This is the first in a four-part series on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

“Can the government make you buy cell phones?” The question Chief Justice Roberts asked during oral arguments over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is at the heart of fears spurred by many who oppose the bill. Those who favor repeal of the landmark health care and health insurance reform bill, especially conservatives, often cite the individual mandate as particularly problematic. The mandate requires all US residents to have “minimum essential coverage” or pay a tax penalty The penalty for failing to purchase insurance is $750 or 2 percent of income, whichever is greater, although there are exemptions for religious, financial, or legal status. In making their arguments before the Court and the public, both sides have made superficial and even spurious arguments that warrant closer examination.

Even though the idea of criminalizing inaction and compelling individuals to buy something from a private supplier does seem like a radical step, proponents of PPACA claim that the individual mandate is necessary to make the bill as a whole feasible. Without having healthy individuals paying into the system to balance those with pre-existing conditions who will no longer be denied coverage, health insurers would face financial hardship. Moreover, the status quo is conducive to adverse selection, since many individuals will simply refrain from buying health insurance until they need it, further burdening both insurance companies and taxpayers who would foot their emergency room bills in the event that they suffered a sudden illness. Critics are still unconvinced, asserting that viability should not be the primary consideration when dealing with constitutional matters.

The government’s arguments for the constitutionality of the law have generally been based on the Interstate Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. In response to charges that the law criminalizes inaction, proponents point out that the mandate is enforced through the Internal Revenue Code, not criminal procedure. Furthermore, under the Affectation Doctrine established by the Court in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) and Gonzales v. Raich (2005), “Congress also has authority to regulate any and all economic activity that, in the aggregate, has a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce,” a standard that is easily met by health insurance. Finally, in both cases where district courts have found PPACA to be constitutional, judges ruled that the economic activity being regulated was healthcare, a field in which no one could reasonably be said to be inactive. Health insurance, according to the courts, is simply a way of paying for healthcare. As such, the courts ruled that the action-inaction distinction was moot. This raises a problematic question, however: Can individuals legally be said to have entered a market—even the healthcare market—simply by virtue of living? While difficult to predict how the Court will decide this question, it may be helpful to look at auto insurance as a partial analogy. Though provisions requiring the purchase of auto insurance are obviously contingent on the prior purchase of a car, the fact that car ownership is so widespread and in many cases pivotal makes it a similar enough case to suggest that the action-inaction distinction may not be enough to persuade the Court of the law’s unconstitutionality.

President Obama, in a rare departure from the precedent of sitting presidents withholding remarks until after the court has made its ruling, commented on the case during a press conference. He believes that the court will not rule the act unconstitutional, on the basis that doing so would be “judicial activism” and “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” since it was passed by a majority of members in the House and Senate. However, such a move would not be quite so unprecedented. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935) seems analogous. In fact, the NIRA had broader public support, was passed by a larger majority of Congress and was billed as a stop-gap emergency measure. Nonetheless, the court voted unanimously to overturn FDR’s flagship legislation. Perhaps the better question to ask is, “Will the Court view this as a primarily political matter?” If so, then experience would suggest that the Court will let the bill stand, pursuant to the rational basis test. The Court established this test in Williamson v. Lee Optical (1955), in which it ruled that “[T]o be constitutional . . . [i]t is enough that there is an evil at hand for correction, and that it might be thought that the particular legislative measure was a rational way to correct it.” If this is the standard the Court chooses to apply, then it may err on the side of upholding the law because of the severability issue. Congress made it clear in a report attached to PPACA that the individual mandate was the lynchpin of healthcare reform, without which the bill cannot stand. Therefore, it would seem that the Court must either completely overturn PPACA or uphold the individual mandate.

Aside from the constitutional questions surrounding the individual mandate, there are also practical challenges. The minimum plan required under PPACA costs around $3000 per person per year. The penalty for not purchasing minimum coverage is $750 or 2 percent of income. This means that for individuals making less than $150,000, the penalty is lower than the minimum requirement. Since the individual mandate is geared towards healthy young adults in their 20s and 30s, most of whom make well under $150,000, there are obvious concerns about its efficacy.

At the end of the day, no one truly knows how the Court will rule, but not because of the reasons usually cited. Neither the president nor his conservative opponents can truly claim that legal precedent does not exist for a judgment either way. While PPACA is truly daunting in scope, there are analogous government policies and regulations. As much as both might want to hedge their bets, sequestering the mandate from the rest of the act also seems unworkable. Finally, although both sides wish to constrain the debate to legal and philosophical grounds, practical questions still abound, no matter what the Court rules. Given the strange framing of the debate thus far, it is no wonder that Justice Roberts’ question was considered both completely appropriate and completely off point.

