Affirmative action thoughts

The League’s Mark Thompson has a  great post up on  affirmative action that has had me thinking about the topic all evening.  I’m pretty familiar with most of the common objections to affirmative action, and I’m particularly good at convincing folks that affirmative action isn’t a form of “reverse racism” or bigotry against white people.  Though, to be fair, I’m good at it (and presumably, so is Mark) because the facts are on my side: institutionalized discrimination has had a tremendously negative (and quantifiable) impact on educational attainment with minority communities.  Affirmative action programs (in college admissions at least) do target academically successful minorities who lack the wealth or support networks of their white peers.  And affirmative action programs have successfully integrated minorities and women into the elite spheres of American life.  Indeed, as sociologist Orlando Patterson repeatedly notes in his book The Ordeal of Integration, affirmative action easily ranks as one of this country’s most successful policy undertakings.

Despite all of this, affirmative action programs – and especially those in college admissions – are deeply controversial, and I’ve spent the better part of my afternoon and evening trying to figure out why that is.  Clearly, some of the opposition to AA comes from perfectly obvious sources: Pat Buchanan-esque white ethnic parochialism, a libertarian/conservative commitment to a “color-blind” state, a sincere belief that racism and sexism don’t significantly impact the lives of women and minorities, and of course, plain old racism/misogyny.  But I think that for a significant number of people opposed to affirmative action, the debate is only superficially about preferential treatment (they may or may not realize this), and instead, is really a debate over the purpose of the university and of a university education.

I don’t have any data to back this up (and please excuse me as I think out loud), of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if AA opponents are inclined to describe university as some combination of education and credentialing – if you’re smart (as defined by some objective metric) you attend a “good” school so that you can get a “good” job on the strength of your credentials.  By contrast, supporters of affirmative action are probably more inclined to think of higher education as some combination of education and socializing.  In this vision, the goal isn’t really to find the highest academic achievers as much as it is to find and place the individuals who will “enrich” the institution in some (usually) ill-defined way.  Although these certainly aren’t mutually exclusive visions of higher education, you can imagine how they could find themselves in conflict.  If your goal is to enrich the institution then you will occasionally elevate those students who don’t quite meet the ‘objective’ criteria for admission.  The same is true of the opposite; if you elevate the academically successful without considering backgrounds or demographics, you run the risk of leaving yourself with a painfully homogeneous institution.

These are issues that don’t receive much attention in mainstream conversation, except when viewed through the lens of affirmative action and other forms of preferential treatment.  And while there isn’t really much of a “point” to this post, I do think that you can shed some light as to why opposition to AA programs is long-lasting and calcified if you begin to think of affirmative action in these terms (and if you assume that there really is a split of public opinion on this sort of thing, which might not actually be the case).

A bit more on presidents and popularity

A while back, the Pew Research Center compared President Obama’s first-term approval ratings to those of his predecessors, stretching back to Richard Nixon.  The point of Pew’s report was to show the tremendous partisan gap in Obama’s approval ratings – 88 percent of Democrats approved of Obama’s performance versus a measly 27 percent of Republicans.  Overall, Obama’s job approval rating stood at a healthy 59 percent (slightly down from its current 61 percent).  What’s far more interesting though, is the fact that Americans have such an overwhelmingly positive impression of Obama’s presidency.  So much so, that as Slate’s Christopher Beam notes, Americans who didn’t support Obama in November are now claiming to have voted for him:

When respondents were asked by the WSJ whom they voted for in the 2008 presidential elections, 41 percent said they voted for Obama, compared with 32 percent for McCain. Factor out the 18 percent who said they didn’t vote, and you’ve got Obama beating McCain by 11 points, 50 percent to 39 percent.

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The gap in the New York Times poll is even wider. In it, 48 percent of respondents said they voted for Obama, compared with 25 percent for McCain. Again, subtract the 19 percent who say they didn’t vote, and you’ve got Obama winning by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, with 60 percent to McCain’s 32 percent.

