By John Fund
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Rather than focus on COVID-19 or the economic recovery,
California liberals insist on pushing their pet issues. The “stimulus” bill
rammed through the House this month by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco
was a liberal wish list of subsidies and spending. Now other California
Democrats are ramming through an effort to repeal the state’s ban on racial
preferences.
Two things often happen when a single political party
dominates a state the way Democrats dominate California. First, an echo chamber
of the dominant party convinces its leaders they can steamroll over any
opposition. Second, that conviction leads to political overreach.
Caucasian Americans are now only 19 percent of UC
students, down from 38 percent a quarter century ago — this change reflects the
increasing ethnic diversity of Californians .
Next month, Golden State Democrats plan to use the
two-thirds control they have in the legislature to push through a November
ballot measure asking voters to end the ban on racial preferences.
They should remember what happened when this was
attempted before. Last year, liberals in Washington State used a similar route
to repeal that state’s version of Proposition 209, which had passed with 58
percent in 1998. Liberals vastly outspent opponents and won endorsements from
leading establishment figures. But they still lost, as voters rejected
preferential treatment 51 to 49 percent. Retrying that strategy in a highly
visible California referendum would be dicey.
That’s also what California Democrats themselves
concluded back in 2014.
The alternative — racial discrimination — is a sordid
business. A lawsuit filed by Asian Americans against Harvard University has
revealed just how arbitrary and subjective its admissions process really is.
Asian-American voters are well aware their children face a rigged system at
universities that don’t have Proposition 209 protections. Preferential
treatment for some groups necessarily means discrimination against others.
All of this is likely to be exposed during any debate
over ACA-5 — the California bill to repeal Prop 209. Asian-Americans will take
the lead in opposing ACA-5, but a nationwide Pew Research poll last year found
that majorities of all racial and ethnic groups say colleges
should not consider race in admissions. Among Asian Americans, the
opposition is 2 to 1 against.
In California, 14 percent of eligible voters are now
Asian Americans (nationwide the number is 5 percent). By 2050, Asian Americans
will account for a tenth of the nation’s voters and at least a fifth of
California voters, according to Taeku Lee, a UC Berkeley scholar and a
co-author of the National Asian American Survey.
Unusually high numbers of Asian Americans are neither
Republicans nor Democrats. In California, about 40 percent are independents —
the classic swing voter. In 2018, their swing to the Democrats was behind the
party’s narrow capture of several ancestrally Republican House seats in Orange
and Los Angeles Counties.
But they can swing back, as the special-election victory
by Republican Mike Garcia for a vacant House seat in Los Angeles proved this
month. Garcia won a ten-point victory, including a majority of independents.
“We’ve seen a lot more suspicion of liberal motives among
Asians in Washington state since last year’s attempt to kill color-blind
policies here,” John Carlson, a Seattle talk-show host and the original sponsor
of Washington state’s color-blind college admission policy, told me. “People
also know the liberals can now be beaten.”
Should liberals in California ignore the experience of
their Washington State counterparts and push for the return of racial quotas,
they will be stepping into a hornet’s nest.
While Asian Americans are a seventh of Californians, they
represent 40 percent of University of California students.
“Those numbers are why bringing this issue forward now
would inevitably divide Californians racially: Latino Americans and African
Americans on one side, Asian Americans on the other,” former California
congressman Tom Campbell, now an independent, wrote in the Orange County Register.
“The politics are inescapably racial.”
California doesn’t need a new flare-up of racial
division. Proposition 209 is working. As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr.
show in their 2012 book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students
It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, Proposition
209, in the years immediately after its passage, had three effects on
underrepresented minorities in the UC system. It increased 1) graduation rates,
2) grade-point averages, and 3) the number of science or engineering majors.
It’s true that some minority students shifted from the
most elite UC campuses to other campuses. But as Gail Heriot, a member of the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, noted in a piece for RealClearPolitics:
“Happily, ‘matching’ students to the right institution made improvement
possible on all three fronts. . . . . California legislators want to throw all
that away and bring back an ugly spoils system.”
Many universities — fueled by white guilt – have long
ignored the Civil Rights Act’s prohibitions on race discrimination. But we now
know there are hidden nonwhite victims of that guilt, whether they be
minorities who often drop out if mismatched with the wrong university or Asian
Americans denied admission on the merits.
When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the critical
vote upholding the constitutionality of the University of Michigan’s racial
preferences in 2003, she wrote that the Court expected that affirmative action
would need to continue for only another quarter-century.
Liberals in California’s one-party state are on an
ideological crusade to continue a racial spoils system forever. They should
realize how much of the country disagrees with them and how the politics of the
issue could once again surprise them and blow up in their face.
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