Comment by rayiner
6 days ago
> Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas
No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four:
1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election.
2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people.
3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action.
4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.
> Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition
What percentage of what group is “many on the left”? This does not sound plausible to me.
Enough to normalize "white men are evil" statements, otherwise such people would get reprimanded and shunned by the other people on the left for being racists and sexists but as is they are still welcomed with open arms.
“White men are evil” does not turn everyone else into a “cohesive political coalition”.
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Enough that “BIPOC” is a thing that even my retired immigrant parents have heard of.
TIL, and I consider myself pretty far left
Re: 3 ... the level of misunderstanding about what affirmative action is and means is so wide and so deep that "the public doesn't like this" is more or less an information-free observation. Most of the public has only a strawman in place when it comes to understanding affirmative action, and sure, if the strawman was accurate, most of the people who do support it would drop their support.
Its more common for proponents to obscure what affirmative action actually is. The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular and the magnitude of the affirmative action effect is much larger than popularly known.
Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...
Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.
> The idea when plainly stated is deeply unpopular
When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.
But:
"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"
generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.
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It’s actually the other way around. Most people like “affirmative action” when you use that term. But most people dislike it when you ask whether race should be considered in college admissions or hiring decisions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans...
“In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity.”
The Pew survey did not find that most people like "affirmative action":
> Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.
It was a preceding Gallup poll that found the result you're thinking of:
> By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs.
The disconnect between this sort of response with the one you cited at the end of your comment just serves to underline my point about the public's lack of clear understanding of what "affirmative action" means (and they cannot be entirely blamed for this, since in the culture, it has come to mean different things).
Institutions like Harvard will (for the foreseeable future) always have vastly more fully qualified applications than they can accept. The concept of affirmative action was originally intended by its proponents to be used only when tie-breaking between equally qualified candidates. Harvard and the other Ivies have this situation in extremis. The idea was that when faced with the question "well, we have 26 people all fully qualified, how are to pick between them?" that using race was a legitimate choice as long as the racial demographics of the institution did not match those of the overall population. They have (for a while) used gender in a similar way, and arguably could use favorite ice cream flavor if they chose, because the candidates are all qualified to be selected.
There was never a suggestion that "affirmative action" meant selecting less qualified candidates because of their racial status. However, the conservative right has claimed that this is what affirmative action really means in the world, and this idea has been broadly picked up by the media and public at large. Whether there is actually any evidence that this has happened on a significant scale is not something I've seen adequately addressed. From what I have read, including the Harvard case, I'd say it was much more an unfounded grievance on the part of people who felt they had a right to be admitted or hired than what actually happens. I could be wrong.
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What you call "the left" is part of the public, but you make it sound like it is not. You also make it sound like the public has a coherent opinion, which I don't think it has.
Do you mean majority when you say public? Do you think what the majority thinks should be done (mob rule)?
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