This is the first in a series of articles on the recent uprisings in the Middle East.

Authoritarian regimes across the Middle East are atremble as popular revolution threatens to engulf a second country in the space of two months. Following the fall of the Ben Ali government in Tunisia, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have converged on major cities such as Cairo and Alexandria to protest a longstanding list of political and economic grievances that include an entrenched police state, one-party rule, endemic unemployment, and rising food inflation. Though current President Hosni Mubarak has been in control for nearly 30 years, at the head of a formidable security apparatus and with backing from the West, he, today, announced that he would not seek re-election in September—though it is doubtful his concession will placate the millions who oppose his rule.

The surprisingly rapidity with which revolution has swept the Arab world can be attributed, in part, to a revolution in social media. Starting in Tunisia and spreading to Egypt, protests are now appearing in Yemen, Jordan, and Syria, organized and publicized by individuals though Facebook, Twitter, and SMS, reminiscent of the abortive Green Revolution in Iran. While technology alone cannot cause the fall of a government, it can help catalyze idealistic students, disaffected intellectuals, and an angry, oppressed population into action by allowing them to organize and exchange ideas online. The relative ubiquity and accessibility of social media also acts as a constraint on government action, forcing them to put on a balancing act when deploying force against largely unarmed civilians. Even Iran, a reviled pariah state, resorted to plainclothes basij to intimidate protestors during the summer of 2009, aware that the eyes of the world were watching.

However, while new social media certainly has a role to play in keeping governments accountable to the people, one must keep in mind its weaknesses. While its spread has been pervasive amongst the youthful Generation Y, many older people have yet to overcome the digital divide. This gap also exists between countries; while Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan have relatively broad middle classes who have access to the Internet and cell phones, poorer countries like Yemen remain relatively isolated from the Information Revolution. In other cases, the government can strangle the flow of information in and out of the country; Mubarak’s government shut down Internet and cell phone service in an attempt to undermine protestors, while countries like Iran, Syria, and most famously, China, censor and control what goes on online.

The role of traditional, conventional media cannot be overlooked either. Qatar-based Al-Jazeera has received widespread acclaim for its 24/7 coverage of the events in Egypt, broadcasting scenes of “protestors bowing their heads against the water cannons; bearded young men in T-shirts and old women in head scarves holding the same signs, hours of silence preceding Tuesday’s mass demonstrations, the Egyptian national anthem rising in the dark from Cairo and Alexandria as millions sat and stood and refused to leave until their president stepped down,” even as the government raced to suppress these images.

While it would be overstatement to say that social media single-handedly provided protestors with the tools necessary to organize a revolution, it did provide a very real, tangible way for people to communicate with each other, and the outside world.

As the winds of change begin to blow through the Middle East, the United States and its allies must reassess their relationship with the region. Pro-Western states like Jordan and Saudi Arabia might not be so stable if Hosni Mubarak, and his vaunted grip on the police and military, is giving way to popular revolution. The speed with which these governments have crumbled (the Iranian Revolution, in comparison, took about a year) also make it difficult for the United States to predict and prepare for a change in regime, making policymakers appear confused and indecisive. Meanwhile, they must also deal with the aftermath of Tunisia and Egypt. The new government in Tunis has yet to consolidate its legitimacy or restore order to the country while Mohamed El-Baradei is only just emerging as the frontrunner to succeed Mr. Mubarak. Following ACE writers will discuss these points and more in upcoming days.

This is the fifth part of an ACE Forum on the use of drones in US military action.

After sixty-five years, human rights activists still delight in skewering the Truman administration for its deployment of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Books, fiction and otherwise, have been written about the bombings; the destruction has been featured (to varying degrees of abstraction) in vast numbers of paintings; pieces of music attempt to capture the sudden violence of an atomic explosion. Like Vietnam for Lyndon Johnson, the mushroom clouds over Japan taint Truman’s presidency — he may have ended the war, but did it so inhumanely that such an accomplishment will never be truly accepted. Our national morality is too great.

