To the Editor:

I salute Richard E. Morgan for his insightful article, “Republicans for Quotas” [February]. Mr. Morgan has it exactly right. Seldom has the GOP been met with a more agreeable opportunity. Supporting Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which prohibits state government from engaging in preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin, was the right and principled thing to do. Happily, it was also extremely popular among voters, and, in last November’s elections, they approved it.

By backing CCRI, Republican leaders could have had it both ways. Yet most of them ran for the hills. There were, of course, a handful of exceptions. California Republicans like Governor Pete Wilson, Attorney General Dan Lungren, and Congressman Tom Campbell endorsed early and never wavered in their support. Honorable mentions must also go to statehouse Republicans like Jan Goldsmith and Bernie Richter and independent Quentin Kopp. Most of the heavy lifting, however, had to be done by relative political novices.

Yet by comparison, the Democratic party’s record was worse than abysmal. Not a single Democratic officeholder endorsed CCRI. Some privately confessed their support, but their party leaders made it clear that this was an issue upon which they would brook no dissent.

I am not a big fan of California’s policy of popular initiatives. Many are illconceived; most are poorly drafted. When in doubt (which is almost always), I vote “no,” and fortunately most of my fellow Californians do likewise. Proposition 209, however, proves the worth of the initiative system. Most members of the California legislature well understood the evils of racial and gender preferences. Nevertheless, they did nothing. They simply did not have the backbone to stand up to the affirmative-action industry. It took the voters of California to lead the way.

Gail Heriot
San Diego, California

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To the Editor:

To listen to right-wing Pollyannas, the demise of affirmative action is ineluctable. Some day, somehow, it will magically disappear, with almost no one doing or saying anything. Many believe that California’s passage of Proposition 209 by a slim margin of 54 percent to 46 percent signaled the coming end of preference laws and quotas. Others, like Richard E. Morgan, are more realistic.

Not surprisingly, however, Mr. Morgan fails to mention the role of feminism (the primary beneficiaries of quotas and preferences are white females) and immigration in advancing the pestilence of group rights and identity politics. Take CCRI, for example: if white males had been denied the vote in California, CCRI would have lost by a huge margin. In twenty, perhaps even ten, years, the scant 54-percent majority will be gone forever.

In addition to feminism and the expansion of quotas and preferences to include women of all races and socioeconomic classes, massive third-world immigration increases the number of people who benefit from affirmative action and, consequently, enhances the “racial spoils system.”

As long as our ruling elites (including white males) are obsessed with statistical “equality”—i.e., proportional representation not only for all races but also for women of all races—quotas will prevail.

Should present trends continue, a tyrannical majority of blacks, Hispanics, other nonwhite minorities, and feminists of all races will control the upper ranks of government, academia, the media, business, etc. Does anyone seriously believe that these groups, once they gain ascendancy, will repeal the laws and policies that have benefited them so greatly?

Michael Kuehl
Kewaunee, Wisconsin

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Richard E. Morgan writes:

Gail Heriot is right to call attention to the honorable fight put up for CCRI by Pete Wilson and a handful of other California Republican leaders; the contrast with the national Republican leadership is stark. And Michael Kuehl is certainly right to emphasize the naiveté of those who thought that after the passage of CCRI it would be smooth sailing to the end of affirmative action in America. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the votes were hardly counted last November 5 when lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of groups opposed to Proposition 209 showed up at the federal courthouse in San Francisco asking that the newly adopted measure be declared void on the grounds it violated the Constitution, and within a month they had a favorable ruling. While this initial ruling has since been overturned by a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the case is likely to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Until that Court rules, the argument of unconstitutionality will dog opponents of preferences across the country.

Furthermore, it is now clear that the Clinton administration has committed itself to a determined defense of affirmative action. The Justice Department has entered the California case in support of the constitutional arguments against CCRI, and in the works is a White House conference on race relations that will showcase the pressure groups most committed to preferences and allow the President to expand on his theme of “mend it, don’t end it.”

The opponents of colorblindness lost at the polls in California, but they succeeded in driving support for CCRI down from around 70 percent to 54 percent. More importantly, these groups showed that they could raise substantial amounts of money to defend preferences and recruit prestigious allies from the corporate and academic worlds. They emerged energized, and a lot of hard political work will be necessary to defeat them on a national level.

In this longer-haul fight, feminists are the key; Mr. Kuehl is right about that as well. It is simply the case that if the regime of preferences survives into the next century it will do so because of the support of American women in thrall to radical feminism. This fact must be faced squarely; it does no good to argue as if affirmative action were only about race.

Where I disagree with Mr. Kuehl (and am therefore somewhat more optimistic) is in respect to immigrants. Of course, it is appalling to see new arrivals immediately qualifying as “protected” minorities. But while some immigrant groups (notably Hispanics) are playing the affirmative-action game with gusto, others (notably Asians) are not. Opposition to preferences is not just a white male thing. White males have wives and mothers and sisters who are less than thrilled at seeing the prospects of their menfolk arbitrarily reduced, and Asians are unlikely to remain politically passive as reverse discrimination bears more and more heavily on them (as it has been doing, for instance, in admission to elite units of the California university system).

Preferences remain extremely unpopular with the American people as a whole. The political task now is to encourage ordinary citizens to trust their better instincts on the question of affirmative action and resist the bullying of entrenched left-wing elites.

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