Class Action

The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action, by Richard D. Kahlenberg (Basic, 350pp., $25)

WHY does affirmative action refuse to disappear? Given its obvious injustice, and the fact that even on its own terms it fails—delivering racial spoils mainly to relatively privileged minorities rather than to the poor—one might well wonder. The answer is that racial preferences have been sustained and expanded because the Left is passionate in cleaving to its besetting error of this century, while the Right is embarrassed about its own worst mistake. That error, and that mistake, now seem ready to add an additional injustice—preferences based on class—to the one that already exists.