Apologists for the bombings claim that if Truman had not ordered the extermination of those two cities, the war would have continued for years, resulting in far more deaths, both American and Japanese. Instead, we gambled on the belief that the Japanese people would set aside their fabled disregard for individual lives and surrender to the instinct for self-preservation. The kamikaze bombers, to us at least, were a clear example of how much they preferred a national victory to individual survival. The American mentality relegates this to an almost inhuman level, making it easier for people here to justify killing, imprisoning, or at least taunting the “Japs.” Nothing short of overwhelming force would suffice to force the Japanese to surrender. And perhaps there is truth to this claim — that the war ended far sooner than it would have otherwise due to Truman’s action. Certainly, the salvation of American lives is a worthy cause, for an American at least.

But then the Soviets started developing their nuclear weapons, and suddenly the attitude towards nuclear weaponry was reversed. So long as there was an atomic gun pointed at us, it was emblematic of the evils of technology. Deproliferation became the political buzzword of the hour, and the rise of radical opposition to warfare was triggered. And thus, the debate on the morality of military efficiency — although it was not necessarily presented as such — began.

Today, we face a similar dilemma, one which some of the other authors have touched on (in particular, Trent Serwetz of The Gothic Guardian at Duke University did an admirable job of covering some of this ground), but of which none of them have chosen to make their primary focus. The basic argument in this forum has been whether our drones actually are as accurate as the CIA claims, and what their inevitable place in our military should be. But, some of the questions raised by John Gee of the Penn Political Review are, in my opinion, far more important, although he still skirts around the basic issue of what the rise in remote attacks means for the future of warfare. I feel that they present as fundamental a risk as nuclear armaments, and should be treated as a potential weapon of mass destruction. This may be a stretch regarding the present circumstances, but I’m not particularly concerned with the current situation; at least, not in the face of the potential long-term consequences. So, with that in mind, here is a type of thought experiment tracing the potential (if not probable) development of drone technology:

Over the next twenty years, production methods for these drones would improve drastically, lowering the cost of their production to something commensurate with large modern weaponry such as tanks or mobile artillery. Already, the geographic range of military vehicles is expanding rapidly, so the necessity of maintaining “drone bases” overseas would be minimal. In addition, the accuracy and firepower of these remote-controlled bombers will increase dramatically. All of this is perfectly plausible from a technological perspective, especially given the extent of military funding over the past few decades. The basic result of such developments would be an incredible reduction in the risk to our soldiers, coupled with as little decrease in our ability to inflict destruction on our opponents as possible; in effect (and to paraphrase Mr. Serwetz), the result would be a de-humanization of warfare for Americans.

Where I depart from my fellow commentators is the assumption that, sooner or later, countries like China or Russia will develop similar technology: the Cold War should tell us that any significant advance in weaponry will soon be copied by all other major world powers. Arms races are a fact of military life (and death). So we can further assume that — maybe in a similar time frame, but certainly by the end of the century — drone technology will lead to the general de-humanization of war. The direct risk to soldiers will be eliminated. But at what cost?

The only major deterrent to involvement in a war is risk. In any case, the victor stands to gain a great amount of something, whether it is territory, resources, or simply influence. And, compared to the obvious bargaining inherent in diplomacy, sans the obvious cost in human lives, war is by far the simplest solution to almost any international disagreement. If a war may be won without giving up anything, it is obviously preferable to a diplomatic solution in which both sides must make some sacrifice. Drone technology, and the de-humanization of warfare, removes this last barrier. Like the atomic bomb or anthrax, advanced pilot-less mobile weaponry is a relatively low-cost, low-risk method of causing mass destruction. Two thousand incredibly accurate drone bombers could level Hiroshima as easily as the Enola Gay. Perhaps J. Robert Oppenheimer, through the Bhavagad Gita, put it best: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

As Mark Hay so cleverly put it, we are “raining Hellfire [missiles]” on the Afghan terrorists. The image is certainly appropriate. Our removal from the process, the aesthetic distance between Americans and those we kill — whether through pulling a remote trigger or voting for funding for drone research or even by ranting at the television, pulling the Stouffer’s lasagna from the oven, and returning to your unextraordinary routine, indifferent at last — hands us the power to smite without fear of retribution. Until the world catches up, we wield the nascent Hand of God. And then everyone else will grow their own laboratory deities, and we are left with a planet of Lokis, Sets, men and women with fire and brimstone at their beck and call. A pantheon of morbidly capricious Shivas. War over land, resources, or anything physical is natural — we see it all the time between ant colonies, for instance. But war over beliefs, the currently “accepted” form, is purely human. What right have we to de-humanize it? Who are we to play God with each other?

