Allan Bloom and the struggle for the soul of the university

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been slowly plowing through Allan Bloom‘s dense but nevertheless wonderful 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. It’s an indictment of alarming trends in higher education that took hold in the 60s and have only accelerated since.

I plan on another post—maybe even a few more posts—on themes sparked by this book. It’s not that I agree with everything in Bloom’s work. But the good in it is so very good, and still so remarkably timely some twenty-odd years after its publication, that I highly recommend reading it if so far it has passed you by, or even re-reading it if you haven’t taken a look lately.

Bloom is at his best in a chapter entitled “The Sixties,” which I’m reading especially slowly and savoring greatly. The subject matter and his conclusions are disturbing. Bloom writes about the student uprisings of that time, and how so may of the university administrators—and especially the craven professors—responded to the pressure of a violent mob of students by dealing what turned out to be the beginning of the death blows for true academic freedom and devotion to the classical canon of Western thought in American universities. Let me warn you, it’s not a pretty story.

Bloom himself was a professor at Cornell at the time, one of the centers for a student uprising in the spring of 1969. The Cornell demonstrations highlighted and also helped set the stage for so many issues we confront today, including that of affirmative action.

Cornell was only one venue of many—Columbia and Berkeley most famously come to mind—featuring demonstrations that occurred during that tumultuous decade, accompanied by varying degrees of violence. I am not referring to the widespread Vietnam protests which also took place at so many universities of the time; the uprisings of which Bloom wrote, such as the one at Cornell, centered on additional issues directly connected with university curricula, teaching, and student life.

As I said, I plan to write more on this subject in a future post. But right now I’ll just offer the following, from Bloom’s many observations about the student leaders of the demonstrations. When you read it, think about the 60s radicals in general, including for example Bill Ayres [emphasis mine]:

There they were in those few elite universities, which were being rapidly democratized. And their political futures were bleak…providing only the prospect of having to work their way up in the dreary fashion of such contemptible persons as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. But these universities were respected, looked to by the democratic press and were the alma maters of much of the powerful elite. These little places could be seized, just as a polis could be seized. Using them as a stage, students instantly achieved notoriety. Young black students I knew at Cornell appeared on the covers of the national news magazines. How irresistible it all was, an elite shortcut to political influence. In the ordinary world, outside the universities, such youngsters would have had no way of gaining attention. They took as their models Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, promoters of equality, if you please, but surely not themselves equal to anyone. They themselves wanted to be the leaders of a revolution of compassion. The great objects of their contempt and fury were the members of the American middle class, professionals, workers, white collar and blue, farmers—all of those vulgarians who made up the American majority and who did not need or want either the compassion or the leadership of the students. They dared to think themselves equal to the students and to resist having their consciousness raised by them. It is very difficult to distinguish oneself in America, and in order to do so the student substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents’ conspicuous consumption.

I could almost have excerpted any passage from the chapter; the entire piece is of merit. But this particular passage caused me to think of (among many other things) the extremity of the contempt of these radicals and their modern-day descendants for a non-intellectual and uncommon “woman of the people” such as Sarah Palin, and their denigration of her bona fide political achievements.

[ADDENDUM: In a different context, commenter “huxley” notes a quote from Jonah Goldberg, about Obama during the 2008 campaign. I think a fuller version of the quote is quite pertinent here as well:

[Obama is] a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: “People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I’m Here To Help.”

Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there’s no mystery at all, and Obama’s problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He’s an elitist.

Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some liberal spluttered herbal chai tea from her nose at the injustice of this whole elitist canard, and the earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, offering the appropriate bons mots from Balzac at the preposterousness of such a suggestion, saying: “Don’t you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They’re on the side of the proletariat ”” I mean workers ”” and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they’d understand that.”]

Air France crash clues; disaster survivor guilt

The New Neo Posted on by

This is not good news: Brazil and France disagree over whether any of the debris claimed to have been spotted by Brazil is really from the missing flight.

