the affirmative-action side.

4) Bork was wrong, in my opinion, when, during his confirmation hearing, he said he’d keep Roe because it had become part of the fabric of our law. If the Court turned the abortion question back to the states, it would allow that “fabric” question itself to work its way through the people’s thinking, the state legislatures, and the state courts. Ditto with affirmative action. Supreme Court decisions often discourage debate.

4) The dismantling of the welfare state would happen (if at all) morsel by morsel; a law in one state, a court decision in another state, an ordinance in some city, and so on. (There’s no virtue in advising or predicting something to which there’s no alternative.) That’s because there’s no one decision or Constitutional principle that ratifies it or could be invoked to abolish it. During the 1930s one might have invoked Art. I, Sec. 8, of the Constitution, specifying the only powers given to the Congress, but that’s no longer possible. The welfare-state system implicates the whole of our political-economic-social universe. That’s not, I believe, yet the case with affirmative action.

5) Krauthammer and most of the others who’ve been unenthusiastic about the decision studiously avoid the question of fear: moral fear of being accused of “racism,” the one sin left to cow us; and physical fear, of violent behavior by slum-dwellers.

Frieda wrote:

“Krauthammer and most of the others who’ve been unenthusiastic about the decision studiously avoid the question of fear: moral fear of being accused of ‘racism,’ the one sin left to cow us; and physical fear, of violent behavior by slum-dwellers.”

Yes, and that’s why you have people like Jay Nordlinger hoping that blacks will somehow end affirmative action on their own, without whites having to do anything about it. Pathetic.

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001563.html

Limbaugh is still banging the same drum, “Affirmative action hurts blacks.”

Dr. Krauthammer, whom I treat as the boys on the island did the sow’s head—awe—is a little shaky here.

Even the best have subpar columns, what with inexorable deadlines.

Didn’t Golden Gopher H. Humphrey say, as the ‘64 Civil Rights Act was being debated, and the mindless right-wingers were presciently arguing (as usual, the Right’s always right) that the proposed legislation would lead to quotas, that HE’D EAT THE PAPER THE BILL WAS WRITTEN ON if this were true.

Some 764 days after it was passed, guess who suddenly defended quotas?

The country has never had the required affirmative action debate. What we’ve had is judicial fiat, bureaucratic tiptoeing into quotas, and a Nixon bone thrown to the Left with a silly executive order.

Another thing Krauthammer got wrong is that he acts as though the Court were merely treading water on affirmative action to avoid social or political disruption, when, in fact, the Court has moved America in a radical leftward direction. Diversity—group rights—has now been implanted in the Constitution. This is a major disaster in the history of our country.

For Krauthammer to blow that off as a mere prudential step is unacceptable. I should have been far tougher on him in the original post.

Nordlinger’s comments and others I have seen show how confused mainstream conservatives are and what a reflexive double standard obtains even among most who oppose racial preferences. It is not enough to point out the legally obvious: racial preferences by government are illegal - they violate the Equal Protection Clause. We don’t even need to consider the unfortunate Civil Rights Act of 1964 to reach that conclusion. Nor is it enough to point out the morally obvious: that it is wrong in a competition that should be based on academic performance and potential to award prizes on the basis of race (or sex, not an issue in the Michigan cases). Those straightforward explanations won’t suffice, because relying on them alone exposes one to the indefensible charge that one objects to harming white Americans.

No, one’s objections must be carefully bolstered by lamentations of the the indirect and more speculative harm racial preferences do to the preferred minorities themselves. That harm may be real, and the theory of it is well explained by such as Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele and John McWhorter. (As intelligent black commentators, they are doing what they should: identifying harms to their own.) Still, that unquantifiable harm pales beside the immediate and demonstrable harm done to a qualified white or Asian applicant who is shunted aside in favor of a less (or just plain un-)qualified black or Hispanic.

Mr. Auster calls for racial realism, I think, and he’s right to do so. Mainstream conservatives also need to abandon the notion, to which most subscribe as unthinkingly as liberals, that the concerns of preferred minorities and the effects of social policies on them individually are more important and weightier morally than the concerns of the majority and the effects of those policies on its members. That deferentially condescending attitude just invites more violations of equal protection, and is mighty patronizing to boot. HRS

Does Mr. Anderson have a quote from Humphrey supporting A-A two years after passage of the ‘64 Act?

(My previous post is meant as a comment on Mr. Auster’s item about Nordlinger’s NRO ruminations. I put it here by mistake. HRS)

Krauthammer’s Roe v. Wade analogy in simply inaccurate. Affirmative action was imposed upon the states and corporations by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. (Another supposedly “conservative” republican regime - God save us from such “allies.”) The bureaucrat who created this malignant policy is now a law professor at Rutgers, as I recall. To top it off, a leftist-controlled Supreme Court ruled in favor of such reverse discrimination back in the early to mid-70s. Thus, overturning racial preferences would have been returning the issue to the state level.

Krauthammer is disingenuous on another statement as well. While it’s true that California outlawed preferences via referendum, the ruling lefists have completely circumvented the law by awarding points on the basis of someone growing up in a violent, drug-infested neighborhood or exhibiting certain cultural characteristics that still manage to exclude poor whites and asians from consideration.

I base my interprations on government’s drive to increase its power in this and other issues discussed here.

My guiding theory is that it’s inherent in any goverment to seek and assert ever more authority — I mean power.

Thus, we have massive immigration and ‘diversity’ with all the division and conflict this brings. We pull away all sexual restraints, thereby weakening the institution through which values are communicated to the next generation. We encourage policies that only exacerbate existing societal ills and reward bad behavior.

