Great argument Greg. Classical liberalism or equality for a multi-racial 'all' under the law, and a work towards equal opportunity is not a utopia but a direction we commit to. I find the best arguments on this, with practical optimism, come from Helen Pluckrose.
I read Andrews' Racial Crossroads piece and I agree with Mr. Thomas. We can and should undo DEI and the other sequelae of Critical Race Theory. That doesn't mean we undo the Civil Rights enforcement regime that long pre-dated DEI/CRT. Those were good laws and they remain good laws. One missing ingredient is race neutral leadership. Color blindness isn't going to happen. We can all see. And, we all see that race is a visible factor in many discrete walks of life. Look at STEM, look at the NBA. It isn't entirely coincidental. It isn't entirely environmental. Furthermore, we are never going to be a monochrome society. We are relentlessly diverse. We could, I suppose, balkanize into ethnic ghettos. Or, we could agree collectively to not let race be a thing that gets between us. Leadership is telling us that we are very diverse and that we have no choice but to make the best of it. "The best of it" isn't going to be paradise. It isn't going to be peace on earth, but ISTM that a lot of people would be ok trying to move past race as a meaningful thing and do what Americans say they do and treat everyone the same.
I pushed a back against Andrews' piece a lot because there seemed to have been little critique of her barely concealed expectation of racial preferences for her group. As long as (white) conservatives prop up a racial bargain copacetic with achieving almost integration and one which rues that "diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room," they sustain fertile ground for the next generation of Kendis.
Strong response article. Since I grew up during the Cold War and thus know the history of the Red Scare, when I ran into Andrews' use of “race-communism,” I was assured that she was not advocating for a middle ground. She was arguing for the right.
She has good reasons, as I have, for challenging identity politics, DEI, and racial preferences for their excesses and for covering up some failures of black culture, as I have, but she ignores the white nationalism on the right. I just don’t see her middle ground.
This is what’s driving me crazy about the politics of racism right now. Both the left and the right are engaged in race essentialism; they just have different solutions, all of which are divisive. As a an old school liberal, I wish a pox on both their houses!
Ethnicity-blindness at the level of peoplehood has never existed. Why do you believe you can conjure it from your philosophy?
If a nation is a community of shared identity, it is conceptually impossible for a multi-ethnic nation to exist.
If you are advocating for a multi-national state, the only successful ones lived as separate nations like Switzerland. This solves the “Who steers the car” problem.
All of this undercuts your utopian vision, doesn’t it?
Ethnicity blindness? Ethnicity is real. Confusing ethnicity and race is as flawed as confusing culture and race.
Conceptually impossible for a multi-ethnic nation to exist? Is not the U.S. a nation? Shared identity isn't solely based on ethnicity; as Americans, our shared identity is grounded in the nation's founding documents.
My vision isn't utopian. Rather, it's informed by the blues, which, according to Ralph Ellison, is tragi-comic. I'm closer to Sowell's tragic vision than the anointed, which is utopian.
Race and ethnicity are both real. My point is you’re bracketing off the problem of ethnicity.
No. The US is not a nation. There is no shared understanding of the good life, of history, of the ends of the state. The founding documents were never bribed to create a nation but to establish rule over a pre-existing multi-national body. Read Federalist #10 and #52. The founding documents presuppose multi-nationalism.
Liberalism is inherently utopian. It shares much with communism in that regard. It believes concepts but denies history.
Are you a post-liberal? Your appeal to Federalist #10 and #52 misreads the Founding project. Yes, the Founders recognized factionalism, but they constructed a constitutional framework designed to bind diverse factions under shared democratic obligations. To reduce America to a mere empire ruling over squabbling ethnic groups ignores how deeply the "principle" of equality has acted as a real, historical force driving national transformation. Further, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (plus the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) are the main documents we rely on, though the Federalist Papers were an important precursor.
You: “arguing against racialization as a governing logic, on the left as much as the right, in favor of the older civic-humanist tradition that runs from Frederick Douglass through Constance Rourke, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Danielle Allen, a cultural tradition that asks Americans to answer to one another as citizens rather than as entries in a ledger of grievance, resentment, or blood. That is my principled position.”