France is saying that the debris located so far is not necessarily from the plane at all. The only material that has actually been hauled up and viewed up close, a cargo pallet, is not of the type that was on the airplane, and the rest of the debris was sighted from the air but bad weather has made it impossible to recover it yet. In addition, the reported oil slick is not from Flight 447 either, although they’ve spotted another oil slick that might be from the downed plane.

In other words, confusion and mystery abound.

Other information indicates a mechanical problem of some sort (including the possibility of a Hal-like computer malfunction), probably compounded by bad weather. In other words, if the cause of the crash was in fact a bomb (something that cannot yet be ruled out), the timing would have been especially coincidental—the catastrophic event began only a few minutes after the pilot had radioed that he was entering an area of highly unstable weather:

The last message from the pilot was a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time Sunday saying he was flying through an area of black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning.

Although that was the final message from the pilot, it was not the final message from the plane:

At 11:10 p.m., a cascade of problems began: the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems. Then, systems for monitoring air speed, altitude and direction failed. Controls over the main flight computer and wing spoilers failed as well. At 11:14 p.m., a final automatic message signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure as the plane was breaking apart.

So although the possibility of a bomb remains, it does not appear to be the most likely explanation.

And then there’s the phenomenon that seems to come with every tragic crash: the many “there but for” tales of those who were supposed to be on the plane but missed it for various reasons only to subsequently hear that the plane went down and took the lives of all aboard. Some people find such a near-miss very difficult to weather, despite their relief at being alive.

This tale of four people who might easily have been on the doomed Air France 447 is typical of those that emerge after nearly every crash. Inability to get a ticket despite Herculean efforts. An early arrival at the airport allowing a departure on an earlier flight.

The psychological repercussions are varied, but a certain percentage of such people have lasting problems:

“Survivors” like these often need psychological counseling, said Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, whose father was among the 170 people killed in 1989 when Libyan terrorists downed UTA Flight 772 with a suitcase bomb. He now heads an association that helps victims of airline disasters.

“They can have big psychological problems. We meet a lot of people like that,” said Denoix de Saint-Marc, who was asked by French authorities to counsel relatives of the victims of Flight 447 at a crisis center at Paris’ airport.

In the case of UTA flight 772, some of the pilots and cabin crew who had flown the French DC-10 jetliner before handing it over to the doomed crew “couldn’t resume their careers,” Denoix de Saint-Marc said.

“They lost their flying licenses because of big psychological problems or alcoholism,” he said.

The Lockerbie crash has a similar story, particularly spotlighted in the case of the “271st victim”:

Jaswant Basuta, a Sikh of Indian nationality, was checked in for Pan Am Flight 103, but arrived at the boarding gate too late. Having attended a family wedding in Belfast, Basuta was returning to New York where the 47-year old car mechanic was about to start a new job. Friends and relatives from nearby Southall came to see him off at the airport terminal, and bought him drinks in the upstairs bar. When “gate closing” flashed on the departure screen, Basuta hurried through security and passport control and sprinted to the departure gate, but the room was empty except for Pan Am ground staff who denied him access to the aircraft.

Basuta was initially considered a suspect as his checked baggage had been on the flight without him. After questioning at Heathrow police station, he was released without charge. Twenty years later, in an interview with the BBC, Basuta talked about his narrow escape from death: “I should have been the 271st victim and I still feel terrible for all the other people who died.”

One of the things that went unmentioned in the Wiki article is why Basuta may have been considered an especially suspicious suspect. The Lockerbie crash occurred in 1988 over Scotland, a mere three years after Air India Flight 182 was brought down by a terrorist bomb over the Atlantic Ocean in Irish airspace, killing all 329 people aboard, most of them Canadians of Indian descent. The death toll was therefore even higher than the dreadful total of 270 (including those on land) who died at Lockerbie.

