Affirmative Action

Racial preference, the policy for which “affirmative action” is a deliberately misleading euphemism, is endorsed by its defenders as a means for achieving many worthy ends. Of one thing there can be no doubt: racial preference has been the chief means by which, since the sixties, American liberalism has committed suicide.

Or rather, a certain kind of liberalism, the multicultural liberalism of multicultural theory and identity politics. Apart from the misappropriated name, this multicultural liberalism has nothing in common with nineteenth-century classical liberalism or twentieth-century social-market liberalism. Under the aegis of multicultural liberalism, the New Deal coalition based on working-class whites has disi...