Affirmative Action

...470 • DISSENT Affirmative Action They are benevolent authoritarians, Fabian technocrats, the proponents of race-based social engineering...

...Decrepit inner-city schools...

...The people who passed for liberals, though, tended—to use a term coined by the great Texan New Dealer Maury Maverick—to speak gobbledegook: "Quotas...

...Racial discrimination against particular individuals, in cases of proven harm to those individuals, should be rigorously punished under federal anti-discrimination law, even as racial preferences are abolished...

...A new, integrationist, social-market liberalism need not—indeed, must not—ignore the persistence of both active racism and the effects of centuries of white supremacy...

...The multicultural left that masterminded and defends racial preference cannot be reformed...

...Some left-of-center politicians and activists persist in thinking otherwise...

...The degrading, quasi-zoological term "white males" (adult human"males," of any race, are men) has acquired distinct and pejorative class connotations that should make people who are really left of center squirm...

...We're just in favor of numerical goals:' After thirty years in which the multicultural left has dictated the civil-rights agenda ofAmerican liberalism and even formulated the weird scholastic patois in which conventional liberals discuss civil rights, what is the result...

...This policy of using economic entitlements to bribe white voters to tolerate anti-white discrimination, while dismissing legitimate criticism of racial preference as nothing more than conservative demagogy, worked for a while...

...After thirty years of defections by white voters, in the North as well as the South, the Democrats have finally lost Congress, and are likely to lose the White House again as well...

...Or rather, a certain kind of liberalism, the multicultural liberalism of multicultural theory and identity politics...

...Fortunately—if the multicultural left is to be believed—white liberal political appointees and white liberal federal judges, along with their academic and journalistic cheerleaders, constitute the one group of white Americans who are somehow capable of transcending their prejudices and becoming disinterested ephors, unmoved movers, a collective pouvoir neutre...

...Though black and Hispanic middle classes, if the term can be used for elites so dependent on public patronage, have been artificially created or enlarged, conditions in the inner cities are worse than ever...

...Conservatives in the seventies and eighties may have been wrong on many things, but at least they tended to say what they meant...

...Achieving these egalitarian social reforms will be politically difficult, after racial preference is abolished...

...Rigorous antinepotism and job-advertising laws, modeled after some in social-democratic Europe...

...Fnlightened despotism in the area of race relations is necessary, we are told, because most legislators either share or must defer to the supposedly irremediable racism of the white majority...

...Apart from the misappropriated name, this multicultural liberalism has nothing in common with nineteenth-century classical liberalism or twentieth-century social-market liberalism...

...Racial preference is not the cause of these problems—but by alienating indispensable white voters it makes impossible the kind of transracial political coalition that might pressure politicians to ameliorate them...

...Why, we're against quotas, too...

...No more...

...The dilution of black and Hispanic political power...

...Twenty-first-century American libFALL • 1995 • 471 Affirmative Action eralism should seek its inspiration in New Deal social-market liberalism and in the color-blind integrationism of the early Civil Rights Revolution— and find a new social base in working-class and lower-middle-class white, Hispanic, and black Americans (listed in order of their relative size in the twenty-first-century U.S...

...Ghetto poverty and welfare dependency...

...Old-boy networks among whites in unions and law firms...

...Not the least among the sins of multicultural liberalism is the corruption of language...

...They prefer to circumvent democratically elected legislatures whenever possible, in order to impose their vision of numerical racial balance in every profession and subculture (except, perhaps, their own) by means of court orders and executive orders...

...These enlightened whites, it is presumed, are found mostly in the college-educated upper middle class...

...Lack of health coverage for many black and Hispanic Americans...

...The multicultural left, with its contempt for a caricatured white majority, makes the Federalists of 1800 look in retrospect like radical populists...

...Multicultural liberals, in power, obfuscate...

...The cruelest irony of all is this: unless they are dismantled, in the years to come racial preferences, designed to help black Americans, are likely to be turned against blacks by Hispanic politicians and activists seeking to maximize the Hispanic take from the racial spoils system...

...The race-neutral remedies might include mandatory, well-remunerated workfare plus residential deconcentration...

...The Democratic party may soon be the "minority party" indeed—the party of blacks and Hispanics (plus Jews frightened by the religious right...

...Indeed, it is racist, snobbish, and antidemocratic, authoritarian, and profoundly insincere...

...Nor is racism hard to find in the paternalism of white leftists and liberals who assume that nonwhite Americans—not only blacks, but so-called Hispanics and so-called Asian and Pacific Islanders— are so feeble that they can never advance in American society unless enlightened whites waive the rules and lower standards on their behalf...

...Du Bois, a student in Berlin of Treitschke) and the post-colonial French third worldism that has so influenced today's would-be "diasporic" intellectuals...

...While gender quotas have disproportionately benefited upper-middle-class women in college admissions, employment in the professions, and government contracting, the wages of most women, along with those of their husbands, have plunged...

...The insincere judicial-academic mode of liberal public discourse, as much as anything else, explains the attraction of many intellectuals of my generation to the right...

...It needs to be defeated and replaced by a generation of liberals, in temporary alliance, if necessary, with conservatives, in a campaign to purge American law of racial preferences and racial labels...

...population...

...Of one thing there can be no doubt: racial preference has been the chief means by which, since the sixties, American liberalism has committed suicide...

...Equalization of school funding by state and federal governments...

...Universal, guaranteed, portable health care benefits for all American citizens...

...They employ two languages—a ritual public dialect compounded of euphemism, legalese, and pseudo-scientific jargon ("goals and timetables," "remedies," "diversity") and a private language of ends-justify-means utilitarianism ("Without quotas, there won't be any blacks on campus...

...In recent years liberal Democrats have tended to run as populist defenders of the economic interests of the transracial working and middle classes—and then, in power, to pass out jobs and entitlements on the basis of race...

...For centuries liberals have sought to use the reagent of plain, clear language to dissolve the obfuscations of power...

...The multicultural left is racist, insofar as it has abandoned the trans-cultural Enlightenment humanism that informs liberal nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism alike for a racial and ethnic mysticism described euphemistically as "celebration of difference" and "diversity?' This biocultural romanticism has swelled from tributaries in nineteenth-century German racial mysticism (passed on by W.E.B...

...This Marcusean left coalition of feminists and minorities (minus the college students) is anything but "progressive...

...The adoption of proportional representation and, possibly, cumulative voting for local, state, and congressional elections...

...Under the aegis of multicultural liberalism, the New Deal coalition based on working-class whites has disintegrated and been replaced by a fossilized New Left coalition of upper-middle-class white social liberals and members of the black and Hispanic professional classes addicted to government preferences and corporate tokenism...

...As for the "vestiges of racism," embodied in an American class system that perpetuates the older American caste system, these, without exception, can be combated by race-neutral means...

...That would be their only concession to conservatism...

...Achieving them will be politically impossible, unless racial preference is abolished...