> 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.
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.
The political coalition there is "people of color" - the point of this was to fight anti-black racism by making a unified group containing them and everyone else who was "not white". This is an improvement over the previous system where groups like Italians/Irish became white by being anti-black. (or were thought to have)
Activists then forgot this was the point and changed the name to "BIPOC" to de-emphasize half the "POC" group (the ones who aren't "BI"), but the whole point was to keep them in the group.
I think the notion of a “BIPOC coalition” has many angles. Many black political thinkers and academics focus on a black/white binary, and extending the concept of “black” to “people of color” was natural. This was also appealing to white democrats, whose coalition with black people is heavily focused on fighting purported racism and discrimination in return for loyal democratic voting.
Couple that with the prospect of America becoming a majority non-white, it’s easy to see why the broader left of center embraced the rhetoric and policies they did over the last decade—e.g. reframing policy issues like immigration and policing in racial justice terms.
The problem is that “white racism” as a lens for understanding America—widely shared by modern liberals—is a poor tool for understanding Latinos and Asians.
I understand what you think you are seeing and that you are probably not alone in this. But you haven’t managed to convince me that there is a «cohesive coalition». I think people who believe that this is what they see may have gotten a bit carried away.
I isn’t a cohesive coalition. I think leaders and activists in the left think there is one. Because the leading DNC chair candidate says stuff like this: https://x.com/benwikler/status/1878205257789960435 (“As DNC Chair, our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—with Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.”).
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.
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.
We all heard that but it was never really true and was the camel's nose under the tent. "Equally qualified" is meaningless given how interview processes work in the tech industry: you keep interviewing until you find the first person that passes the bar and then make an offer. Holding offers back in the hope that someone more demographically attractive comes along is a bad policy that results in lost candidates who get tired of the BS, but is a natural consequence of this definition of affirmative action.
Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.
So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
>"our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call.
I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions
That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.
> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was
What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.
> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself).
In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...
Is that comparable though? It's not an open job position with requirements listed that anybody can apply for.
I don't know how that works in the US, but according to wikipedia the president can nominate a person and a majority vote in both houses of congress can confirm that.
It's not like the best candidate wins...this is politics...
> I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
It is illegal for jobs in USA, but not for university student spots. Trump has said he will make that illegal though, so it might change and become illegal like in most of the world.
It isn't legal for individual university spots either.
What a university can do, or any form of corporation in the USA can do, is to announce goals to have its body be made up in roughly the same was as the general population, according to some demographic metrics.
So you can't say "student #68 must be female"; you can say "we are aiming for a 50/50 male/female student body" and then take steps to get there.
It is illegal in the US but the law isn't enforced when men are on the losing end. As someone else points out, the POTUS himself violated this law openly and in public. Because everyone knows that and because feminists agitate constantly for female-biased hiring, it's been effectively decriminalized.
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.
The polls have asked the question in different ways and get similar results. In particular, they have asked whether people support race being used as a factor in admissions decisions, and overwhelmingly they do not: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans... (“In the December 2022 survey, for example, 82% of U.S. adults said colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept, while only 17% said colleges should take this into account.”) That’s exactly what’s happening, and people don’t like it.
And people see that this framing of “breaking ties between qualified candidates” concept is merely wordplay. Harvard doesn’t say “everyone above a particular academic index score is ‘equally qualified’ and there’s no difference above that line.” According to the SFFA data, Asian and white students in the 10th decile of academic index score are 5-6 times as likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 5th decile (who have virtually no chance). But black and Hispanic students in the 5th decile are as likely or more likely to be admitted as white and Asian students in the 9th and 10th deciles. Thus, Harvard uses race to admit less qualified students—as measured by the very metric Harvard has established to measure qualifications.
Most people intuitively understand this without the explanation. They intuitively understand that grades and test scores establish a sliding scale of more or less qualified candidates.
What is race? When a student is applying for college, are they free to check whichever box they think will maximize their chance of admission or are there specific, objective criteria to which they must adhere?
Of course, should they be admitted and it is realized that they abused the definitions of race that society uses to group and classify people in some egregious way, they may face consequences for that.
And sure, I'm entirely sympathetic to the scientific observation that race is a myth, but in the actual USA, in actual 2024, basic physiological features like skin color, face shape, voice tone, hair texture will result in you receiving different treatment in many contexts. Whatever triggers such different treatment is what defines race on the ground (ignoring the equivalent set of things related to sex/gender).
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)?
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.