RALEIGH — The U.S. Supreme Court’s split decision this week on affirmative action policy at the University of Michigan has already drawn a great deal of attention, across the country and right here in North Carolina. My colleague George Leef at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has been making the media rounds with his view, and I’ll be weighing in on the decision myself later this week in my weekly syndicated column.
My purpose today is simply to observe that there has been a surprising amount of diversity — irony, sweet irony — among writers and intellectuals who can broadly be classified as part of the American “Right” in reacting to the Court’s handiwork. Far from offering a uniform, predictable position on the proper use of race in higher education and elsewhere, conservatives and libertarians are all over the map in their agreement or disagreement with the Court.
Some analysts are savaging the decision for taking America further in the wrong direction, toward government bean-counting and endless racial recriminations. These include conservatives like Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and libertarian Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute, which had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case supporting the plaintiffs.
On the other hand, writers at the libertarian Reason magazine such as Julian Sanchez and my friend Jeff Taylor downplayed the significance of the decision, arguing that the outcome more or less conformed with where the bulk of public opinion is and that institutions of higher education should have more freedom to use race than strict interpretations of federal law and constitutional amendments would allow. And on the Tory side of the spectrum, conservative George Will wasn’t wild about the decision but argued that it would be overtaken fairly soon by social trends, such as mixed-race couples and children and a growing unwillingness to classify one’s race at all.
Think that black conservatives, at least, would have a similar critique? Think again, this time without stereotypes. Columnist Armstrong Williams essentially embraced the Supreme Court’s muddle, expressing the hope that it would lead to a better-designed policy of affirmative action. New York Post columnist Robert George wrote that because virtually everyone, including Republicans and conservatives, have embraced diversity as a value, it would have been odd if the Supremes hadn’t gone along. But Scripps Howard News Service columnst Deroy Murdoch warns of new forms of racial “mischief” that the split decision could well inject into university admissions and other fields. “Rather than shine a beacon decisively in one direction or another,” he wrote, “the Court has illuminated a disco ball that will send a dizzying pattern of light beams swirling around us in every direction for the foreseeable future.”
Diversity of opinion on diversity, reasoned disagreements on philosophy and politics, strained metaphors, and disco.
That’s the conservative movement, all right.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.