The Complexities of Coalition

One audacity of neoconservatives is their appropriation of the radical egalitarian rhetoric of the 1960s. In his recent book, The Affirmative Action Fraud, for example, Clint Bolick calls for a restoration of the Founding Fathers’ “civil rights vision.” According to Bolick and other conservatives, commitment to race and gender blindness was ensconced in the Constitution in 1789; while American practices did not always live up to these ideals, a steady progress brought us as a nation to real equality. Since the 1960s, however, a “politics of difference” has torn apart America’s common fabric, with groups claiming that they are oppressed, and demanding to be noticed in their social difference and cultural specificity. Th...