Breadline from the FDR Memorial
Ross Douthat doesn’t want white guys to stand in line. He says that it’s time for affirmative action to go away – or ought to be in some fictional future 20 years from now, the one he claims Sandra Day O’Connor had in mind six years ago when she expressed hope, in dicta in her decision about admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, that affirmative action might then no longer be needed.

What Ross doesn’t do is explore the economy or the dysfunctional way it distributes resources. Specifically, he ignores the problems affirmative action imperfectly attempts to fix, how long those problems were nurtured or who they made wealthy. Which would cover a period from the beginnings of the slave trade in the early 1600′s, through America’s unCivil War, to the century of de facto slavery that continued after it, until the modest success of the civil rights movement.

Ross, like Rush, wants the solution to go away and with it, any notion that there was a problem that needed fixin’. All to immunize the privileged, who were made wealthy owing to slavery, segregation and its diverse, less obvious progeny. This is an old Republican talking point that taps into white angst and the broader feeling percolating in middle America of, "Enough already; I’ve got problems, too." Given our current depression and the likelihood that any recovery will be jobless, there’s likely to be a lot of angst to tap into.

It’s a lever the moneyed class has found useful for generations. They used it to help foment conflict between their workers and each new wave of immigrants, and always against slaves or free African Americans. Here, Douthat uses the Sotomayor hearings to claim that the white male power structure is "old hat":

Here you have a Hispanic woman being grilled by a collection of senators who embody, quite literally, the white male power structure. Her chief Republican interlocutor, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, even has a history of racially charged remarks.

But the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.

The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have “minority” majorities [sic]. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, “every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.” [Scare meter pegs out.]

As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go. [Will it? How?] The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action; the de facto racial preferences required of employers by anti-discrimination law should disappear.

Progressives would agree in limited part. Discrimination hasn’t lessened: white male elites have merely extended their sumptuary law to include select non-male, non-whites. We are becoming "post-racial" in the sense that the bases for discrimination may be changing. Where once it was race, sex or immigrant status, it may be shifting toward discrimination based on age, health and income.

That’s good for Ross – if he hopes his talking point will prove useful in derailing progressive policies rather than make them unnecessary – because progressive policies address economics more directly than race. For example, for the first time since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the mid-1960′s, there’s talk of constructive reforms:

- of health care and the ways we pay for it;
- of consumer lending practices and the malformed bankruptcy law that protects predatory lenders;
- of enhancing labor laws and their enforcement;
- of increasing support for education; and
- of reforming taxes.

The latter especially will be a big battle and will affect all other reforms. We should design taxes better, close now irrational loopholes and subsidies, and actually collect what we are owed from profitable corporations and the wealthy.

Mr. Douthat may direct his rhetoric at the angst of rural, poor and under- and unemployed whites. But for him, it is rich elites of any stripe that ought not to stand in line because anti-discrimination rules protect others. His little essay isn’t so much about ending affirmative action as it is about protecting the beneficiaries of discrimination from those who would end it.