The switch from one rationale to another—and if the second hadn’t had some success it would have been succeeded by a third—shows that all such rationales are and will forevermore be mere rationalizations. Rationalizations for what? For a claim to unearned status.

The only defensible switch in government policy was a negative change: from barriers to no-barriers.

Why then do liberals continue to favor affirmative action in the face of a generation of proofs that it doesn’t work and is unjust to those against whom it discriminates? That they’re running out of rationalizations won’t induce them to let their policy be guided by empirical evidence. The reason, I suspect, is that there’s one class of empirical evidence that they’ll never accept. It’s so unthinkable that well-meaning conservatives won’t consider it either. Take, for instance, the following passage from the article that Mr. Kalb has cited:

QUOTE: “The question underlying the University of Michigan cases is why are so few African-American 17- and 18-year-olds academically competitive with white and Asian 17- and 18-year-olds,” says Mr. Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
“The answer to that question is not discrimination,” Clegg says. “The answer is extremely high illegitimacy rates, poor public schools, and a culture that too often views studying hard as ‘acting white.’ “
He adds, “Those problems are not going to be solved by racial and ethnic preferences.”
END QUOTE.

Every statement in Mr. Clegg’s remarks is true except for the “answer.” Of course the performance of black students would improve if illegitimacy rates were lower, if public schools had more rigorous standards, and if black culture didn’t penalize high achievers for “acting white.” But Mr. Clegg must know, deepdown, that the gap will never close, for every IQ test and every collation of many IQ tests, and every analysis of the testing techniques used, all show a gap between white and Asian IQs on the one hand, and black IQs on the other.

In fact, the more open the opportunities, the more improvements are made in the scnools, the better the atmosphere for ambitious and talented young blacks, the more intractable the gap will be. As the most talented and brightest blacks will earn their degrees and high salaries, the higher the correlation will be between racial and achievement categories. That’s the Horror looming before egalitarians, as a result of the abolition of artificial barriers to advancement.

It is certainly true that liberalism attempts to destroy the authority of tradition and particularity by forcing “diverse” groups to live together: think bussing in the 1970’s, for example. As long as we are forced into close quarters, particularly starting with little children, the tyranny of particular prejudices will break down. We’ll all have sex with each other and then our marriages and children will depend upon the diversity principle that gave birth to them — which in turn means that they will depend upon the destruction of particularity and tradition. Obviously diversity is just a “soft” eugenics.

People take exception on occasion when I talk about Naziism being just another form of liberalism. I admit that the terminology is obscure in our broken state, although I think the way I use it aligns with what is transcendently true. The eugenic constuction of the new ubermensch, and the necessity to destroy the traditionalist, particular untermensch in order to make way for the superman, is common to all liberalisms. Particular methods and discriminations (unavoidable in all politics including liberal politics, though generally denied by liberals themselves through the exception-categories of “oppressor”, “hater”, “rights violator”, etc) vary from one form of liberalism to another but in the end Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc are just forms of liberalism: liberalism ALWAYS pursues eugenic supremacy in a new world of the free and equal superman, and Mr. Kalb is right that “diversity” is a natural “soft tyranny” in the pursuit of liberalism’s eugenic objectives.

I dont understand here what Matt means by eugenic aims? I think maybe that liberalism seeks from people a kind of purity of essence(a thought pattern) and not a purity of form(superman). I’m not sure now but there doesnt seem to be physical eugenics in this but rather a eugenics of the mind, certainly physical dysgenics is the unwitting current fashion.

Matt raises an interesting point about one of the central ideas of liberalism (or whatever label we may wish to assign this religion). The defiance and rebellion against the created natural order - even to the point of desiring the abolition of such inborn aspects such as gender and ethnicity. At its heart lies the liberals’ basic refual to acknowledge anything outside of themselves, of any order, morality, or natural law that they cannot control or change to suit their purposes.

In reply to Stephen: all liberal conceptions of the new free and equal superman involve the abolition of the old authoritative and therefore oppressive particularities, including racial ones (thus the eugenic content to all liberalisms), that are history’s legacy. I don’t know that liberalism makes a distinction between the formal and the essential except to the extent that anything of the latter sort that impedes freedom and equality must be stamped out. I think that in liberalism the only essence that is acknowledged is the human will (it can be argued that earlier liberalisms like Locke’s do acknowledge other essences but make them politically irrelevant).

The nazi approach was to postulate aryans as proto-supermen, whereas another more currently accepted form of liberalism defines the multicult as the proto-superman. In all cases the traditional-authoritative-oppressor untermensch must be exterminated by one means or another, though.

In a way I am just agreeing with Stephen: at the heart of all liberalisms is an attempt to abolish everything physically essential that is holding back the superman. Whether it is right to call that attempt “eugenics” is I suppose a matter of legitimate inquiry.