The pretense that only Democrats support race preferences

Marvin Olasky writes at TownHall.com:

The one continuity between the old Democratic Party and the new is that each made or makes its peace with racism. The old party, with its solid South base, demanded preferences for whites; the new party, with its solid African-American base, demands preferences for blacks. Both bigotries were, are and ever will be wrong.

How can Olasky criticize the Democrats for their support of race preferences, while failing to mention the fact that the Republican party—including President Bush and some of his top aides such as Powell, Rice, and Gonzales—also support race preferences? The revolutionary Grutter decision, followed by Bush’s endorsement of it and the complete failure of the Republican party to rise up in outrage against it, was an earthquake in American political life. Yet conservative writers have by and large ignored this event, apparently because they don’t want to damage Bush among conservatives, and they don’t want to face the fact that the Republican party—and conservatives themselves—have surrendered to the race-preferences regime.

It is not intellectually honest of conservatives to single out the Democrats for supporting the principle of racial proportionality, when Republicans are following one or two steps behind the Democrats along the same path.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2004 07:04 PM | Send