Questions about accuracy will be answered with time and technological improvements. Questions about use in the Afghan war are for strategists dealing with current technology, which I won’t pretend to understand. But questions of morality are open to any would-be philosopher or historian, however, and here, in two short sentences, is my answer, however unrealistic it may be: To war is human. Let’s keep it that way.

This is the fourth part of an ACE Forum on the use of drones in US military action.

Technology discussions often disappoint me. Rather than engage substantively with human nature and the structure of society, they usually single out one, decontextualized novelty to misinterpret as a sea change. Internet social networking, for example, only accelerates a process that began with paved roads and horses, or perhaps with the postal service. Yet we approach Facebook as if this is the technology that will finally render us incapable of human connection with each other, once and for all.

I see the same thing happening with discussion of drone strikes in South Asia. According to Trent Serwetz, “The ever-growing distance between the killer and the killed is not exclusively physical. It is a dissociation of the human on the other side to his humanity…” What, pray tell, have we been doing throughout the millennia but separating ourselves from our victims? The hand on the throat becomes the knife in the back, becomes the long-range rifle, becomes the machine gun, becomes the smart bomb, becomes the Predator drone. The word “ever-growing,” while it seems to acknowledge some continuity, implies that this growth has occurred only over the last century or so. It hasn’t.

Trent’s more specific point is about unintended civilian deaths – inevitable, at this point, in targeted drone killings. He deplores the dehumanization of collateral deaths for their “collateral,” i.e. marginal, insignificant status. My immediate objection is that the discussion of drone strikes has certainly not marginalized civilian casualties. Rather, they take center stage in our understanding of mechanized warfare. See Urja’s and Mark’s posts for a prime example: their disagreement stems largely from their having different numbers on civilian deaths. See the Brookings paper that Mark links to, or the work of David Kilcullen (whom Brookings quotes) for more discussion of civilian death.

But more importantly, I object to the idea that killing someone remotely with a robot – or, for that matter, unintentionally killing a civilian in the first place – is more difficult to reconcile with a liberal conception of political rights than the orthodox killing of one soldier by another, in person. Whether volunteer, drafted, or conscripted, soldiers have no say in when they go to war. If we view warfare as a battle between governments, enacted through the deaths of their nations’ citizens, almost every death is collateral. The only due process involved is the initial decision to declare war.

In fact, the targeted killing of an individual who has demonstrably committed a war act against the state entails more respect for due process than the marching of armies to anonymous slaughter. Of course, that’s not much of an improvement, but I don’t think it “has serious implications for the way we imagine ourselves as political subjects” or “the value we assign to human life.”

Mark quotes Sherman – and I agree – that war is hell. To be more precise, war is a grotesque sacrifice of the individual for the collective (or the elite), of exactly the form that Trent applies to targeted strikes. We didn’t need drones to make war frightening; it already was. I am not sure whether Trent agrees with me, and was just polite enough not to resist the initial prompt. But I hope that the increasing mechanization of warfare makes us think less about mechanization, and more about war.

This is the third part of an ACE Forum on the use of drones in US military action.

In ancient times, warriors fought within meters of their opposition, feeling the sweat and blood of their human enemies. In the modern age, rifles, bombs, and artillery increasingly distanced the human from his/her target, moving the soldier farther and farther away from the gaze of the dead. Today, hundreds can be killed with the push of a button and the deployment of an unmanned orbital missile.

The ever-growing distance between the killer and the killed is not rendered exclusively as physical distance. It is a distance from the human on the other side which some warn will give drone controllers a “Playstation” mentality. But the inhumanity of drone killings goes beyond empathic distance as well. Where did drones come from? They are a response to the economic concerns of waging modern warfare; drones are to expensive air force pilots what the assembly line is to hand-made industry. Mass produced death. What are the consequences of drone strikes? “Collateral damage,” as human lives are now being called. War is no longer about man and his target, the object of his murderous intent. In this day and age, other humans who happen to be near the target are rendered insignificant, regardless of their (non)combative status. At every level, drones are emblematic of the subjugation of the human to the demands of the economic and the political. Crucially, human deaths are not the telos of these new technologies, they are mere logistical side constraints.

