Michael Lind: The Liberal Case Against Race-Based Affirmative Action

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.]

Some time ago I attended an event in Washington, D.C., in which Virginia Sen. James Webb startled the audience by declaring:"The greatest threat that this country faces is the class system."...

Webb's intervention is a reminder that, from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, there was a lively debate over race-based affirmative action between integrationist or" colorblind" liberals and liberals of the"identity politics" school. Most of the liberal critics of race-based policy were pro-labor liberals and social democrats, while many of its defenders were found among neoliberals, who favored inexpensive symbols of racial progress even as they sought to deregulate the economy, slash welfare and shrink the government.

In the late 1990s, after the Clinton administration announced its affirmative action policy --"Mend it, don't end it" -- the editors of liberal journals and other gatekeepers of progressive orthodoxy declared abruptly that the debate was over. Young progressives entering politics in the last decade may not even know that there were and are liberals who oppose race-based affirmative action and that their ranks included Bayard Rustin, who organized Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington. (Rustin was a gay black social democrat; so much for the claim that only conservative white males oppose race-based public policies.)...

In making the rather Orwellian argument that the sequel to the anti-racist civil rights revolution needed to be a temporary or permanent era of benevolent racial discrimination, contemporary defenders of racial preferences frequently quote President Lyndon Johnson's historic commencement address of June 4, 1965, at Howard University,"To Fulfill These Rights":

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say,"You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

I once asked the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who along with Richard Goodwin drafted Johnson's speech, whether these words were intended to be a manifesto for affirmative action."Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Not," Moynihan replied, in his staccato style."We were not talking about affirmative action. We were talking about jobs. Safe streets. Good schools. The safety net. Healthcare. Strong families."...