Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 30, 2003 02:35 AM
“The implication is that not a single conservative group opposed the racial group-rights system enough to be seriously displeased by a total Bush sell-out to the left on that issue. Ahh, “conservatism.””

is it really a sellout when nothing better was expected?

“we can’t even call them right-liberals any more. They are, in effect, left-liberals”

does this make bush a left-liberal? that’s what i consider him.

I just checked out The Weekly Standard online which over the past week has had a grand total of one article on the Grutter decision, a short column by Terry Eastland, a very low-key critic of affirmative action. From reading this piece, you wouldn’t even know that anything of particular importance happened last week. It seemed like just another liberal-leaning Supreme Court decision that Eastland seemed mildly displeased with. No big deal.

While a handful of conservatives are indeed deeply upset and alarmed, I’m getting the impression that the low-key response is more typical.

But is this really possible? Can it be that the neoconservatives, who for the last 20 years have made opposition to affirmative action the centerpiece of their domestic ideology, will surrender on this issue? How, then, could they continue talking about the Propositional Nation (all men created equal; a nation of individuals where one’s parentage doesn’t matter), given that the placing of race preferences in the Constitution cancels out the Proposition?

This will be one of the most interesting things to watch in coming days and weeks.

I’ve had the same impression as Mr. Auster has. Either they’re so stunned that they need time to think through the implications of this revolutionary decision, or they believe we’ve lost.

Here’s a point I’d like to see a lawyer (which I’m not) address on this site: It’s an old principle that a law must be precise enough for citizens to know when they’re violating it; it can’t be so flexible that a court could define an action as legal today and illegal tomorrow, according to the same statute.

DIVERSITY CAN’T MEET THAT TEST. The only way to make it meet the test would be to assign numerical quotas, which the SC has explicitly ruled out. In other words, the SC has explicitly decided that a concept that is by definition contrary to a basic principle of our legal system is a compelling state interest! (If there’s a lawyer reading this, I’d appreciate learning if I’m mistaken.)

Another point I’d like to see discussed: We may predict further invasions of individual rights in the name of protection of individual rights. For example: we’ve all noticed that advertisers usually include blacks in every social group in their commercials. How long will it be before a company is sued if it doesn’t include a black in a commercial? Diversity, remember, is a compelling state interest, and a quota of one is the minimum way to satisfy it.

Of course, everyone sees the phoniness of these little TV dramas devised to sell stuff. They present “real-life” situations by depicting social groups that are rare in real life. But consistency must bow to compelling state interest. So hypocrisy is an inevitable concomitant of this compelling state interest. The pretext is that such ads are educational as well as pitches to sell stuff. The next step is to subject to obloquy any private (not just country clubs with golf courses) social groupings that are known to be all white. (Pointing finger in accusation: “Is it true that you have no black friends?”)

Mr. Auster, I think you answered your own question about the neocons on another thread: “Liberals lie.” If you scratch a neocon, you’ll find a Tranzi beneath.

Frieda,

I believe newspapers have been sued by the government for failing to include pictures of blacks in their real estate sections.

Well, David Frum is taking it pretty seriously. He’s got a piece headlined “Last Week was not a good week for the Republic,” a weak echo of the title of my article, “One of the most momentous weeks in American history.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary062903.asp

The libertarian Stephen Moore, also at NRO, also takes it pretty seriously, writing: “Thanks to the Supreme Court’s act of supreme unwisdom, King’s dream is now legally prohibited from coming true anytime soon.” This would be the key point for the neocons to admit, that America is not in actual fact the color blind society that they’ve been saying it is. And if it’s not a color blind society, they can’t keep, e.g., promoting diverse immigration on the basis that all the immigrants will assimilate. Under Grutter, every colored immigrant will be the recipient of constitutionally mandated racial privileges. Given that existing reality, how can can the neocons continue supporting mass non-white immigration?

And how will the neocons maintain their optimistic view of America’s expansive role in the world given this decision which destroys the core of their view of America? How will they go on saying, “America represents the principle that all people are the same and have the same rights, and it’s America’s mission to spread this idea to the whole world,” when the supreme law of our Land as currently interpreted says just the opposite? Are we going to export Grutter v. Bollinger to the Dar al-Islam?

My point is that an intellectually honest neoconservative would need to acknowledge that, given America’s actual political condition, it is not in a position to democratize and homogenize the world through open borders and the exporting of democracy.

That real-estate agencies have been sued for not including blacks in their ads doesn’t quite meet my point. All-white ads can be construed as code for “we don’t sell homes in this neighborhood to blacks.” Such suits are a bad enough example of affirmative action, but I was thinking of voluntary SOCIAL situations.

A racially mixed commercial for cake mix isn’t necessary to prevent anyone from inferring that the manufacturer won’t sell cake mixes to blacks. The message has to do with the SOCIAL setting in which friends in a private home exclaim how delicious it is. That’s far more pernicious, and it’s where we’re headed—and in a period when all-black fraternities and dorms in colleges are commonplace and immune to criticism.

The Washington Times has been pretty weak on Grutter. They had one editorial admitting the hope of a color-blind society is fading, then turning around and quoting George Will’s stupidly smug column saying that none of this is a problem because America’s increasing racial diversity renders race preferences moot:

“Moreover, as George Will astutely points out, such race-conscious remedies are inevitably being overtaken by demographic realities, such as rising rates of intermarriage, and the fact that race and ethnicity have become ‘extremely fluid, hence dubious, scientific categories.’ ‘African Americans, he points out, include the descendants of African slaves and recent voluntary immigrants from Africa. ‘Hispanic Americans’ include Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans and Argentinians — but not Brazilians. Many Hispanics and Arab Americans choose to describe themselves as white on Census forms.’ “
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030624-085744-3615r.htm

So, it’s the same old song-and-dance we’ve been hearing for over a decade: the solution to the problems brought by increasing racial diversity and increasing race quotas is the continuing increase of racial diversity which somehow so mixes different peoples together that the differences stop mattering, combined with racial intermarriage which will somehow make the whole problem go away.

What the “stupidly smug George Will” doesn’t realize is that racial differences will matter more and more in the future. Laws favoring “minorities” will become increasingly draconian.

And then there’s this column by Robert Novak I linked in another blog entry,

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20030630.shtml

indicating that the White House wants to pick O’Connor as Chief Justice and fill the vacancy with Gonzales.

A correspondent writes to me:

“The Novak article is terrible news. After all that about the conservatives being furious, they are already, it sounds, reconciled to Gonzales! They didn’t hold out at all? They didn’t make some noises, some discomfort for their man? Does he think he doesn’t need them? Do they think he doesn’t really need them?”

It would be helpful if everyone wrote their representatives and demanded set-asides for themselves. If everyone did this and also acted on their demands by not supporting representatives that voted with Bush, the set asides would soon end. The usual response is this is unrealistic because then one would be letting the other side win. But this ignores the fact that if everyone thought that way, nothing would ever change. Moreover, voting is not the only way of nonviolent fighting; it is just the easiest (and maybe the lamest).