Figured through this anti-humanist rhetoric, we cannot help but understand drone killings as one tactic deployed in the context of the strategic oppression of the global South. The relationship of Western “modernity” to the ethnic other has always been one of violence. Superior mechanization characterizes the American relation to alterity. New technologies concretize new methods of establishing US global hegemony, figured in the post-colonial context not as (intrusive) terretorialization but as (defensive) deterrence. The atom bomb over Hiroshima: don’t mess with America, or accept the gruesome consequences. What, as Mark asks, is the effect of such characteristic subjugation on our perception abroad? How can other nations not see us as the bully in the sandbox with the biggest stick, when the lives of non-citizens and even some US natives are seen as collateral?

Significantly, our own political foundation is undermined by the deployment of drone strikes. One guilty target is terminated at the expense of those civilians nearby. With no opportunity to demonstrate his/her innocence in a court of law. And at the expense of innocent human lives, if necessary. Isn’t that fundamentally the sacrifice of the one for the many, the preeminence of the group over the individual? Doesn’t the voluntary use of drone weaponry contradict the liberal rhetoric of individual rights and “innocent until proven guilty?” When we locate accountability for wartime murder in the possession of an unmanned craft, don’t we reify the collectivist ideology we seek to oppose? Doesn’t killing Pakistanis through a computer screen in Nevada impart a certain expendability to human life in the same way that crashing a plane into a building does?

This is not to demolish the specific political and social context in which drone warfare has emerged. Mark reminds us that the battle against terrorism is a kind of arms race in which the side that outguns the other will win. The legality is questionable to me, since assassination is illegal under US law, but for the time being drone strikes seem legal enough. Even if we have located a legal loophole in which to fit drone strikes, I am dubious that it is in the interest of due process for this power to reside not only with the armed forces but also with the CIA. One can justifiably fear a future in which unaccountable government bureaucracies launch surgical strikes when there is insufficient evidence to take formal military action. Regrettably, that future is now.

Thus, the object of my post is not to downplay the practical concerns facing the US military today, as Urja discusses. Rather, I want to question, as Mark does, “the attitude we have in our discourse and our military operations towards drones and the deaths they cause, the way we count them.” I do not, however, see these as mere concerns affecting the use of drone weaponry.

I think drone weaponry has serious implications for the way we imagine ourselves as political subjects, the value we assign to human life, and our understanding of the relationship of the US to the international community. As things now stand, drones are a site for unprecedented mechanization of the human (as controller, as incidental victim, as the object of military force) and thus the unprecedented dehumanization of the US citizen and ethnic other alike. We should be skeptical of the sacrificial rhetoric of drone advocates in the government, as this rhetoric is simultaneously a locus of anti-Americanism. It is not a matter of logistics: we can (and will) refine drone weaponry to an exquisite science. That doesn’t change the fact that drones represent humans using robots to kill other humans, and whoever is trampled in the process be damned.

Military drones are undoubtedly here to stay, regardless of whether they can be redeemed as a method of relationality between the US and the global South. Reconciling drone weaponry with the demands of liberalism and due process, as daunting a task as it is, is only half the battle. The issue is not to imagine a way to exterminate people in a more sanitary, efficient way. Significantly, we need to rethink our military objectives, what the cost of those objectives are, and what importance human life is going to have as we become increasingly decentered from the technological world. Only with concurrent ideological upheaval will drones ever be an acceptable way for one human to impose his/her will on another.

This is the last in a six-part ACE Forum on affirmative action.

All of the essays so far have maintained, in some way, that identity-based affirmative action, however well-intentioned, has failed to work in its four decades of existence (Connie Wu’s discussion of the relationship between affirmative action and the Asian-American population is especially interesting in this regard; unfortunately, I do not have space to address it in this post). Therefore, we are obligated to seek out an alternate solution. The most comprehensive plan since offered was Jeremy Pilaar’s idea of funding an expanded public school system in an effort to increase the availability of high-quality education. As he says, the specifics of such a solution are complex, and I think they would be heavily influenced by the partisan political environment which has pervaded Washington. But, I will try to present a set of policies that could be the foundation of a solution.

While identity politics continues to play a dominant role in many people’s experiences, and is a topic of public fascination, social researchers tend to focus more on other socioeconomic variables such as income, educational attainment, and various environmental factors. Many studies do show effects attributable to race, but I find the argument that race is not a causal factor (that its influence is due to the influence of so-called “lurking” variables rather than race itself) to be more convincing. And in either case, since the days of racial sciences are thankfully dead and gone, whatever policy is enacted should attempt to address the cause of outcome disparity independent of ethnicity. Mr. Gee’s point about the difference between “opportunity” and “outcome” can serve to dismiss the efficacy of palliatives aimed at improving short-term circumstances. Our goal is to ease structural inequities, not mask them. Easier said than done.

