Is the cure worse than the disease?

Back in January, Tyler Cowen did a post entitled:

This was in reference to their role in fighting DEI policies:

As most of you already know, the Trump administration through Executive Orders has taken major steps against affirmative action and also DEI. We will see how the details play out, but each of these developments seems highly significant and not just “expressive.”

Those two individuals played a decisive role in what happened, in both cases taking considerable flak along the way.

I had exactly the same view as Tyler. But in at least one respect, the “details” did not play out in the way that many of us would have preferred. Here’s Richard Hanania:

I’m in The Economist today on the problems with Trump’s war on Harvard. The entire point of the anti-wokeness movement, at least from my perspective, was to fight for merit, freedom, and the rule of law. If you honestly hold these principles, then you have to acknowledge that Trump is trying to replace DEI with something that is even more opposed to them. . . .

I don’t see any real defenses out there of what Trump is doing. Here’s Rufo arguing against center-right critics of the administration, yet the policy he defends has no resemblance to the one actually being pursued. Not once does he mention the Trump requirement for ideological diversity, nor the demand that Harvard create an ideological litmus test for foreign students. If Chris thought that these policies had a sound logical and legal basis, I think he would make the case for them. He might believe wokeness is so bad that any policy that strikes against it needs to be supported, but I think that kind of attitude is how you end up defending the indefensible.

On issues like free speech there are two types of people. Those whose views depend on whether or not they agree with the ideology of the speaker, and those who have a principled support for freedom. In the former case, a so-called proponent of free speech may immediately flip to opposition as soon as they gain power. Some on the right have opposed diversity programs that placed racial and gender considerations above merit, but now wish to place ideological diversity considerations above merit. People who complained about cancel culture now wish to deport students that protested against Israel’s action in Gaza.

In a related note, a recent Matt Lutz post on civil rights caught my attention:

So ok, let’s talk about the Civil Rights Act.

I know, I know! I feel you reaching for your pearls again, ready to clutch. So let me begin by saying that I am not against the Civil Rights Act. I think it has been, on the whole, good. But as with much else in politics, there are good arguments to be made on either side. And I think that there are good arguments to be made against the Civil Rights Act. It is, on net, good. But that doesn’t mean there’s no bad to it. And the bad is, basically, the argument that libertarians have long had against the Civil Rights Act. . . .

The world is complicated, and we should never commit ourselves fully to any particular perspective. The Trump administration’s treatment of Harvard is bad. But Jim Crow was worse. If the worst that can be said about the Civil Rights Act is that it gave Donald [expletive] Trump the power to run roughshod over liberal institutions, and the best that can be said is that it ended Jim Crow, then the Civil Rights Act comes out way ahead. Jim Crow was that bad.

But the libertarians had a point. I think it’s easier to see that now.

My views on civil rights are pretty similar to those expressed in Lutz’s post. But I’d like to frame the debate in a slightly different fashion.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act covers many different areas. The vast majority are fairly uncontroversial. I don’t see people arguing that blacks should not be allowed to vote, sit at the lunch counter, or sit in the front of a bus. I don’t see people arguing that public benefit programs should favor whites. I don’t see people arguing that labor unions should be allowed to refuse admission to blacks, or that employment agencies should be allowed to screen out black job applicants. Or that certain public schools should be for whites only. It seems to me that almost all of the controversy over civil rights is actually related to a set of DEI-related issues in employment and college admission, which constitute only a small portion of the bill. The most controversial civil rights issues relate to concepts such as “disparate impact”, “affirmative action” and “diversity”.

But many of these controversial DEI policies seem to violate the plain meaning of the Civil Right Act. Indeed at least one part of the law (in Title VII) explicitly suggests that companies should not be required to aim for racial or gender diversity.

(j) Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer, employment agency, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee subject to this title to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex, or national origin employed by any employer, referred or classified for employment by any employment agency or labor organization, admitted to membership or classified by any labor organization, or admitted to, or employed in, any apprenticeship or other training program, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section, or other area, or in the available work force in any community, State, section, or other area.

There are a couple ways that a person might think about this situation:

1. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a good law, but was not implemented as written.
2. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a bad law, because it gave powers to government that would inevitably be abused.

A few people of the right might even argue the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a bad law because racial discrimination is good. But the more mainstream conservative objection has been that the Civil Rights Act was (wrongly) interpreted as encouraging companies and universities to discriminate against whites and Asians. Once civil rights advocates gained political power, we learned that their actual objective was not a colorblind society.

Here are a few analogies.

1. Prior to Roe v. Wade being overturned, the pro-life movement wished to allow individual states to determined abortion policy. Today, they favor a nationwide ban on abortion.
2. During the Joe McCarthy era, the left favored allowing more freedom of speech in places like UC Berkeley. Once the left gained control of UC-Berkeley, they shifted to opposing freedom of speech.

Unfortunately, very few people have consistent principles. Most people favor freedom only when other people make the sort of choices of which they approve. As soon as they gain power, they seek to impose their values on the rest of the population. The developing world is full of “liberation movements”. As soon as they gain power, they usually switch from being a liberation movement to being an oppression movement. The almost saint-like reputation of Nelson Mandela comes from the fact that he was an exception, he did not attempt to crush his enemies after taking power.

The Trump administration faces a momentous decision. Should it try to prevent universities from discriminating to achieve diversity, or should it replace one type of discrimination with another?

PS. Here’s another example. Environmentalists have made it very difficult to build new projects, by erecting a complex a bureaucratic process in order for a project to be approved. In the past, conservatives objected to the fact that those hurdles were aimed at preventing the construction of coal-fired power plants. Today, conservatives are using these restrictions to stop clean energy:

The halt on federal permits for wind energy was first laid out in a Jan. 20 executive order, one of a barrage that President Trump signed immediately upon taking office. It directed agencies to stop all permits for wind farms pending federal review. . . . The wind industry provides about 10 percent of the nation’s electricity, and has many new projects under development, particularly in the Great Plains and the Atlantic Ocean.

Last month, the Trump administration halted a major wind farm under construction off the coast of Long Island, the Empire Wind project. It was designed to provide enough electricity to power a half-million homes. It had already received the permits it needed, but Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested the Biden administration’s analysis during the approval process was rushed and insufficient.