The perpetrators of the Air India bombing? Sikhs separatists based in Canada, bent on revenge for the 1984 attack on the Sikh shrine known as the Golden Temple (that event also served as motivation for the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; I’ve written at length about both here). And the bomb in the Air India crash had been carried on the plane in a suitcase that was unaccompanied by its owner, just as had happened with Basuta and the Lockerbie flight.

The Air India crash has other commonalities with the current Air France situation, especially the recovery operation. The former broke apart over water 6700 feet deep, and finding the black box was very challenging. The Air France flight is estimated to be in waters that are between 9,000 and 14,000 feet deep, an even more daunting situation.

It’s not an impossible one, however, even if the black box is not found within the 30-day window of opportunity in which it emits “pings” to help with its location:

n 1987, a South African Airways 747 crashed into the Indian Ocean off the island nation of Mauritius, sinking to a depth of about 16,000 feet. After an unsuccessful two-month search by the South African military, the U.S. Navy was able to locate the wreckage and the cockpit voice recorder. The accident was eventually blamed on cargo that caught fire.

Let’s hope that some answers are found before too long, so that the families and loved ones of the dead do not have to continue to endure this terrible uncertainty along with their grief.

The hegemony of the low-rise pant

The New Neo Posted on by

Until recently, I hadn’t really minded the fashion known as low-rise pants—you know, the ones that fit so far down on the hips that they only look good on that tiny (in more ways than one) subset of the female population that’s completely lean, hipless, and stomachless, a group usually found only between the ages of eleven and twenty, and relatively rare even in that cohort.

Commentary in the press about low-rise pants has mostly focused on the ubiquitous “cleavage” (of the rear variety) that occurs, whether on purpose or by accident, when the wearer sits or bends. But being the fashion libertarian that I am, I figure it’s up to the wearers. If they happen to want to expose us all to a portion of the anatomy heretofore only flaunted by paunchy middle-aged plumbers, it doesn’t upset me all that much.

Until now, the rest of us could easily manage to avoid wearing low-rise pants which make us look like dreck: blubby and chubby and a good fifty pounds heavier than we actually are. We just didn’t buy them.

But now the situation is getting serious. Now I must voice an objection. This year—as I discovered when I went to do a little shopping the other day—it has become well-nigh impossible to find any other sort of pants. The fashion powers-that-be have decreed that all of us—fat or thin, young or old—will be wearing our pants in a manner designed (literally) to accentuate and call major attention to the largest portion of our lower anatomies.

Okay, that’s not absolutely true; in fact, there are a few other types of pants to be found here and there, if one looks carefully. For instance, the petite section where I am sometimes known to linger offers—in addition to the low-risers—a fairly generous selection of elastic-waisted polyester monstrosities for the little old ladies who often shop there. When one has given up on fashion entirely, and the only function of clothes becomes to cover one’s nakedness with the least possible flair and expense and the maximum comfort, no doubt that’s the way to go.

But fortunately, I’m not there yet. And unfortunately, my pants choices have dwindled down to a precious few, none of them very good.

What’s more, it’s difficult to tell the lowness of the pants rise when the clothing is on the hanger; one has to go through the strain and ignominy of trying the things on. A very very very short zipper is one clue, but hardly an invariable one. I’ve taken pants with longish zippers to the dressing room only to find they’re a come-on, a decoy cleverly and insidiously designed to sucker people like me into trying them on in hopes of finding a more reasonable amount of coverage than they offer.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that slacks have to go right up to one’s waist (although they used to, for years and years and years, and I never saw anything wrong with it; after all, most women’s waists are smaller than their hips). But they need to arrive somewhere within an inch or two of the general vicinity to prevent the formation of an extra roll (or rolls), and the thousand natural shocks that female flesh is heir to.

In researching this post (yes, I researched it) I discovered that I am not the first to report this phenomenon. It even has a name: muffin top.