Affirmative action, for all its faults, did accurately select the primary inequity faced across racial or class lines today – education. The most obvious example lies in the prohibitive cost of upper-tier college and graduate education (the Harvard admissions debate), but similar problems turn up in public schools as well. My home state of South Carolina, for example, allocates school funding based on property taxes on the rationale that higher property taxes indicate a larger demand for public schools. But when the districts which receive the most funding under this rule are simply the wealthier areas with higher home values, the disadvantaged neighborhoods are left with the educational dregs. So this would be my first policy change: public education should be funded based on better metrics of need than tax revenue. If our goal is to eliminate inequity, it should be funded based on population; rather, if we intend to level the playing field (under the admittedly flawed liberal argument for affirmative action), metrics such as median income, unemployment rate, and demand for free and reduced lunch should be considered.

Then, we have the problem of how to use funding once it is properly distributed. Increasingly, all social sciences are claiming that the primary indicator of adult outcomes is early-childhood environment and education. Investigators like the University of Chicago’s James Heckman and Arthur Reynolds at University of Wisconsin–Madison have shown that the return on investment in early-childhood education is enormous. Given how much money we sink into “rescuing” struggling public schools, one would expect deficit-conscious budget hawks to welcome any more efficient way to improve overall education. Perhaps a broader federally subsidized childcare and pre-adolescence education program would do the trick (the federal tie is simply because the national government has more funds to work with than do the state governments).

Another reason for South Carolina’s abysmal showing in national educational rankings is the so-called “Corridor of Shame.” This is a rather large area lying along I-95 that has almost no infrastructure, incredibly high food insecurity, and a surprisingly large number of school-age children. Now, I know that throwing money at the school problem is a popular but ineffective way of addressing disparities in educational attainment, but when the school in question cannot purchase textbooks for their students, perhaps a little more funding would be useful. But such funding is not forthcoming in my state, for one very simple reason: it is not politically feasible. And this is the primary issue with any attempt at solving the basic structural inequity in the American socioeconomic system. However much analysts and commentators may preach the doctrine of social consciousness, there is simply not the political will to enact the sweeping policy changes that are necessary. Not one of my ideas is particularly original. Every single statement I made has been made, in some permutation at least, by somebody else; every step in reforming the education system has been documented somewhere. And yet, we cling to our flawed standardized tests and falsely meritocratic process. Why?

Perhaps I’m just a political cynic, but I agree with Mark Hay’s analysis that affirmative action is a talking point because it is quick and easy sound bite. But I would add that affirmative action is an evasion, that not only can politicians benefit from discussing it, but that the debate has been driven into such a stultifying realm of absolutes to avoid the overhaul our system needs. Left unsaid in every one of my propositions was the need to throw out standardized tests with the bathwater and find some other way of measuring achievement. Otherwise, all we can discuss is how to get around the obvious differences in test scores, a vein which leads quite predictably to doomed ideas like affirmative action.

I have not mentioned the more radical aspects of my solution (replacing welfare with a comprehensive negative income tax comes easily to mind, but since it is not directly related to the realm of academics, I have left it out), but the disparity in education, while difficult to fix for next year, could be eased significantly over the next twenty with a simple change in emphasis. We must focus on laying a strong foundation through various early-childhood programs – not just in education, either. Pollution reduction; easier access to healty, affordable food; expanded public utilities like electricity and running water; better public transportation systems; and increased funding to mixed-income housing developments like the HOPE VI program all have helped improve outcomes across the board. None of them is enough by themselves, but all together, with a commitment to quality early education and improved availability of quality schools at all levels…that could well make a difference.

So, that was my response to a somewhat brash challenge. I apologize if it was not as complete as it could have been; I’m already over 1000 words as it is.

This is the fourth entry in a four-part ACE Forum on affirmative action.

As an immediately actionable method of increasing the number of low-income students in elite colleges, I like the basic concept of class-based affirmative action. Such a program would be fairly easy for college admissions offices to integrate if modeled after current affirmative action policies, and would likely expand the diversity of political and social views on our nation’s campuses. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that the push could not coexist perfectly with continued race-based equality initiatives.