Your desire lacks a theory of transition. It names the end-state. It cites an very new intellectual tradition. You give no account in practice of how an ethnic nation becomes a civic one.
There is a purely conceptual, liberal “civic-humanist tradition.” It’s a tradition of thought not of practice. To be “in favor” of such a tradition in practice is not to restore it but to do it for the first time, since it’s never existed.
You presuppose a reciprocity that does not exist. Relating to others as citizens works only if they answer back in kind. But they don’t. By and large citizens relate to other citizens by ethnicity.
In these two senses, your vision is utopian. You must presuppose what doesn’t exist. You have not given an account of transition along with historical grounding.
The U.S. is a multi-ethnic nation. Your responses presuppose one ethnicity. What is that one ethnicity?
The work of turning a multi-ethnic nation into a civic one is indeed the work of the figures I've mentioned. See Douglass' "Composite American" speech. See Danielle Allen's book "Talking to Strangers." Rourke's "American Humor: A Study of the National Character" outlines fundamental American archetypes. Murray's Omni-American idea extends on Rourke and others. Ellison's body of work (and the cottage industry around his work after Invisible Man) also confronts this issue. See his "The Little Man at Chehaw Station."
Also see Stanley Crouch's "Blues to Be Constitutional."
The American experiment is a work in progress. Has it fulfilled its promise? No. But has it taken steps in the direction our founding documents point? Yes. The amendment process itself provides a way to address past wrongs and learn from our errors.
Is it possible to embrace ethnicity without an overriding ethnocentrism? I think so. Seems that you'd disagree.
You said: “bind diverse factions under shared democratic obligations.”
I said: “to create a nation but to establish rule over a pre-existing multi-national body.”
Same thing.
You lied: “To reduce America to a mere empire ruling over squabbling ethnic groups ignores how deeply the "principle" of equality has acted as a real, historical force driving national transformation.”
I said: “If you are advocating for a multi-national state, the only successful ones lived as separate nations like Switzerland.”
Switzerland isn’t an empire. You’re making shit up. Stop doing that. I’m not talking about an empire but a multi-national state, for which there is historical precedent, against your civic-national state for which there is none.
You’re making straw men to avoid that point. Why not address it?
You said: “the ‘principle’ of equality has acted as a real, historical force driving national transformation.”
True but irrelevant. The several nations in America, present and acknowledged by the Founders at the Founding, existed under both equality and inequality.
You said: “the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (plus the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) are the main documents we rely on”
This is total fantasy. The modern administrative state bears no resemblance to the constitutional state envisioned at the founding. The constitution acts as no restraint on the government at all. This is another example of you believing concepts, but ignoring reality.
Communists, liberals, anarchists, and other utopians work very hard to achieve ac forlorn hope.
American can only survive in a weaker federal system with states being actual nation-states. America can survive as a multinational federation. It can’t survive as one nation, because that nation doesn’t and can’t exist.
I looked you up. Sorry to read about your parental situation.
To better understand your perspective, besides your podcast, what books would you recommend?
Since America becoming a multinational federation isn't part of the mainstream political conversation, what do you think the likelihood is of it actually happening?
I recommend the Anti-Federalist Papers in which Founders like Jefferson argued against Hamilton and Madison.
The core Antifederalist argument was that liberty survives only in small republics: representatives should be close to and resemble their constituents.
They argued that the proposed federal government’s taxing power, standing army, supremacy clause, and open-ended “necessary and proper” clause would swallow state sovereignty over time.
While I don't see 50 states becoming nations, I do think that blocks of regional federations are possible. I just don't see how that transition could happen.
Scratch the question of what books you'd recommend. I get a good sense from reading your podcast notes. I'd suspect that Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield would be among your recommendations, as well as the ancient Greek philosophers.
"How about so-called “heritage American” advocates who sort citizens into rightful stakeholders and tolerated guests? Race realists who invoke group IQ differences to justify unequal treatment?"