Now, a muffin top of the old-fashioned variety is ordinarily a very pleasant thing:

muffin2.jpg

Whereas a muffin top of the new-fangled sort is considerably less so:

muffin-top.jpg

Note that the photo of this particular lady was chosen because, although she’s hardly model-thin, she most definitely is not fat. In fact, in more normal pants, she would look just fine, thank you very much.

But alas, there are no normal pants anymore.

Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: the lasting legacy of insecurity

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent post, I wrote of affirmative action:

We all have subsequently paid dearly, including those whom affirmative action was supposed to benefit, because their achievements have forever after been tainted by the suspicion (correct or incorrect) that they might not have been able to earn them if the playing field had not been recently slanted in their favor.

This is one of the most insidious effects of affirmative action, and Michelle Obama—despite all her achievements and her current position as First Lady—may herself still suffer from it. In a recent commencement speech she gave to the graduating class of Washington Mathematics Science Technology Public Charter School, she had the following to say about Sonia Sontomayor and herself (unfortunately, embedding is disabled for the You Tube video; you’ll have to go here to view it) [emphasis mine]:

…And [Sotomayor] went to Princeton, and in the story she said that when she arrived (and this was nine years before I would even think about going) she said when she stepped on that campus she said that she flet like a visitor landing in an alien country. She said that she never raised her hand that first year because…she was too embarrassed and too intimidated to ask questions…So despite all her success at Princeton—and then she went on to Yale Law School where she was at the top of her cass…and despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sontomayor says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up. And when I read her story I understood exactly how she feels.

Note that Michelle Obama does not say “how she felt.” She uses the present tense: “how she feels.”

Now, perhaps it’s not really affirmative action that’s at fault. I know that imposter syndrome (which is exactly what Ms. Obama is describing) is more likely to be felt by women (even, or perhaps especially, high-achieving ones) than by men. But it seems odd that these particular women might feel it so sharply even at this late date that they find it necessary to talk about it.

In addition, if you watch the video, you may notice that Michelle Obama speaks with a bitterness that appears to haunt her even today. I find it very sad; she seems to have not been able to put the insecurities of her past behind her no matter what heights she has scaled since.

The disconnect: Obama’s polls and the economy

The New Neo Posted on by

Dick Morris (yeah, Dick Morris; can’t stand the guy but every now and then he writes something interesting) points out that Obama’s continuing popularity seems to rest on the fact that the majority of Americans still blame Bush for the bad economy. Morris believes that, as time goes on and the negative consequences of Obama’s own policies take root, his popularity will plummet.

I don’t know. That would require a connection between cause and effect, and a knowledge of financial matters, that may at this point be beyond the powers of the majority of Americans. It also would mean that quite a few people would have to admit that they were wrong in voting for the man.

These are two very formidable barriers.

More from a recovering liberal

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s more from former liberal (and present Berkeley therapist) “Robin” at American Thinker. She discusses all you ever wanted to know about her transformation and were unafraid to ask.

And I was amused by the following from a commenter, as well:

Aren’t most conservatives former liberals to some extent? All children are liberals. They are naive, selfish, and believe the world works the way they want it to work. They throw tantrums and blame everything on someone else. They think being a kid is cool and adults are uncool.

Carter on the rails vs. Obama on the skids: failing industries and deregulation

The New Neo Posted on by

An article headlined “If Obama Had Carter’s Courage…” is bound to get my attention.