As a brief aside, I think we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to “regular old” affirmative action. While John Gee argues that “being poor necessarily interferes with substantive equality of opportunity, but belonging to a certain racial group does not”, the fact of the matter remains that African Americans continue to face a vastly more unequal social landscape than do whites and others in the U.S. As the Urban League’s 2009 State of Black America report carefully underlines, blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, and are three times as likely to live in poverty, both significant barriers to accessing equal education opportunities. Race-based affirmative action efforts attempt to remedy these ills by acknowledging that the playing field is not level and giving black students a leg up in arenas such as the college admissions process. Such policies are the best stopgap available until truly sweeping structural reforms can be implemented.

While I’m going to sound like broken record, Matt Yglesias is dead right to assert that “the presumption that you can solve any significant problem of social justice in America by fiddling with Ivy League admissions policies is dead wrong.” Sam Barr eloquently points out the limited impact of class-based affirmative action in selective colleges as a means of correcting for inequality:

Peter Beinart, echoing Ross Douthat, thinks that “More white working-class kids at Harvard would mean an American educational elite less easily caricatured by Fox News, and more able to speak across the red-blue divide.” While that might do wonders for the media discourse, it won’t do much to produce real educational and economic opportunity for the vast majority of Americans.

How, then, can we begin to tackle these overwhelming structural challenges? A quote from Harvard Professor Robert Coles, in an early Boston Globe piece on class-based affirmative action, provides some insight:

[Working class whites and blacks] are both competing for a very limited piece of pie, the limits of which are being set by the larger limits of class, which allow them damn little, if anything.

Part of the answer to finding the “complex and practical solution” Mark Hay so rightly pines for to remedy our deeper social inequities lies in expanding the size of that pie, not in continually shifting the conditions under which a segment of our ever-growing lower class competes for the same small morsel.

In other words, the question we as a society should be posing is not primarily ‘how can we increase economic diversity at Harvard’ (though this should still be a goal of the university), but rather ‘how do we increase the number of institutions of higher learning in the United States that offer a quality education rivaling that of Harvard’s at an affordable price?’

In my mind this can only arise in the form of a vast increase in our national and state-level investment in public education. In the face of recurring billion-dollar budget deficits, states like California have repeatedly slashed funding in the past several years for both K-12 and higher ed; the result has been fewer classes, higher tuition, and reduced access for the vast majority of those at the middle and bottom of the economic scale.

A renewed and highly structured commitment to building a world-class education system on both state and national levels – call it a Master Plan for the 21st Century – would be the surest way to guarantee equal access to a lifetime of affordable, quality education for all Americans. This is far from a pipe-dream; California achieved just such a system back in the 1960s and 1970s by successfully enacting its original Master Plan, which played a pivotal role in propelling the state to its current status as one of the ten largest economies on earth by further developing the state-operated UC, CSU, and Community College systems.

True equality of opportunity begins with access to a level playing field from the youngest possible age, meaning that American children must also benefit from a highly funded K-12 system subjected to rigorous standards of excellence applicable across state lines. This would hopefully include greater federal subsidization of state systems, as well as a reduced reliance on district-based funding for elementary and secondary schools, which currently perpetuates the cycle of poverty in lower-class communities.

The initiatives suggested above are of course vastly simplified, and would require significant investments in time and money in order to be properly developed and enacted; state and local governments would have to work closely with the federal government to agree on more stringent benchmarks for achievement in our public schools; both the federal and state governments would also have to work out a plan to guarantee sufficient, long-term funding for K-12 and higher education.

But while the details are complex, the basic idea behind such a project is simple and worth repeating: a system plagued by structural inequity demands reforms that tackle our current structure, not solutions that attempt to work within it. Americans must renew their commitment to universal access to public education.

This is the third entry in a six-part ACE Forum on affirmative action.

The civil rights movement espoused an ideal that all Americans should embrace: the creation of a color-blind society in which persons are judged by their merits as individuals, not by their membership in a particular racial group. Thirty years later, the legacy of the civil rights movement is bitterly contested and America remains a color-conscious society. Contemporary affirmative action policies—on the parts of government and private institutions—are central to understanding the “great American dilemma” as it endures into the 21st century. Although affirmative action proponents endeavor to implement the vision of the civil rights movement, their policies have polarized Americans according to racial divisions, creating the phenomenon of the “angry white male.” This black and white dichotomy tends to dominate the debate over affirmative action. An examination of the Asian American dimension will offer new insights into such an enduring issue. Understanding the complicated relationship between Asian Americans and affirmative action requires an analysis of Asian Americans as a distinct racial group. Contrary to the myth of the “model minority,” Asian Americans do not constitute a monolithic ethnic group.