Who are these people? Where are these people?
The "race realists" are overwhelmingly demanding EQUAL treatment, rather than the racial preferences that have been normalized. "Heritage Americans" is plainly a cultural rather than a racial classification; it correctly elevates the traits and practices that built American prosperity.
Race disparities--as society defines them, a disparity of outcomes--will continue because races are *not* equal. Ignoring race (race blindness) will not change that.
Really appreciated this response to Helen Andrews. You rightly expose the one-sidedness of her treatment of “race communism” and, more importantly, show why the critique has to be grounded in a civic-humanist principle rather than simply becoming another partisan intervention in the racial politics it purports to transcend.
I had many of the same thoughts when I read Andrews a couple of weeks ago, but you articulate the danger of her approach especially well. The deeper point, it seems to me, is precisely why and how Omni-Americanism (as conceived by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and Stanley Crouch) has to challenge all varieties of race communism and racial essentialism—without ever allowing itself to be weaponized on behalf of either of the warring race-ideological camps.
That is what makes the civic-humanist alternative so important: it offers a genuinely different route toward a republican order in which citizens recognize one another first as human beings and fellow citizens, rather than as representatives of competing racial collectivities.
A great series for JFBT to be conducting, and this opening salvo makes clear once again why your voice is so valuable to the conversation. Cheers, Greg.
I read both pieces. Andrews would do well to read Olia Hercules STRONG ROOTS which is about her family's experience in Ukraine in the 20th century to have a better understanding of what ordinary life under actual Soviet communism was like. Gordon Carrera's A SPY IN THE ARCHIVE also details why Mitrokhin felt it necessary to rebel and smuggle out the part of the KGB archive. Andrews paints far too benign a picture and thus appears to falsely equate the totalitarian nature of the regime with what is happening in the US re attempts to deal with very real and longstanding problems. I am pleased Greg Thomas wrote an excellent rebuttal.
The big question which is one which the Arday Affair threw up in the UK -- what the minimum standards be for a position and should they apply equally to everyone? And what harm is done to society when the minimum standards are not applied?
As Dame Florence Bell pointed out in the early 20th century (she did a lot of the data collection about the condition of poor working women in England) is that once a benefit is given to a large section of the voting public, it is virtually impossible to take that benefit away without causing significant political problems.
Finally as Churchill once point out about prohibition -- no folly is as costly as intolerant idealism. When does the pursuit of social equity tip over into intolerant idealism and force society to bear unacceptable costs?
I would accept your critique of HA's idea if those "Heritage American" prescriptions had been codified into law in the way that the current set of racial preferences have.
Furthermore, you would need to find something that connects that set of prescriptions to any actual words or actions of HA. If you can do this, that she is indeed talking out of both sides of her mouth, but until then, you have a a solid dissent of an idea that doesn't exist.
Great argument Greg. Classical liberalism or equality for a multi-racial 'all' under the law, and a work towards equal opportunity is not a utopia but a direction we commit to. I find the best arguments on this, with practical optimism, come from Helen Pluckrose.