This is actually a lot more common than you would think.  Absent some easily attributable miserable failure, first-term presidents tend to have fairly high job approval ratings (from Pew’s data):

Considering the enthusiasm most Americans have for newly elected presidents, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see some voters claim that they supported the president during the election.  After all, he’s popular and most people want to claim some kind of connection to a popular president.  Of course, this goes both ways – if the results of this 2006 New York Times poll are any indication, John Kerry beat George Bush with a reasonably comfortable margin.

A brief interruption (for your enjoyment)

When you get the time, you should check out Gawker’s hilarious takedown of University of Virginia political scientist (and preening pundit) Larry Sabato.  Here’s the key bit:

One of the many gimmicks that Sabato uses to make it appear as though he knows what he’s talking about is his “Crystal Ball,” in which he calls election outcomes. He’s boasted of a 98% accuracy rate when it comes to predicting congressional races, which means almost nothing when you consider that in 2008, 94% of incumbents were re-elected. One incumbent who wasn’t re-elected in 2008, however, was Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.), who happens to be Sabato’s own congressman. And an old buddy from law school his college days. And, Politico reports, the congressman who has directed about $1.4 million in annual earmarks to Sabato’s Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. But last year Sabato, the expert prognosicator who actually works in Goode’s district, called that particular race wrongly—he said Goode was going to win, but challenger Thomas Perriello defeated him. Not that the $1.4 million-a-year bonus that Goode was sending Sabato’s way would influence his punditry.

Gawker has discovered what most of us already know: Larry Sabato kind of sucks.

The Inviolable Sanctity of the United States Government

Politico:

President Obama’s campaign for health care reform by this fall, once considered highly likely to succeed, suddenly appears in real jeopardy.

Top White House advisers, especially chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, are still privately predicting massive changes to the health care system in 2009. But for the first time, Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration are expressing frank worries about stronger-than-expected opposition from moderate Democrats and worse-than-expected estimates for how much the plan could cost.

Business groups, which had embraced the idea of reform and have been meeting quietly with Democrats for months in an effort to shape the legislation, now talk of spending millions of dollars to oppose the latest proposals out of Capitol Hill. And Democrats themselves are not united, with leading party figures making contradictory declarations about how far they should go to overhaul the system when deficits are soaring and prospects for an economic recovery remain cloudy.

Since I’m not at all qualified to speak with any detail on the chances of a decent health care bill leaving Congress (though it’s worth noting that health care wonks Ezra Klein and Jon Cohn are fairly pessimistic at this point), I’m just going to mention that this whole drama is a little ridiculous.  In virtually every other Western democracy, winning electoral coalitions are rewarded with fairly wide leeway in their legislative priorities and governance.  To use a familiar example, Margaret Thatcher assumed the premiership in 1979 with a substantial legislative majority and went on to implement a fairly controversial conservative agenda.  The British left was none-too-happy with the result, but because they operate in a system which grants legislative initiative to the victor, there wasn’t much they could do.

This is a good thing, and it’s something the United States should emulate, seeing as how Republicans and Democrats operate in a virtually nonsensical institutional environment where  legislative initiative lies with the opposition.  If the United States had a rational institutional setup, the party which controlled a sizable majority of the legislature as well as the executive branch would have pretty wide leeway to pursue the policies it promised to the voters.  George W. Bush partially campaigned on Social Security “reform” in 2005, and while I’m glad that the bill failed, if the majority of the Republican caucus in the House and Senate supported said efforts, then it should have passed.  Sure, the current arrangement is fun and makes for interesting political gossip (Evan Byah said whaat now? *whisper whisper*), but it also severely hampers the majority party as it tries to do what it was elected to do – govern.

Unfortunately, decades of institutional worship (The Senate is the “world’s greatest deliberative body!” Many layers of overlapping/conflicting government are a good thing!) have resulted in the widespread belief that we shouldn’t ever tinker with the mechanisms of government, lest we invoke the divine wrath of our (cue Charlton Heston voice) Founding Fathers.  Indeed, seeing as how meaningful institutional change is incredibly unlikely, we might as well amend the Senate bylaws to include one of the concluding verses from the Book of Revelation:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:

You know, for shits and giggles.

