Affirmative action was how the liberal elites assuaged their guilt
Washington Examiner
Video Embed
By more than 2-to-1, the public opposes affirmative action in college admissions as unfair discrimination. By a 20-point margin (52% to 32%), they approved of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action.
How then can we explain the vociferous and unanimous defense of affirmative action within the Democratic Party leadership and the left-leaning media? Why are they so at odds with the public on this issue?
CONGRESS SHOULD SECURE BIDEN’S SECRET EMAILS
Democrats and newspaper editors might argue that they are simply more enlightened about the nature of systemic racism and thus more fervent for reparations. But perhaps the best way to understand the liberal elite’s attachment to affirmative action is to view it through the Biden family’s educational history.
When Joe Biden was a former vice president and the future Democratic presidential nominee, one of his granddaughters was applying to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution.
Biden, one of the most powerful and connected men in America, met with the college president and the dean of admissions to help his grandchild get in. Reporters Joe Simonson and Andrew Kerr told the story (based on text messages found on Hunter Biden’s laptop) and pointed out that Joe Biden around that time lent his name to the Penn Biden Center, which has proven lucrative to the university.
What does this have to do with affirmative action?
America’s elite class has for decades used political connections and wealth — the class privilege, if you will — to assure spots for their own children at elite institutions that are pipelines to lives of wealth and power. This, of course, clashes with the class warfare politics and equality rhetoric that the same liberal elites mouth every election season or when justifying their increase of government power.
This dissonance surely gnawed at consciences inside the Democratic Party and the New York Times. Affirmative action was the salve for these raw consciences. Legacy admissions and influence peddling around college acceptance are only two examples of what Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves calls “dream hoarding.”
Affirmative action is best understood as medicine to assuage liberal elite guilt about all they do to protect their privilege and pass it on to their children.
This helps explain the odd language Democrats and the left-leaning media used when they tried to pivot after their Supreme Court loss. “Let’s be clear,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) said after the decision. “Affirmative action still exists for white people. It’s called legacy admissions.”
The average white reader might be baffled by that claim. Less than one-third of whites over age 25 have a college degree, which means only a minority of white high schoolers have a parent who graduated college. When you narrow it down to the elite schools that practiced affirmative action, you’re talking about a tiny slice of white people benefiting from legacy admissions.
But Lee, who is African American, has been in Democratic politics for decades, so maybe all her white friends, like Joe Biden, can lean on college presidents and deans of admissions.
However muddled their thinking, Lee, Joe Biden, and the liberal press corps are now leading a charge against legacy admissions as “affirmative action for white people.”
Conservatives need not accept this silly framing but shouldn’t lift a finger to save the legacy admissions system on which the Bidens and Kennedys of the world have relied. Legacy admissions are part of the defense system American elites have constructed to protect their power and wealth from competition. If elite universities choose to abandon them, conservatives should not lament their demise.