Here are some great resources for FBT readers:
* Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico by Herman L. Bennett
* Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 by Herman L. Bennett
* Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 by Miguel A. Valero
* Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown
* Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora by Stephanie E. Smallwood
* All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles
* Sleeping with the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery by Joseph McGill Jr. & Herb Frazier
* Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley
* Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave by Jennifer Fleischner
* Murder on the Mississippi: The Shocking Crimes That Shaped Abraham Lincoln by Saladin Ambar
* Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White
* Integration: Did Black People as a Collective Benefit? by Maurice I. Crawford
* Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum
* Blacks against Brown: The Intra-racial Struggle over Segregated Schools in Topeka, Kansas by Charise L. Cheney
* Jim Crow's Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership by Leslie T. Fenwick
* The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 by James T. Anderson
* Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens
* Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation by Stuart Buck
* Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter
* Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America by John McWhorter
* White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
* Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century by Theodor Michael
* Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich by Tina Marie Campt
* Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement by Tiffany L. Florvil
* Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out by May Optiz
* Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany by Ika Hügel-Marshall
* The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts
* A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely
I read Andrews' Racial Crossroads piece and I agree with Mr. Thomas. We can and should undo DEI and the other sequelae of Critical Race Theory. That doesn't mean we undo the Civil Rights enforcement regime that long pre-dated DEI/CRT. Those were good laws and they remain good laws. One missing ingredient is race neutral leadership. Color blindness isn't going to happen. We can all see. And, we all see that race is a visible factor in many discrete walks of life. Look at STEM, look at the NBA. It isn't entirely coincidental. It isn't entirely environmental. Furthermore, we are never going to be a monochrome society. We are relentlessly diverse. We could, I suppose, balkanize into ethnic ghettos. Or, we could agree collectively to not let race be a thing that gets between us. Leadership is telling us that we are very diverse and that we have no choice but to make the best of it. "The best of it" isn't going to be paradise. It isn't going to be peace on earth, but ISTM that a lot of people would be ok trying to move past race as a meaningful thing and do what Americans say they do and treat everyone the same.
I pushed a back against Andrews' piece a lot because there seemed to have been little critique of her barely concealed expectation of racial preferences for her group. As long as (white) conservatives prop up a racial bargain copacetic with achieving almost integration and one which rues that "diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room," they sustain fertile ground for the next generation of Kendis.
Strong response article. Since I grew up during the Cold War and thus know the history of the Red Scare, when I ran into Andrews' use of “race-communism,” I was assured that she was not advocating for a middle ground. She was arguing for the right.
She has good reasons, as I have, for challenging identity politics, DEI, and racial preferences for their excesses and for covering up some failures of black culture, as I have, but she ignores the white nationalism on the right. I just don’t see her middle ground.
This is what’s driving me crazy about the politics of racism right now. Both the left and the right are engaged in race essentialism; they just have different solutions, all of which are divisive. As a an old school liberal, I wish a pox on both their houses!
Ethnicity-blindness at the level of peoplehood has never existed. Why do you believe you can conjure it from your philosophy?
If a nation is a community of shared identity, it is conceptually impossible for a multi-ethnic nation to exist.
If you are advocating for a multi-national state, the only successful ones lived as separate nations like Switzerland. This solves the “Who steers the car” problem.
All of this undercuts your utopian vision, doesn’t it?
Ethnicity blindness? Ethnicity is real. Confusing ethnicity and race is as flawed as confusing culture and race.
Conceptually impossible for a multi-ethnic nation to exist? Is not the U.S. a nation? Shared identity isn't solely based on ethnicity; as Americans, our shared identity is grounded in the nation's founding documents.
My vision isn't utopian. Rather, it's informed by the blues, which, according to Ralph Ellison, is tragi-comic. I'm closer to Sowell's tragic vision than the anointed, which is utopian.
Race and ethnicity are both real. My point is you’re bracketing off the problem of ethnicity.
No. The US is not a nation. There is no shared understanding of the good life, of history, of the ends of the state. The founding documents were never bribed to create a nation but to establish rule over a pre-existing multi-national body. Read Federalist #10 and #52. The founding documents presuppose multi-nationalism.
Liberalism is inherently utopian. It shares much with communism in that regard. It believes concepts but denies history.
You do too.
Are you a post-liberal? Your appeal to Federalist #10 and #52 misreads the Founding project. Yes, the Founders recognized factionalism, but they constructed a constitutional framework designed to bind diverse factions under shared democratic obligations. To reduce America to a mere empire ruling over squabbling ethnic groups ignores how deeply the "principle" of equality has acted as a real, historical force driving national transformation. Further, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (plus the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) are the main documents we rely on, though the Federalist Papers were an important precursor.
What's utopian about my vision?
You: “arguing against racialization as a governing logic, on the left as much as the right, in favor of the older civic-humanist tradition that runs from Frederick Douglass through Constance Rourke, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Danielle Allen, a cultural tradition that asks Americans to answer to one another as citizens rather than as entries in a ledger of grievance, resentment, or blood. That is my principled position.”
