An honest look at the issue would show that, in practice, affirmative discrimination (the British term, which I prefer) has a MIXED record. Some clear success, for instance in enabling large numbers of minorities to enter schools and be hired for positions, AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THESE OPPORTUNITIES, which would have been available to them under an ostensibly “color-blind” selection system. And possible practical downsides: reinforcing minority feeling of inadequacy, intensifying white resentments, etc..

But the primary objection to affirmative discrimination are not practical ones, rather they are based on principles.

Indeed.

I spoke with a family friend about the failure of affirmative action programs, despite some 30 years of effort.

Her conclusion was that we hadn’t tried hard enough.

Yes, that’s right, an entire generation of hardworking, dedicated lefties had not tried hard enough.

But please feel free to enlighten me about classic liberal blunders. After all, I’ve been told there is no such thing as an educated liberal, only an educated ex-liberal. Right? Not a single one?

Jamie — I’m not going to speak for leftists or marxists, since I am not one of them. But having a relatively fixed idea of human nature is certainly compatible with modern liberalism (progressivism). There is nothing about human nature that is incompatible with the effort to end child labor in 1905, nor with the similar effort to ensure universal access to the best health care one hundred years later.

Jamie, exactly! You are beginning to see why conservatism is not an ideology.

As to the original point, party line politics is only stupid if both parties offer worthwhile choices.

Actually, intelligent liberals (cf. Washington Monthly, New Republic, Center for American Progress, New American Foundations) see the shortcomings of various institutions which they have promoted in the past, and they then seek to make those institutions work better. That is to say, liberals are REFORMERS. Conservatives see the shortcomings of liberal institutions as proof that they never should have existed in the first place.

And when the voters put people who think that government programs are intrinsically inefficient and unable to help solve problems in charge of administering those very same programs — this is when we get people like Michael Brown.

of course, cathy young blew a hole in that theory with 2 words: ‘ann coulter.’ but maybe that just proves there are exceptions to every rule.

You see, [the Republicans] had the TRUTH, and eventually their party and their country recognized it…

As one who migrated slightly to the right of center almost immediately after 9/11, when I had been to that point rather far to the left (without being “radical”), I think to the extent that conservatives feel they have any grasp of the “truth,” it is mostly a grasp of an enduring truth of human nature: human nature is relatively fixed.

Our genes, which control a surprising range of our possible behavior, without the latter’s being altogether rigid, have changed hardly at all in hundreds of millennia. When one reads the great writers of antiquity, one is surprised at the degree to which they already had the world, and their fellow human beings, pretty well figured out.

The left sees human nature as almost infinitely malleable, and doesn’t hesitate to promote the overthrow of institutions (marriage, for example) that it sees as hindrances to this infinite malleability.

What really surprises me about the left is that, in contrast to its purported belief in science, it seems almost immune to historical evidence (which is of course of a different order than experimental evidence). While there is evidence everywhere of the failure of the institutions promoted by the left, the latter sees these failures as evidence only of an insufficiently pure application of their principles.

Strange.

Jamie Irons

Any semi-literate moron understands the plain meaning of maria’s advice. murkus’s complaint only makes sense if Democrats cannot speak out without being rude, obnoxious, or otherwise deleterious. I suspect markus knows himself, and those he consorts with, all too well, and his question acknowledges, however painfully, that Democrats simply cannot speak up nor lose arguments gracefully.

Which only means we’ll have this problem for years, if not decades, to come, as Democrats and other liberals haven’t proven themselves smart enough to learn new tricks, let alone absorb lessons.

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/60411.htm (registration required)

ON June 9, 1954, during the televised Army- McCarthy hearings, Sen. McCarthy “outed” Fred Fischer, a young lawyer working for the Army, for having once belonged to the leftist National Lawyers Guild. Everyone in the room except McCarthy instantly realized it was a gross gratuitous smear.

Fischer’s boss, Joseph Welch, interrupted McCarthy’s tirade with an indignant speech of his own, which began, “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” and ended, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

The cameras took it all in ? one of the 20th century’s unforgettable moments. …

McCarthy’s fall sank the anti-Communist crusade he had championed, and crippled the Republican Party’s right wing, which had made anti-Communism its lodestone, for a generation. Those dramatic minutes on TV began a political landslide that buried McCarthy’s friend Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election 10 years later.

Republicans, and the conservative movement, learned a powerful lesson. They would now pay a high price for their rhetorical excess or hysteria, which the media would instantly denounce as “McCarthyism.” …

THE fall of McCarthy forced conservatives to change their political style. Smearing opponents as “commies” or “pinkos” only backfired. Appealing to racial or anti-Semitic stereotypes told the public more about the accuser than the accused.

The right began policing its own. Conservatives who didn’t or couldn’t make the adjustment were relegated to the swamps of the John Birch Society ? or later, like white supremacist David Duke or evangelist Pat Robertson, instantly denounced. The new attitude was embodied in a new magazine that appeared soon after McCarthy’s fall, William F. Buckley’s National Review, which taught conservatives that they could gain more through reasoned debate than through conspiracy theories, name-calling, and sleazy innuendo.

Conservatives learned their lesson: The Reagan Revolution would be the result.

I apologize for any names I may have called you. I regret any sleazy innuendo or gratuitous smear I may have posted here. I will henceforth try to confine my remarks to reasoned debate. Which is really too bad because I just thought of a terrific joke about respecting your “opposing views”. Oh well. My excuse is I was a Democrat for so many years, rudeness just comes naturally to me.

Did you ever see anyone at Daily Kos apologize for anything? Do you see any relevance in Herman’s editorial for today’s Democratic Party? Did I just use the word “henceforth”? Yikes!

Excuse me, but what positions did conservatives rethink after the Goldwater loss? My understanding is that the Goldwaterites simply continued the ideological battle that Goldwater himself started with mainstream Republicanism. Eventually, around 1980, they won. You see, they had the TRUTH, and eventually their party and their country recognized it.

maria hovarth — “My advice to the Democrats: Learn to lose gracefully.”

I always appreciate when people say what the really feel. So thank you, maria, for being honest and for summing up (I think) the viewpoint of most people reading this blog. Which is that unless Democrats like myself have something to say about Terri Schiavo, or gay marriage, or perhaps Pat Robertson, or unless we are attacking liberal orthodoxy ourselves (something that many of us actually do more than occasionally, c.f. The New Republic) — we should just SHUT UP. Right?

Just like too many posters at the Daily Kos,

no respect for those with opposing views.