Just the other day I compared Carter favorably to Obama in the arena of hypocrisy about promises not to live high on the public’s dime. Now Holman W. Jenkins offers another shining moment from the Carter past (one of which I was not previously aware): when our system of freight railroads was threatened with multiple bankruptcies and faced the grim prospect of nationalization, Carter showed courage in resisting that call, as well as in confronting the special interest groups to which politicians are ordinarily beholden:

Rail executives and economists had been arguing since the 1920s, when competition from trucks and planes began to emerge, that comprehensive federal regulation had only distorted the industry’s pricing, driven away investment, and made competitive adaptation impossible…it still took some doing on Mr. Carter’s part. When the bill stalled, a hundred phone calls went from the White House to congressmen, including 10 by Mr. Carter in a single evening. The bill essentially no longer required railroads to provide services at a loss to please certain constituencies. It meant going up against farmers, labor, utilities, mining interests, and even some railroads—whereas Mr. Obama’s auto bailout tries to appease key lobbies like labor and greens, which is why it can’t work…

In 1980 [during the Carter administration], Congress passed the Staggers Act, ending a century of federal regulation and leading to the railroad industry’s renaissance. Leo Mullin, then a young Conrail veep, would later look back and praise all involved for having the fortitude to recognize that salvaging the taxpayer’s investment in Conrail meant more than fixing a single broken company—it meant fixing a defective regulatory environment.

That fortitude is exactly what’s missing today, as it was missing from Mr. Obama’s statement on Monday, which attributed GM’s failure to sins by everyone but Washington.

I’m extremely unfamiliar with the history of the railroads (passenger or freight) in this country—except for the usual random facts every child used to be forced to learn in school, such as the golden spike at Promontory Point; as well as a trip to Chicago I took when very young on the Twentieth Century Limited, which included sleeping berths a few inches from the ceiling for my brother and me as the old train rattled along on through the night; and then later the obligatory jokes about Amtrak coupled with several rather frustrating trips between Boston and New York on said line.

Alas, it would take me far more time than I have available at the moment to catch up on all I don’t know (which is almost everything) about the history of the US railroad system. But a very quick skimming of the Wiki entry on Amtrak and one on Conrail (the freight system Jenkins is referring to, the one with which Carter dealt) indicates it’s an intriguing story as well as a relevant one.

For example, I always thought the cause of the decline in the passenger rail system was obvious. Whoever would prefer a train ride to a car ride given the choice, except for commuters in cities with traffic so bad that driving has become an exercise in hair-tearing frustration and futility? And it’s certainly true that passenger railroads probably would have declined when faced with stiff auto competition no matter what they’d tried to do to compete.

But they never really had a chance; even before autos represented especially keen competition, the hands of the passenger rail industry were tied—by the federal government:

The first interruption in passenger rail’s vibrancy coincided with government intervention. From approximately 1910 to 1921, the Federal government introduced a populist rate-setting scheme, followed by nationalization of the rail industry for World War I. Ample railroad profits were erased, growth of the rail system was reversed, and railroads massively underinvested in passenger rail facilities during this time. Meanwhile, labor costs advanced, and with them passenger fares, which discouraged passenger traffic just as automobiles gained a foothold.

Compare and contrast to Conrail (I’ve excerpted only a small portion of its lengthy history, in which Carter was only one player of many) [emphasis mine]:

In the years leading to 1973, the freight railroad system of the U.S. was collapsing…

Conrail was incorporated in Pennsylvania on October 25, 1974, and operations began April 1, 1976. The theory was that if the service was improved through increased capital investment, the economic basis of the railroad would be improved. During its first seven years, Conrail proved to be highly unprofitable, despite receiving billions of dollars of assistance from Congress. The corporation declared enormous losses on its federal income tax returns from 1976 through 1982…Congress once again reacted with support by passing the Northeast Rail Service Act of 1981 (45 U.S. Sec. 1101 et seq.), which amended portions of the Regional Rail Reorganization Act by exempting Conrail from liability for any state taxes (45 U.S.C. 727(c)) and requiring the Secretary of Transportation to make arrangements for the sale of the government’s interest in Conrail (45 U.S.C. 761). After NERSA was implemented, Conrail began to improve and reported taxable income between $2 million and $314 million each year from 1983 through 1986.