Your desire lacks a theory of transition. It names the end-state. It cites an very new intellectual tradition. You give no account in practice of how an ethnic nation becomes a civic one.
There is a purely conceptual, liberal “civic-humanist tradition.” It’s a tradition of thought not of practice. To be “in favor” of such a tradition in practice is not to restore it but to do it for the first time, since it’s never existed.
You presuppose a reciprocity that does not exist. Relating to others as citizens works only if they answer back in kind. But they don’t. By and large citizens relate to other citizens by ethnicity.
In these two senses, your vision is utopian. You must presuppose what doesn’t exist. You have not given an account of transition along with historical grounding.
Thanks for your explanation. I disagree.
The U.S. is a multi-ethnic nation. Your responses presuppose one ethnicity. What is that one ethnicity?
The work of turning a multi-ethnic nation into a civic one is indeed the work of the figures I've mentioned. See Douglass' "Composite American" speech. See Danielle Allen's book "Talking to Strangers." Rourke's "American Humor: A Study of the National Character" outlines fundamental American archetypes. Murray's Omni-American idea extends on Rourke and others. Ellison's body of work (and the cottage industry around his work after Invisible Man) also confronts this issue. See his "The Little Man at Chehaw Station."
Also see Stanley Crouch's "Blues to Be Constitutional."
The American experiment is a work in progress. Has it fulfilled its promise? No. But has it taken steps in the direction our founding documents point? Yes. The amendment process itself provides a way to address past wrongs and learn from our errors.
Is it possible to embrace ethnicity without an overriding ethnocentrism? I think so. Seems that you'd disagree.
I’m a never-liberal.
You said: “bind diverse factions under shared democratic obligations.”
I said: “to create a nation but to establish rule over a pre-existing multi-national body.”
Same thing.
You lied: “To reduce America to a mere empire ruling over squabbling ethnic groups ignores how deeply the "principle" of equality has acted as a real, historical force driving national transformation.”
I said: “If you are advocating for a multi-national state, the only successful ones lived as separate nations like Switzerland.”
Switzerland isn’t an empire. You’re making shit up. Stop doing that. I’m not talking about an empire but a multi-national state, for which there is historical precedent, against your civic-national state for which there is none.
You’re making straw men to avoid that point. Why not address it?
You said: “the ‘principle’ of equality has acted as a real, historical force driving national transformation.”
True but irrelevant. The several nations in America, present and acknowledged by the Founders at the Founding, existed under both equality and inequality.
You said: “the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (plus the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) are the main documents we rely on”
This is total fantasy. The modern administrative state bears no resemblance to the constitutional state envisioned at the founding. The constitution acts as no restraint on the government at all. This is another example of you believing concepts, but ignoring reality.
We see this country, this nation, its people and their potential much differently. I'm working every day towards my vision of America.
What are you working towards, what path do you think we should take?
Communists, liberals, anarchists, and other utopians work very hard to achieve ac forlorn hope.
American can only survive in a weaker federal system with states being actual nation-states. America can survive as a multinational federation. It can’t survive as one nation, because that nation doesn’t and can’t exist.
What have I done? Just google my name.
I looked you up. Sorry to read about your parental situation.
To better understand your perspective, besides your podcast, what books would you recommend?
Since America becoming a multinational federation isn't part of the mainstream political conversation, what do you think the likelihood is of it actually happening?
I recommend the Anti-Federalist Papers in which Founders like Jefferson argued against Hamilton and Madison.
The core Antifederalist argument was that liberty survives only in small republics: representatives should be close to and resemble their constituents.
They argued that the proposed federal government’s taxing power, standing army, supremacy clause, and open-ended “necessary and proper” clause would swallow state sovereignty over time.
And that’s exactly what happened.
While I don't see 50 states becoming nations, I do think that blocks of regional federations are possible. I just don't see how that transition could happen.
I see that you, too, burn the midnight oil, Jeff.
