TRADITION!:

Friends of Affirmative Action: Briefs filed in two pivotal cases before the Supreme Court testify to how central affirmative action is to preserving diversity in American life. (NY Times, 4/01/03)

At issue is not just the admissions policies at Michigan's college and law school, but the question of whether race can be taken into account by universities, employers and the government to promote diversity. The briefs provide the court--and particularly Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the likely swing vote--with compelling reasons to uphold affirmative action.

The briefs supporting Michigan--filed by major corporations, elected officials and academics, among others--testify to how central affirmative action is to preserving diversity in American life, and to how much damage would be done if it were eliminated. In Vietnam, the military brief notes, many African-Americans served among the enlisted but few were officers, and the forces were racially polarized. It became so bad, the brief says, the leadership feared that the military was "on the verge of self-destruction." But race-based recruitment programs increased the percentage of minority officers and greatly improved race relations.

Fortune 500 companies tell the court about the importance they, too, place on affirmative action. A brief on behalf of 65 corporations, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola and General Electric, asserts that racial and ethnic diversity in colleges and universities is vital to the companies' ability to maintain a diverse work force, and ultimately to their "continued success in the global marketplace."

When Mona Charen was on Booknotes this weekend, discussing her book Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First , Brian Lamb asked:

LAMB: So, what about conservatives? Have they misjudged anything in your lifetime and if they have what is it?

CHAREN: Race. In the early days of the civil rights movement, conservatives were nowhere to be found. They tended to joke about it. They didn`t see the moral certitudes that were involved and they tended to give way too much weight to tradition as opposed to justice in the beginning.

I think over time when it comes to racial issues the conservatives have come around completely and are now really the principled ones in this discussion and that it`s more often liberals who are attempting to see things, you know, take color into account way too much and conservatives who are willing to look at people as individuals now, now.

LAMB: If you were going to pinpoint the time back then when conservatives misjudged and didn`t sign on at the right time, when would that have been?

CHAREN: In the `60s.

LAMB: Around what in particular, the civil rights bill?

CHAREN: The civil rights movement, the civil rights bills. Let`s see. I`m having trouble thinking of particular moments or things that people said but I can remember sort of reading conservative publications, not at the time, I was too young, but later and thinking oh, that grates. You know the tone is wrong. It wasn`t so much what they said as the way they said it. You know it was kind of grudging and the sort of this isn`t our cause, that feeling that you got in those days.

The readings to which Ms Charen refers, though she's too much a lady to say so, are from National Review and even from one of her mentors, the great William F. Buckley Jr, and they are grating for conservatives because while right on many of the principles involved they are ultimately very wrong on the big question. Those who wished to preserve what was best about Southern culture had a serious and normally sensible case to make, but the American South was not "normal" in any way that conservatism should have countenanced. The denial of rights to blacks, which necessarily hung on the repellent idea that they were not fully human, disfigured America in such drastic ways that no "tradition" could possibly outweigh the ongoing injustice. Yet, Mr. Buckley and others at the magazine argued not merely that integration and the granting of civil rights should be achieved cautiously, so as to minimize the damage to society, but that the maintenance of that society was more important than even attempting to heal the malignancy within. Thus, even thirty years later, in 1998, Mr. Buckley had the following exchange with Ira Glasser of the ACLU, on Firing Line:

Glasser: In 1961, you said you were "not ready to abandon the ideal of local government in order to kill Jim Crow."

Buckley: That's true.

Glasser: You ought to be ashamed of that now. Are you?

Buckley: No In order to advance them [blacks], certain cultural changes, including education, had to be done Whether it should have been turned over to the federal government, in my judgment, it ought not to have been.

One can't help but be dismayed by this elevation of local government--does it not matter whether that government is just or not?--over the dignity of the humans who live under it. Moreover, one finds oneself locked in an inescapable circle, because tradition serves equally well as an argument against making the change on the local level, from within, as against making the change from above, via federal mandate. If one's tradition is injustice then the defense of tradition is the defense of injustice.

But we are, as Ms Charen notes, arrived at a time when the roles have reversed and conservatives are on the right side of civil rights, the side that vindicates human dignity and here, in one of those delightful ironies, that make life worth living, we find the Times reverting to that earlier tragically mistaken argument of the conservative opponents of racial justice and basing their case on, "how central affirmative action is to preserving diversity in American life, and...how much damage would be done if it were eliminated." It is not, of course, any more possible to make a moral argument for this new form of racial spoils than it was for the old, so it's necessary to fall back on "tradition" and preserving the good and avoiding the damage that change will bring, etc., etc., etc.... Diversity may or may not be a worthwhile thing, but this is surely just a preferential, not a moral question--it's not, for instance, readily apparent that it is superior to homogeneity, either in theory or in practice. So what we end up with is the Times arguing in favor of an immoral system in order to vindicate a merely political impulse, and doing so on the basis of a line of thought that most of us accept as having been discredited no later than four decades ago. We've gone from conservatives arguing that racism is an appropriate and traditional means of maintaining homogeneity to liberals arguing that racism is an appropriate and traditional means of maintaining diversity. But it all comes down to the same thing: the advocacy of racism, the defense of injustice.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2003 10:25 AM