Happy Juneteenth

For those of you unfamiliar with the particulars of African-American historyis “Juneteenth,” a quasi-official holiday commemorating Union General Gordon Granger’s arrival into Galveston, Texas on June 19th, 1865 and his announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas, thus officially ending slavery in the former Confederacy.  Last year, the Root published a good piece on the origins of the Juneteenth celebration.  The link is now broken, but I still have an excerpt from last year’s Juneteenth post:

Think of Juneteenth as black Independence Day.

On Monday, June 19, 1865, the Union Gen. Gordon Granger stood in Galveston, Texas and informed a group of residents that the world as they’d known it had come to an end: All slaves were now free.

The newly liberated slaves began celebrating immediately. They commemorated that day every year after, giving rise to Juneteenth, a celebration that is now observed throughout the United States.

There are several parallels between the Fourth of July and Juneteenth. Both celebrate American freedom and independence and feature the same kinds of activities: outdoor picnics with games, races, barbecue and red soda pop—a Juneteenth staple. For Juneteenth, there are typically speeches, rodeos, dances, church services and readings from the Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth became such a large and important holiday that in 1872 ex-slaves in Houston purchased land for parks devoted to hosting the celebrations. As Texans migrated, they took their Juneteenth traditions with them to Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and California.

But it wasn’t until 1980 that June 19 became Emancipation Day in Texas, a paid state holiday. In 1997, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and former Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., sponsored a resolution honoring Juneteenth. Today, 17 states have formal observations of the date. Sen. Barack Obama and Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., have both supported calls to make Juneteenth a national holiday.

It’s also worth linking to John McWhorter’s take on the holiday, which is decidedly (and understandably) less enthusiastic than my own:

I am John Hamilton McWhorter, the fifth. The first John Hamilton McWhorter was a slave. This Thursday is Juneteenth, when I might be inclined to celebrate the emancipation of John Hamilton McWhorter, the first.

Or not. Truth to tell, I have never quite gotten the hang of Juneteenth.

I suppose I should. What could be wrong, after all, with celebrating slaves in America being freed? Technically, Juneteenth arose to mark the day slaves in Texas were freed, but over the years it has been embraced nationwide as a celebration of emancipation.

But at the end of the day, I just can’t wrap my head around celebrating the fact that someone else freed my ancestors. It puts too much focus on a time when we were so starkly in the down position. Juneteenth seems to be about what someone else did.

[...]

To me, the real day of celebration—one that I always think about as it passes—is not June 19 but July 2. That was the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The Civil Rights Act had as profound an impact on the fate of blacks in the United States as Emancipation. Say what you want about how far we have to go, but the official dismantling of Jim Crow was a watershed event in the history of human affairs.

This is one of those rare times in which I basically agree with McWhorter’s take; as important as it is to mark and remember the abolition of chattel slavery – which itself was a monumental event in modern Western history – it is equally important to mark the day when African-Americans were included into the American political project as full and equal citizens.  It’s not so much that the latter is more important (it couldn’t have happened without the former) as it is that it represents black self-determination at its finest, and when you consider the long and painful struggle African-Americans made to self determine (as it were), it’s worth giving some time to commemorating one of the most important fruits of that labor.

Presidents and popularity

The Pew Research Center:

A solid majority of Americans (61%) continue to approve of Barack Obama’s job performance, although they express mixed views of several of his policies. An important positive sign for Obama is the public’s continued optimism that his policies will improve the economy – fully 65% express this view. A smaller majority (55%) is optimistic Obama will reduce the budget deficit over the long-term. Nonetheless, Obama’s job approval on the economy has declined from 60% in April to 52% currently.

While I’m sure that some conservatives will latch on to this polling to argue that Americans are skeptical of Obama’s “big government” solutions, my hunch is that none of this polling actually matters.  When trying to predict a president’s success, the most relevant metric is job approval rating; generally speaking, a popular president can command significant amounts of public support for his agenda, even if public support for particular agenda items is tepid.  Or put another way, Americans might be skeptical of health care reform, but they trust Obama, and that trust can manifest itself as a willingness to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when it comes to health care reform (and any number of other issues).  And of course, if these policies work, then Obama becomes more popular and the cycle begins anew.  Liberals should begin worrying when Obama himself becomes less popular – or even unpopular – and can’t sustain his agenda on personality alone.