In the schools we have effectively removed old-fashioned discipline, (the board of education applied to the seat of knowledge,) encouraging an anarchistic and unruly atmosphere. Yet where punishment is enforced at all it often entails authoritarian, zero-tolerance tactics — sometimes for utterly ludicrous ‘offenses,’ — to teach the children what’s to come.

Many other things can be mentioned, but the cummulative results, eventually threatening the social order, leave only one solution — the heavy hand of government. Ironically, the people actually end up _demanding_ that the government ‘do something’ in order to provide an expedient ‘solution’ to the problems that government policies cause.

I don’t mean to imply a conspiracy here — it’s just the natural tendency of government in general.

I think it was Mr. Adams who said that, “Democracy is for a moral and religious people, and for no other.” As society becomes less moral and religious, the road is paved for a government that becomes less democratic. And as our culture becomes diluted, government becomes the enforced ‘unifier.’

Joel writes:
“My guiding theory is that it’s inherent in any goverment to seek and assert ever more authority — I mean power.”

That seems to me to represent the first step toward a political libertarianism, though. It is true of course that wealthy people seek more wealth and powerful people seek more power, and that any practical politics has to take that into consideration (along with a great many other things) as a part of human reality. But if that stands alone as a first guiding principle then we just end up back at liberalism: the institutionalization of questioning the legitimacy of authority, which ironically reaches its end-state(s) in inhuman tyranny(ies).

Of course I say all of this as a politically authoritarian traditionalist with monarchist leanings. Naturally most modern people are going to instinctively be negative toward someone who is openly a political authoritarian (even though in actual practice all classes of liberal are also authoritarian via the unprincipled exception).

The fact that it seems so odd for anyone at all on any side of any aisle to openly call himself a political authoritarian is itself something of an illustration of the point though.

Matt’s point is well-taken, although I may not have stated my case very well.

I think that the appropriate restrains and constraints on human behaviour are ideally shaped at various levels starting with family, the church, the school, the local community, and finally the law. But I think the law is the _final_ check, but not the primary.

But when the other institutions become less influential — the breakdown of the family, the increased liberalism and irrelevence of the church, the dilution of neighborhood and community that ‘diversity’ brings — then the only check left is imposed by government.

What I mean by ‘guiding principle’ is only in interpreting government policies that tend to weaken the non-government institutions that formerly were at the forefront in defining what is or is not acceptable. And one could add such things as Welfare, where government takes over the dependence that people formerly had on church, family, and community institutions, thereby weakening them further, (to say nothing of often rewarding irresponsibility.)

Government policies such as this I think can be seen within the context of its continuous tendency to exercise greater levels of authority. I don’t mean to say it’s the ONLY factor by any means, only that it is a very significant one.

BTW, Matt’s comments reminded me of Jared Taylor’s article, Democracy vs. Freedom (And The Nation-State)? http://www.vdare.com/misc/taylor_hoppe.htm which had me actually rethinking monarchy in a positive light. But I still prefer a constitutional republic, if we could have kept it.

Joel writes:
“I think that the appropriate restrains and constraints on human behaviour are ideally shaped at various levels starting with family, the church, the school, the local community, and finally the law. But I think the law is the _final_ check, but not the primary.”

I agree. Liberals on the other hand recognize ONLY government as an actually binding authority; or perhaps more accurately in VFR-speak government is liberalism’s institutionalized _unprincipled exception_ to its abstract rejection of authority. Since lots of unprincipled exceptions to liberalism are in practice necessary in everyday human life liberal government ultimately grows without bound, even if it starts as libertarian self-government. So with liberalism (including libertarianism or classical liberalism) there is a natural inflation of government power over time above and beyond the normal human tendency for the powerful to accumulate more power.

Very good, Matt. Under a traditional or non-liberal order, the importance of, e.g., government authority is recognized. It has a place in the scheme of things. It has recognized principles governing how far it ought to go. It has its Aristotelian mean, excess, and deficiency. Of course it’s not as mechanical and neat as I’m suggesting here, there’s always tension and struggle, that’s what politics is about, but nevertheless there is the notion of a larger frame of reference that gives government its legitimacy and that restrains it from going too far.

But under liberalism (and the more advanced the liberalism the more this will be true), since authority and power are unprincipled exceptions from the liberal rule of universal equality, and since government is therefore lawless in its essence, there is no recognized principle of legitimacy controlling how far government can go. So it just keeps going and going, growing and growing.

A member of the governing elite is involved in something that as a liberal he cannot fully defend or explain, something shadowy and dark. That’s why in The West Wing all the scenes taking place in the White House are in half darkness, suggesting a pervasive guilt and sneakiness. Liberal elites worship themselves, but hate the institutions they are leading. Not respecting the institutions, they will misuse and abuse them.

As an illustration of my last point, here is a photo of some staffers in the Clinton White House, including Craig Livingstone, posing in the Oval Office. This is how they respected the White House, the government, the presidency. Everything is here except the grass and the cocaine, and that’s probably there too. Seeing this shocking picture, one can understand that everything Gary Aldrich said in his book was true.

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/Oval%20Office%20bums.html

It is right to be anti-affirmative action. The policy is imposed by mere aggression; that alone shows it to be hopelessly immoral. It is injurious to the majority who have flexible quotas being flexed more restrictively against them each year. It is not compensatory; immigrants and their descendants are eligible, and all these factors intensify hostility between the racial and ethnic groups involved, which is then the object of the quotas and other race-baiting official policies.