Buying false racial peace AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF GUILTY CONSERVATIVES AND FATALISTIC LIBERALS IS PROPPING UP OUR DIVISIVE RACIAL SPOILS SYSTEM -- AND PREVENTING AMERICA FROM FINDING A HIGHER COMMON GROUND. + + + + + + + + + BY JIM SLEEPER | It isn't often that a prophet without honor savors a little vindication, but Michael Lind can take satisfaction from having called something right when virtually no one would listen. Three years ago, he argued in his book "The Next American Nation" that there is nothing distinctively or virtuously "liberal" about the color-coding of American life through racial preferences, racial electoral districting and racial "diversity" programs. Of course, liberal activists, legislators and professionals have built these into the foundations of a kind of national Church of Affirmative Action, but Lind was bold enough to ask whose "faith" and interests the new liberal religion really serves. If anything, he argued, affirmative action that trades on racial preferences -- that is, that practices a color-coded double standard -- represents a collaboration of elite liberals and conservatives in a "failed and repellent regime" that serves a national "overclass" more than it does its disadvantaged clients. Racial preferences that are imposed to achieve "diversity" actually help corporate managers to divide and conquer work forces whose most important interests have little to do with color; and dressing up racial disparities as cultural "differences" eases the consciences of liberal elites who have no real intention of redressing the inequities that divide not only blacks from whites but also whites from whites and, these days, even blacks from blacks. Or so Lind loudly proclaimed. As soon as liberals who'd ballyhooed Lind's conversion from conservatism figured out that he was damning them, too, they, like conservatives, dismissed him. But lately some liberal writers have grasped his insight that behind affirmative action's "progressive" moralist drapery moves a liberal-conservative consensus that isn't so "progressive" after all. The problem is that some of these writers sound oddly unfazed by this, if not, indeed, relieved. That, too, is about what Lind expected of liberal spin doctors. Late in February, Jeffrey Rosen, one of the most acute liberal critics of affirmative action's excesses, surprised readers of the New Yorker by reporting that some conservatives, dismayed by abysses of black failure that have opened in California and Texas after successful court suits and voter initiatives imposed race-neutral policies, are deciding that racial preferences aren't so bad after all. In Rosen's account, conservatives like legal scholar and activist John Yoo are slipping quietly into the Church of Affirmative Action to lament that by sweeping away every racial consideration in state admissions, hiring and contracting, they have unduly hurt blacks and Hispanics, many of whom couldn't make it into Berkeley and UCLA without explicit preferences. More important, Rosen reports, conservatives' own elite institutions could become too white for their own political comfort. No one is more sensitive to charges of racism than honorable conservatives, whose movement has so much to live down. Better to retain racial preferences as a kind of "damage control" against the "resegregation" of elite institutions, Yoo tells Rosen, who seems to agree that, for all affirmative action's deceits and debilitations, race-neutrality "may be far worse." Hard on the heels of Rosen's report came "In Defense of Preference," a bellwether New Republic essay by distinguished sociologist Nathan Glazer. In the '70s, Glazer had delighted conservatives by leading the charge against preferences; now he said he'd changed his mind. The battle over affirmative action is a contest between "a clear principle" and "a clear reality," Glazer explains. The principle is that merit must prevail over race in applications for jobs, college admissions and contracts. The reality is that "strict adherence to this principle would result in few African-Americans getting jobs, admissions and contracts." Three times, Glazer reminds readers that national business, labor, religious, educational, political and media elites -- conservative as well as liberal -- would rather accommodate "racial reality" by bending the merit principle. Like Yoo, they fear that race-neutral testing will whiten (and so delegitimize) their institutions in the name of standards that are abstract and unreachable. And Glazer agrees with them, calling the alternative "too grim to contemplate." Even more candid about affirmative action's role in "damage control" is James Traub, writing in the same issue of the New Republic. "Affirmative action is, at bottom, a dodge," he acknowledges, but "it allows us to put off the far harder work: ending the isolation of young black people and closing the academic gap that separates black students -- even middle-class