Too long, too late

I can’t say that I’m terribly interested in the news that the Senate has deigned to apologize for slavery and Jim Crow.  The time for apologies is long past, and if the Senate really wanted to show contrition for the long-term effects of systematic oppression, it would push forward with a decent health care bill, work to reduce carbon emissions, invest money in rebuilding our cities, and find ways to make college more accessible and more affordable.  These certainly aren’t glamorous, but unlike an empty apology, they would actually do something to help African-Americans and other underprivileged minorities earn their piece of the American dream.

Skepticism

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I’m going to second Daniel Larison’s skepticism of the virtually unanimous belief that Ahmadinejad stole the election, or at least engaged in some serious electoral fraud:

Now let us turn to Iran. The pre-election hype was that the opposition candidate was enjoying a surge in support in the final weeks and stood a chance of forcing a run-off, if not actually beating the incumbent outright. Then, amid record-high turnout, the incumbent won handily and the opposition complained that it had been robbed. In other words, the hype in Lebanon was just hype and was shown to be such on election day, whereas it was God’s own truth in Iran. As the Leveretts argue in Politico today, Ahmadinejad’s official percentage of the vote is very close to his 2005 total against Rafsanjani. As it happens, this is true. Of course, this result was from the head-to-head run-off between two candidates, rather than the multi-candidate first round, but it is not necessarily impossible that a comparable percetange of a larger electorate backed Ahmadinejad in the first round as turnout increased. This does not rule out the use of fraud. Fraud may have been widespread as well, but what we do not know as yet is how significant the effect of this fraud was.

The simple fact is that there isn’t any definitive proof – outside of reports from anti-Ahmadinejad eyewitnesses – that the election was stolen.  In fact, as Larison notes, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which Ahmadinejad wins with a significant percentage of the vote.  After all, it happened four years ago.  Now, let me clarify something before I’m accused of being a stooge for tyranny: I am genuinely inspired by the student protests and heartened by the widespread international displays of solidarity.  That said, in the absence of definitive proof of fraud, we should at least entertain the possibility that Ahmadinejad was the legitimate winner of last week’s election.  It’s not particularly satisfying, but in situations like these, the truth matters a whole lot more than what makes us feel better.

Interference

Neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan has joined the chorus of conservative voices pillorying President Obama for his cautious approach to the protests in Iran:

The United States had to provide some guarantee to the regime that it would no longer support opposition forces or in any way seek its removal. The idea was that the United States could hardly expect the Iranian regime to negotiate on core issues of national security, such as its nuclear program, so long as Washington gave any encouragement to the government’s opponents. Obama had to make a choice, and he made it. This was widely applauded as a “realist” departure from the Bush administration’s quixotic and counterproductive idealism. [...]

But Obama’s calculations are quite different. Whatever his personal sympathies may be, if he is intent on sticking to his original strategy, then he can have no interest in helping the opposition. His strategy toward Iran places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis.

Kagan actually makes the intelligent observation that American intervention on behalf of the protesters would immediately lead the Iranian government to declare Obama an “enemy of the state,” thus hampering the Obama administration’s efforts to make headway with the Iranian regime.  Indeed, if not for his maudlin, overly-sentimental idealism, Kagan may have noticed that Obama’s caution is absolutely critical with regards to ensuring that the protesters maintain some legitimacy in the eyes of most Iranians.  The protesters have been tremendously successful in depicting their struggle as an extension of the 1979 revolution, and an attempt to refresh the principles of the Islamic Republic.  The quickest way to shatter that narrative and destroy the protesters credibility is for the United States to pick sides in the unrest.  What’s more, Iranian authorities will be much more willing to use violence against protesters if they can effectively depict them as stooges of the West.  Inserting ourselves into Iran’s turmoil might be psychologically satisfying, but it simply isn’t a good idea, and I wish conservative commentators would stop pretending like it is.

links for 2009-06-17

• Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes – Ta-Nehisi Coates