Just as the victor after the Cold War were the ones teaching American kids how Marxism and Communism was pretty good.

Southerners couldn’t stop voting Democrat until Reagan, at least out in the open. Jews, minorities, some women, inner city blacks… really can’t help themselves but vote Democrat.

It’s all that fear and cultural loyalty.

The ones who rewrote the South’s own memories of their war… were the Democrats.

The blood is thicker here, you could say. So is the heat.

I never understood how that term was devised in English. To me, “affirmative action” is a better description of nodding one’s head in agreement than setting up racial quotas. I like the Hebrew term for it better: aflaya metakkenet, literally “corrective discrimination”–an acknowledgement that, although the measures may be corrective, they’re still discrimination.

They’re not even corrective, though. I’m glad to see that I oppose affirmative action on the same grounds as most commenters here: Because it goes against the ideal of a merit-based society. The best person for the job, the content of one’s character, etc. Ideals that run contrary to the lazy opportunists (those who want to be rewarded without working for it–hey, that reminds me of somebody… oh, bummer, I can’t remember who it is…) and the genetic determinists (those who think DNA is the same as destiny).

It all goes back to the issue of moral character, then. A moral nation needs no affirmative action to be free of racism; with an immoral nation, affirmative action will quickly become a form of institutional racism as bad as, sometimes worse than, the one it was supposed to correct.

These are human weaknesses. It’s why blacks say someone is a race traitor or wannabe whitey if they go Republican (off the plantation).

Human weaknesses are the easiest way for totalitarian systems to maintain control

Those who live in the US who think they are immune because their “culture is strong”, have no conception of the power of Weapons of Mass Deception.

What would really kill Don Carlos’ common sense perception (which is wrong because the history of the world is written by propagandists, not honest folks), is if Beverly lived in the North or North West or Middle Kansas.

Realizing that this made the whole house of cards fall down, leftists soon turned to ‘diversity’ as their rationale, and here we are. Of course the advantage of ‘diversity’ to the ‘remedy’ rationale is that the latter lets you continue to practice reverse discrimination against some groups in perpetuity.

Even defenders of preferences know it is fundamentally wrong. They comfort themselves with the thought that the betrayal of their sense of fairness is only temporary, and justified to right historical wrongs.

I survived my race-based rejection. In fact, if it hadn’t forced me to leave the city I grew up in I would not have met my wife. But how many white males were made bitter by the exclusion? How many racists did affirmative action create? We know if must have created some, the only question is how many.

I agree with Neo-Neocon…racial progress would have happened without affirmative action, and we would be a more healthy society if we hadn’t taken a shortcut. The same holds for forced school busing. Schools should reflect their communities. Schools would be racially mixed when the communities were racially mixed. Judges and politicians used their power to force white and black children to do what their parents would not: live together. Today, the racial education gap remains. What did we gain by forced busing and was it enough to justify such social engineering? The answer is clearly, no.

FWIW (nothing), to me, the War was principally about States’ Rights, with slavery as a fulcrum issue. The Union (the Federal State) won, the States lost, and that is the enduring heritage.