Although Conrail’s government-funded rebuilding of the heavily run-down railroad infrastructure and rolling stock it inherited from its six bankrupt predecessors succeeded by the end of the 1970s in improving the physical condition of tracks, locomotives, and freight cars, the fundamental economic regulatory issues remained, and Conrail continued to post losses of as much as $1 million a day. Conrail management, recognizing the need for more regulatory freedoms to address the economic issues, were among the parties lobbying for what became the Staggers Act of 1980 [this is the act passed when Carter was president], which significantly loosened the Interstate Commerce Commission’s rigid economic control of the rail industry. This allowed Conrail and other carriers the opportunity to become profitable and strengthen their finances.

The Staggers Act allowed the setting of rates that would recover capital and operating cost (fully allocated cost recovery) by each and every route mile the railroad operated. There would be no more cross-subsidization of costs between route-miles (i.e., rates on profitable route segments were not set higher to subsidize routes where rates were set at intermodal parity, yet still did recover fully allocated costs). Finally where current and/or future traffic projections showed that profitable volumes of traffic would not return, the railroads were allowed to abandon those routes, shippers and passengers to other modes of transportation. With the Staggers Act, the railroads, including Conrail, were freed from the requirement to operate services with open ended losses for the public convenience and necessity of those who simply chose rail services as their mode of transportation.

Seems to me there are a number of lessons here, the first of which is that government bailouts without significant government deregulation of unreasonable mandates and taxes hampering a failing industry are doomed to fail themselves, and all such bailouts will therefore be a waste of taxpayer money. In addition, keeping an industry in private hands is better at turning a profit than nationalization—as long as the government doesn’t tie those hands unreasonably in order to favor other special interest groups.

Obama seems to be on a course to disobey all those lessons. Carter, to his credit, was not.

The disappearance of Air France 447: those in peril in air and sea

The New Neo Posted on by

It was a juxtaposition of two romantic and wonderful cities: Rio and Paris. Who wouldn’t want to take a flight from one to another? Spirits must have been very high indeed on Air France 447 when it departed.

The airbus left Rio just fine. But it never made it to Paris. All aboard are presumed dead somewhere over—and then in—the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

All disasters strike fear and grief into our hearts. But this one has a special horror: the catastrophic event occurred while the plane was out of radar contact and without the pilots being able to send any message at all. And since it happened over deep ocean, the recovery efforts will be particularly difficult and the black box that could tell the story may never be found. It is a disappearance and a mystery.

This tragedy, already almost unbearable for the loved ones of those who died, contains the added painful possibility that the bodies of the lost may never be recovered. And all of this happened in an instant; families and friends were waiting at the Paris airport for an ordinary happy arrival, and then they received the dreadful news that will change their lives forever.

Now we learn that some debris has been sighted near the spot where the plane is suspected to have gone down: the mute and terrible testimony of an airplane seat, an orange buoy, and some other debris. The material will need to be investigated further to see if it is indeed from the downed flight, but it’s a good bet that the answer will be yes.

Searching for the black box will be much harder, and it’s a race against time: the mechanism only emits signals for thirty days. Right now the cause of the crash is a complete mystery; despite turbulence and lightning, neither would explain the large and sudden systems failure that seems to have occurred, evidenced by an automatic signal emitted by the plane indicating loss of electrical power and cabin pressure.

I have always loved the Navy Hymn, from the very first time I ever heard it as a young child. Although it is connected with the military, there is no reason it cannot apply to civilians as well—or any of “those in peril” on the sea or in the air. Since the passengers and crew of Flight 447 were in danger in both sea and air, I think it fitting to offer this beautiful hymn in their memory, in hopes that their souls are at rest and their families and friends find comfort, and that we find some answers to the mystery of what happened:

There are many versions of the hymn, which originally was written in 1860 for sea travel but has since been updated to include air and even space (see this for examples of many of these variations, and more). Here is the version in the video:

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidst the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
O, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!

O Trinity of love and power!
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them whereso’er they go.
Thus ever let there rise to Thee,
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea!