black students -- from whites. When we commit ourselves to that, we can do without affirmative action, but not before." Never mind that the "dodge" of racial double standards has become so deeply entrenched that it weakens any incentive to make deeper commitments; Traub's candor and sobriety are almost bracing compared to the open exultation at the New York Times, an arbiter of overclass consensus. Every year or so, the Times celebrates some supposed new apostle of liberal racialism. A few years ago, Lind himself was anointed because his break with conservatism seemed so vehement and telling, but then his excoriations of the "failed and repellent regime" of preferences caught up with him, and now he is seldom seen in the Times. Two years ago, the paper couldn't get enough of eminent black sociologist William Julius Wilson, who had earlier been a pariah for arguing that the significance of race was declining. His new book, "When Work Disappears," seemed more equivocal on the subject, and this at a time when preference-driven liberals needed a life raft amid mounting evidence of popular discontent with preferences. Wilson's book was excerpted in a cover story of the Times Sunday magazine, awarded rare praise in an editorial and touted in op-ed and news features. Then, eminent reviewers outside the Times made clear that the book just isn't very good. And Wilson has been heard from no more. Glazer's recent book, "We Are All Multiculturalists Now," is even weaker (I panned it myself in the Times on April 27, 1997), but no matter: Liberalism needs an apostle. No sooner had his recent New Republic article appeared than Times reporter Stephen Holmes presented a long "Week in Review" account of the article's role in the liberal-conservative consensus in favor of affirmative action. More strident was an editorial-page column, "The Quota- Bashers Come in From the Cold," by Brent Staples, who gloated that not only Glazer but conservative sociologist James Q. Wilson, writing in Commentary, had acknowledged a need for preferences in some cases. Staples got almost every nuance wrong, but no matter; the Times Sunday Magazine has commissioned a long profile of Glazer and assigned it to -- James Traub. It's a wonder that Rosen, Glazer, Traub, Staples and other liberals who've touted the new consensus aren't as worried as Lind that some conservative policy intellectuals and managers agree with them. They may think that conservatives who make nice noises about preferences are converts to liberalism, but conservatives don't become "progressives" by embracing racial double standards in admissions and hiring, or racial districting in electoral politics. Indeed, conservative political operatives and CEOs have always done that, for reasons that make liberals wince. If anything, policy intellectuals like Yoo and Glazer confirm liberals' membership in Lind's "overclass." Even more troubling, the elite consensus in favor of preferences is deeply fatalistic, if somewhat disingenuous, about blacks' capacities and prospects -- and dismayingly fainthearted about undertaking any social and moral initiatives that might really reduce blacks' measured deficiencies. From the abolitionists to the directors of urban settlement houses, classical liberals used to believe in uplift and used to do the actual "heavy lifting" that yielded results. Today's liberals, lacking the will and sense of moral entitlement necessary to "lift" blacks' expectations and performance, prefer to buy a false social peace through racialist brokering that snuffs out civic idealism. Racial double standards make great sense to people who think that blacks' deficiencies are genetically determined (more and more elite liberals assume this, too, but won't say so outside of the intimate dinner parties and tête-a-têtes where I have heard them say it). Double standards make even greater sense to people who think that blacks' measured deficiencies, while not genetic, are culturally so "hard-wired" that overcoming them would require a deeper, more vigorous social renewal than even "white" America envisions for itself. The best way to test -- and, in my view, to refute -- these propositions is to couple stricter, race-transcendent standards with "heavy lifting" -- with clearer cultural messages (about families and work) that are encoded in stronger pedagogical and economic supports. Liberalism used to be about striking this clear balance between economic justice and social discipline. Many Americans hunger for it now. That today's celebrants of the affirmative-action détente don't suggests resignation to a society that is little more than a web of contracts and rights. A racial-preference regime signals liberalism's moral and political implosion, its loss of ability -- and credibility -- to lead an American democracy worth leading. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E: Secrets and lies of campus affirmative action - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE STREETER