The war for southern independence (aka: the Civil War) proved that states can join the union voluntarily but can never leave.
Scratch the question of what books you'd recommend. I get a good sense from reading your podcast notes. I'd suspect that Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield would be among your recommendations, as well as the ancient Greek philosophers.
Yes. That’s right.
"How about so-called “heritage American” advocates who sort citizens into rightful stakeholders and tolerated guests? Race realists who invoke group IQ differences to justify unequal treatment?"
Who are these people? Where are these people?
The "race realists" are overwhelmingly demanding EQUAL treatment, rather than the racial preferences that have been normalized. "Heritage Americans" is plainly a cultural rather than a racial classification; it correctly elevates the traits and practices that built American prosperity.
I've tripped over Thomas's challenge that asks about "deciding who gets to drive." That's the next essay I want to read.
We might at the same time ask, what is it that they are driving? I might prefer walking.
Disparate impact law assumes that groups are identical in interests and abilities. Is that true? If not, the law should be repealed, no?
And what, exactly, is a 'group'? Do all blacks think/believe/want the same things? How about all whites? Jews? Muslims? Asians? Hispanics?
To attempt to sort things out based on 'black/white is as racist as it gets. And entirely pointless.
Race disparities will continue until race blindness fully sets in. I don’t see how this is not obvious.
Race disparities--as society defines them, a disparity of outcomes--will continue because races are *not* equal. Ignoring race (race blindness) will not change that.
Helen Andrews is a walking talking blind spot who is just as evidence free and vibes based as the women she accuses.
Really appreciated this response to Helen Andrews. You rightly expose the one-sidedness of her treatment of “race communism” and, more importantly, show why the critique has to be grounded in a civic-humanist principle rather than simply becoming another partisan intervention in the racial politics it purports to transcend.
I had many of the same thoughts when I read Andrews a couple of weeks ago, but you articulate the danger of her approach especially well. The deeper point, it seems to me, is precisely why and how Omni-Americanism (as conceived by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and Stanley Crouch) has to challenge all varieties of race communism and racial essentialism—without ever allowing itself to be weaponized on behalf of either of the warring race-ideological camps.
That is what makes the civic-humanist alternative so important: it offers a genuinely different route toward a republican order in which citizens recognize one another first as human beings and fellow citizens, rather than as representatives of competing racial collectivities.
A great series for JFBT to be conducting, and this opening salvo makes clear once again why your voice is so valuable to the conversation. Cheers, Greg.
Best,
Jacob Roundtree
I read both pieces. Andrews would do well to read Olia Hercules STRONG ROOTS which is about her family's experience in Ukraine in the 20th century to have a better understanding of what ordinary life under actual Soviet communism was like. Gordon Carrera's A SPY IN THE ARCHIVE also details why Mitrokhin felt it necessary to rebel and smuggle out the part of the KGB archive. Andrews paints far too benign a picture and thus appears to falsely equate the totalitarian nature of the regime with what is happening in the US re attempts to deal with very real and longstanding problems. I am pleased Greg Thomas wrote an excellent rebuttal.
The big question which is one which the Arday Affair threw up in the UK -- what the minimum standards be for a position and should they apply equally to everyone? And what harm is done to society when the minimum standards are not applied?
As Dame Florence Bell pointed out in the early 20th century (she did a lot of the data collection about the condition of poor working women in England) is that once a benefit is given to a large section of the voting public, it is virtually impossible to take that benefit away without causing significant political problems.
Finally as Churchill once point out about prohibition -- no folly is as costly as intolerant idealism. When does the pursuit of social equity tip over into intolerant idealism and force society to bear unacceptable costs?
Agreed, but the law does just that...
I would accept your critique of HA's idea if those "Heritage American" prescriptions had been codified into law in the way that the current set of racial preferences have.
Furthermore, you would need to find something that connects that set of prescriptions to any actual words or actions of HA. If you can do this, that she is indeed talking out of both sides of her mouth, but until then, you have a a solid dissent of an idea that doesn't exist.