Lord, guard and guide the men who fly
Through the great spaces of the sky.
Be with them traversing the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air!

The illogic of affirmative action

The New Neo Posted on by

The Sotomayor debate has brought the controversy about what is known as “reverse racism” to the fore. I don’t much like that term—I’m of the opinion that racism is racism is racism. But the term “reverse racism” does acknowledge the fact that racism in the name of redressing previous discrimination practiced towards a minority by a dominant majority does have a different flavor and purpose than the original. That doesn’t make it right, however.

This piece by Victor Davis Hanson is an excellent exploration of how muddled and illogical “reverse racism” and its proponents have become. I have a few things to add, as well:

Reverse racism is not about fairness to the individual. It’s about the perception of fairness to categories of people in order to even out statistics that indicate differences of outcome between groups.

It’s about collective guilt and collective innocence, and the hope that, by doing penance for the former, advocates can finally claim the latter.

It’s about taking individuals off the hook for their own achievements or lack thereof.

It’s about blaming all differences between groups on the effects of prejudice. The underlying belief is that if there are any disparities between the achievements of races/ethnic groups, this cannot possibly reflect real differences (not even ones that are culturally perpetuated within such groups).

The criteria for inclusion in the favored racial or ethnic group are quite irrational and simplistic, sometimes allowing those with only a tangential connection to the group to claim the coveted status. And in a terrible irony, these criteria reduce people’s complexity to a simple matter of race in exactly the same manner that discriminatory racism does. And it almost goes without saying (although I’ll say it again) that the rules penalize other probably deserving categories of people—impoverished whites from Appalachia, for example—because of their race, and their race alone.

The policies are open-ended in time. There is no consideration of what criteria could be used to decide some day that it is time to end the policy.

Groups that have been discriminated against in the past but who have transcended it through their own achievements, without any special help (East Indians, Chinese, and Jews, to name a few) are exempt from being assisted now, despite the discrimination from which they have suffered in the past. Their subsequent achievements are considered to remove the need for affirmative action, and of course they do; I’m not arguing that favored status should be extended to such groups. But, what achievements by black people (or for that matter, native Americans or Hispanics or other favored groups) would be enough to finally end affirmative action? For example, is Obama’s election as president sufficient to remove the need for affirmative action for African Americans? And if not, whatever would be? Do the outcome statistics (jobs, income, admission to schools) have to be exactly equal between groups before affirmative action can be ended? And would even that be enough?

Hanson’s essay is so good that I’ll conclude by quoting the last section of it at length:

Indeed, creating, recreating, and emphasizing racial identity, especially among elites, currently involves so many contortions that it has descended from the absurd to the outright pernicious-and is becoming a sort of racism itself. One gets the uncomfortable feeling that the perpetuators of the present system—mostly elite whites—find some sort of psychological absolution in such a system that allows them to alleviate guilt without living among poorer people of color, or sending their own children to the “diverse” public schools—two concrete steps that might quickly indeed ensure better neighborhoods and better education for the “other.”…

Unfortunately, unlike a Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Alberto Gonzales, President Obama has embraced identity politics in unprecedented fashion-and we are reaping what he has sown…

But then only in these race-conscious times could a Barack Obama have entered the racial labyrinth as a well-educated youth of mixed and foreign ancestry, and middle-class prep school lineage, and exited as a representative totem of the African-American underclass.

By virtue of that metamorphosis it matters not at all that he once subsidized the racial hatred of Rev. Wright’s Church, carelessly tossed out the epithet ”˜typical white person’, stereotyped the white working class as ”˜clingers,’ had his privileged Attorney General call Americans “cowards” on matters of race, and nominated a candidate for the Supreme Court who, despite all the tortured exegeses of exculpation, declared that white males could not possess the judicial wisdom and temperament of someone of her own race and gender.

You see, in matters of racial politics, we deal now only in fantasies rather than reality.