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Affirmative Action
Forever? Racial preferences, though they seem a shortcut to a multi-ethnic elite, actually fail that test on two grounds. First, they systematically mismatch minority talent to academic opportunities, placing the top 10 percent of designated minority students into competition with the top 1 percent of white and Asian students. Not surprisingly, a disproportionately high number then drop out — and those who remain are tempted to explain their difficulties as a result of concealed racism. Hence the classrooms are often places of resentment and division rather than of the energetic exchange of life experiences imagined by Justice O'Connor. Some conservatives understandably take comfort from O'Connor's suggestion that diversity should cease to be enforced in 25 years. But O'Connor took no steps toward a time limit. She merely expressed a hope — and that hope was at variance with her justification for diversity now. If diversity benefits all races admitted to college by elevating the educational benefits they receive, why should such universal benefits be discontinued in 25 years?
The Supreme Court delivered a huge blow to equal opportunity on June 23, but the two cases involving "diversity" at the University of Michigan may have been lost well before then. That's because the Center for Individual Rights, the Washington, D.C.-based law firm handling the litigation, made a tactical decision early on not to challenge Michigan's claim that racial and ethnic diversity improves the quality of higher education. "We didn't have the resources to turn it into an issue," says Curt Levey of CIR. "Besides, people out there have a sense that diversity is valuable, and we didn't want to get into a debate over that. We wanted to focus on the legal principles." As it turned out, legal principle had little to do with what the Supreme Court decided. "I say this more in sadness than in anger, but CIR made a tactical error," says Peter Wood of Boston University. "They should have confronted the diversity argument."
In the last week of June, conservatism suffered two of its worst defeats in a generation — the Supreme Court's endorsement of state-sponsored racial preferences and congressional passage of a huge new prescription-drug entitlement. Worse yet, President Bush praised the Supreme Court decision — and twisted arms in Congress to pass the drug bill. Both of these defeats illustrate modern democracy's inexorable drive to provide large benefits to the few at the expense of the public good. The bully pulpit of the presidency is the best potential counterweight to this inevitable tendency of factions to try to maximize benefits for themselves at the expense of the common good. A president can mobilize citizens in behalf of principle: Ronald Reagan, to cite a recent example, is already climbing the ranks of presidential ratings based in no small measure on his philosophical consistency. For this reason, it is especially disappointing that President Bush has aided rather than obstructed these special-interest programs.
GWBush.com creator Zack Exley is now the organizing director for MoveOn.org, the web-based activist group that attracted worldwide attention in June when it held a "virtual primary" of Democratic presidential candidates. "In the long run, MoveOn could be our Rush Limbaugh," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. The New York Times hailed MoveOn as a "glimpse into [the] politics of the future." But under close examination, MoveOn appears to be more a reflection of the politics of GWBush.com than a genuinely new, forward-looking political movement. The site is filled with the hostility toward the president that defines some segments of the Democratic party, and its recent success has some Democrats worried. "There are quite a few people in the party who really do want this election to be about their self-righteous knowledge of the perfidy of George W. Bush and the perfidy of the centrist Democrats who have caved in to him," says one Democrat. "It's just one long bellow of rage."
The Left naturally resents Berlusconi's fortune and his attempts to protect it, but the exceptional malignity of the attack derives from his unconditional admiration of the United States. "I support American policy," he once said, "whatever it might be." Rising from a modest background through his own efforts, he is a standing example of American can-do values. He advocates the free market at every opportunity, and praises Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He sides with the United States against the proposals of the Kyoto treaty. He would have liked to send an Italian contingent to Afghanistan, and probably to Iraq too. He is President Bush's welcome guest at the Crawford ranch. At Strasbourg they shudder at anyone like that. It's a socialist assembly carefully pre-arranged for the sermonizings of the bearded Schulz and his colleagues, in which conservatives are ostracized, and lucky not to be outlawed.
At the same time that social conservatives were reaching this dead end, the agenda of gay-rights organizations was changing, too. What, after all, have been gays' great demands in recent years? They have asked for the opportunity to serve in the armed forces, to lead Boy Scout troops, to marry and adopt. Social-conservative rhetoric on homosexuality remained stuck in the 1970s, presenting gays as sexual radicals. Homosexual groups also embraced the quintessential conservative idea of a fixed human nature. Indeed, they pushed an exaggerated form of that idea: genetic determinism. Many people who would otherwise be disposed to object to homosexuality came to believe that gays and lesbians were "born that way." Gay activists had to be ambivalent about this development, given the subtext: Who would choose to be that way? A mildly "homophobic" sentiment was recruited to the side of gay rights. It has been a powerful ally. No space has been left in which to love the sinner and hate the sin; objection is discrimination.
Conservatives can no longer take comfort in DOMAs (defense-of-marriage acts), state laws affirming that marriage is only for a man and a woman. For there is nothing in Lawrence — in its turgid language or in its (putative) reasoning about dignity, liberty, and autonomy — that can be held at bay by statutes or state constitutions. What then is to be done? Conservatives must hold the defensive lines — in state courts, in legislatures, in corporate America — as best they can. These efforts will come to naught, however, if the Court stays its course. The only way to rein in this runaway Court is to change the supreme positive law: the Constitution. The Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) would impose upon willful justices — and every other public actor in the land — a definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The amendment would leave legislatures free to extend some benefits to non-marital households. But courts could not.
A good deal of the trouble we're in was foreseeable. This has to be the case, because some people, in fact, foresaw it. Does that mean the war was a mistake? No, for two reasons. First, the dangers of letting a regime like Saddam's sneak its way to WMD capabilities were simply too great to countenance. (Just because we haven't discovered barrels full of toxic goop, by the way, doesn't mean the Baath was innocent of such motives or programs.) Even the problems we have now are preferable to the risks we would have run from continued inaction. But second, the trouble we're in would have been far less had decapitation worked, and, even more important, had the transition from the military to the reconstruction phase been planned and implemented more competently. Bremer is right to say that what we are trying to do is very hard. He is too much a diplomat to admit that we've made it much harder than it needed to be.
In challenging the United States over Iraq, Chirac surely knew that he stood little chance of persuading President Bush to change course. Yet here was a means of demonstrating to the world that, whatever its faults as an engine of economic progress, the Romano-European state nevertheless embodies a higher type of civilization than that of the Anglo-Americans. It was an inspired exercise in salesmanship. Intellectuals of various stripes rallied to Chirac's standard and argued that Romano-Europe — the same civilization that gave the world absolutism, Bonapartism, socialism, National Socialism, fascism, and Francoism — is somehow morally superior to the coarser civilization of the "Anglosphere." As long as men like President Chirac can persuade the chattering classes that in defending Romano-European traditions they are resisting a shallow American materialism, they will find useful support in their effort to prevent would-be Mrs. Thatchers from rising up to take them down.
Censors Everywhere — Tracy Lee Simmons . . . The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch One Man's Zeta Jones — David Gelernter . . . Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire Shelf Life: Question Authority — Michael Potemra on the insurgent conservatives at Encounter Books. Music: Backhaus for Your House — Jay Nordlinger on Beethoven pianists, and pianists in general, and Wilhelm Backhaus in particular. City Desk: All the World's a . . . — Richard Brookhiser on a theatrical evening. |
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