Scapegoating the Supreme Court

It has become conventional wisdom that ideological polarization impairs the ability of the political system to function or succeed. In Congress, that is demonstrably true. But what if polarization is justified?

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, popularly summarized as “ending affirmative action,” is the latest study in polarization’s mortal combat.

Democrats en masse are on the attack against the Roberts court. The delegitimization campaign, such as the personal assaults against Justice Samuel Alito’s integrity, will expand, as will demands that President Biden support a bill introduced by Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren to expand the court to 13 seats.

The U.S.’s polarization over race has indeed become deeply destructive. Its cause lies not in systemic racism but more in political decisions made 60 years ago.

The political division arguably began shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose passage—as a matter of undisputed historical record—was made possible with strong support from Republican senators.

What came next was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, the “war on poverty.” In effect, liberal Democrats back then said to Republicans and conservatives: Step aside. The running of these programs to help black Americans is something we, Northern Democrats, are going to control. You Republicans don’t have a role in this.

No doubt the Democrats’ takeover of antipoverty programs and their large financial transfers was done in part to keep black voters inside the party’s coalition. Still, it’s hard to overstate the monopoly control that career Democrats asserted over public policies affecting the lives of black Americans. The rest of the country was reduced to bystanders. From time to time, a Republican such as Rep. Jack Kemp, Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, would try to cross the racial bridge with less centralized policy proposals. He was rebuffed.

What is there to show for this social-welfare monopoly? Put plainly: The Democrats’ stewardship of urban black America—its education, housing and family well-being—has been a policy and moral failure.

No one will gainsay that the original Great Society was well-intentioned. But a political and psychological characteristic of the liberal administrative state—that is, the appointees and academics who ran these programs—is they never changed course no matter the evidence before their eyes. And past some point, the catastrophe for black family cohesion and education was so embarrassing that by internal Democratic consensus, it became virtually a nonsubject.

During this 60 years, the one notable midcourse correction was Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, whose telling title was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. That reform has since been repudiated by Democratic progressives, who have revived the original Great Society idea of direct transfer payments, aka Bidenomics.

Most disturbing is the liberal failure in education. The race-based admissions policies of Harvard, North Carolina, Princeton and other “elite” schools are the result of so many black Americans being underprepared by their public schools. I recall a visit to the Journal editorial page years ago by the head of one of the college accrediting agencies, who unapologetically argued to us that remedial college courses in English and math were not only necessary for incoming black freshmen but should be a requirement for a college’s accreditation.

These university presidents should be on the ramparts for public-school reform. Instead, they pulled down the shades and retreated to the salve of their admissions policies.

Time was that a strong public education was a crown jewel in New York City. But in another Faustian bargain to keep their political coalition intact, the Democrats let the teachers unions degrade into an industrial union that first and last is about . . . da money.

This travesty of sweeping urban K-12 under the rug was never sustainable. The past 40 years or so have seen a wave of upwardly mobile Asian immigrants to the U.S. from South Korea, China, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was inevitable.

This commentary is painting Democrats with an unfairly broad brush. Liberal reformers recognized the failures in schooling and family cohesion among inner-city black populations, and some became supporters of public charter schools or school-choice voucher programs. They, too, were pushed aside as the party’s social-policy agenda was taken over by the Democratic left, which has come up with a deflection for six decades of failure: Create scapegoats, such as “white supremacy.” Or the Supreme Court.

Census Bureau data show that increasing numbers of blacks are moving out of these cities, some to nearby suburbs or to states in the South. They often cite better schools and fear of crime. Bloomberg reports that in the past two years, some 2.2 million people have moved to Florida and the Southeast.

Outmigration in search of better opportunity is bleeding the Democrats. In 2022, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and for the first time California each lost one congressional seat. Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Texas gained two.

The Supreme Court doesn’t deserve to be attacked for its Harvard decision. It should be thanked for forcing the subject of this 60-year policy failure into the open.

Write [email protected].