Educational and economic statistics reveal a dramatic degree of polarization within among Asian American groups. For example, the overall poverty rate for Asian Americans in 1990 was one percent above the average of the total U.S. population; this statistical mirage obscures the reality of many ethnic groups that fall under the Asian American title. For in comparison to the total U.S. population, Pacific Islanders were 4 percent above the average poverty rate, Vietnamese were 12.6 percent above the average, Laotians were 21.6 percent above the average, Cambodians were 29.5 percent above the average, and Hmongs were 50.5 percent above the average. These Southeastern Asian groups often have higher poverty rates because they usually arrive on American soil as refugees.

Moreover, in a report for the American Council on Education, Shirley Hune and Kenyon Chan found that 55.1 percent (almost double of other groups of color) of Asian Americans ages 18-24 were enrolled in college during 1990; however, this statistic did not reflect the complexity of their enrollment rates. At opposite ends, 66.5 percent of Chinese Americans were enrolled in a college, whereas only 26.3 percent of Laotian Americans were as well. In fact, Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indian, and Korean Americans were more than twice as likely to be enrolled in college as Hmong, Guamanian, Samoan, Hawaiian, and Laotian Americans.

This evidence exposes the lack of homogeneity among the ethnicities that comprise Asian Americans. Clearly, Asian Americans occupy both ends of the political and social spectrum according to different origin, language, culture, religion, and other factors such as educational attainment and personal income. This internal heterogeneity produces a variety of reactions to the issue of affirmative action.

The affirmative action debate for Asians in higher education is especially different from the black-white paradigm. In fact, it has been the allegations of possible quotas or limitations in Asian American admission and enrollment to prestigious public and private institutions that has fueled this educational controversy. Beginning in the early 1980s Asian Americans were recognized in the press for their surprisingly large presence in college populations. Their rise in many of the country’s most prestigious and selective universities drew attention of much of America. U.S. News and World Report described Asians to be “flocking to the top colleges,” noting that “they make up about 10 percent of Harvard’s freshman class and 20 percent of all students at the Julliard School. In California, where Asians are 5.5 percent of the population, they total 23.5 percent of all Berkeley undergraduates.” Newsweek even asked rhetorically in an article, “Is it true what they say about Asian American students, or is it mythology? They say that Asian Americans are brilliant. They say that Asian Americans behave as a model minority, that they dominate mathematics, engineering, and science courses—that they are grinds who are so dedicated to getting ahead that they never have any fun.”

By the mid 1980s, allegations spread across the nation that policies were being adopted to curtail the number of Asian Americans being admitted to institutions of higher learning through the imposition of quotas. Suddenly, Asian Americans found themselves being compared to the Jews in the 1920s and 1930s when Jewish students were vilified as “damn curve raisers” because of their outstanding performance and were thus restricted by quotas on their admissions to undergraduate universities. So began the attack on liberalism’s cornerstone affirmative action policy.

In 1983, Brown was the first school to receive and respond to formal complaints about of discrimination against Asian Americans. Brown director of admissions Jim Rogers declared, however, that the “vast majority of Asian Americans applying here, 70-75 percent, are premedical students. The question is not one of race, it’s academic balance.” Insiders at Brown, including Asian American students and staff, argued that based on various comments made by admissions officers, it was clear to them that decisions were often racially motivated. Thus, the Brown Asian American Students Association (AASA) made a case of racial discrimination before Brown’s governing board—the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees delegated the task of investigating the claims to the Committee on Minority Affairs (COMA) to examine AASA complaints. The COMA investigation found that the disparity in admission rates between whites and Asians were an “extremely serious” problem, as were the attitudes of some officials in the admissions office. According to then Assistant Dean Bob Lee, interviews of admissions officers substantiated many of the claims about racial discrimination brought forth by the AASA. Director Rogers was said to have joked that they could reduce the admitted class by deleting the first 10 Kims off the top of the list. An independent review board study by the Committee on Admission and Financial Aid confirmed COMA’s findings of racial discrimination. Brown was only one of a few prestigious schools that admitted bias against Asian Americans and promised reform in their admission policies.

Perhaps the most important landmark case for Asian Americans, however, was that of the University of California Berkeley. Between 1987 and 1988, Berkeley’s treatment of Asian American admission policies generated a national controversy. Assistant Vice Chancellor Travers and President Gardner staunchly defended Berkeley’s admissions policies and their effect on Asian Americans, especially when they added the criteria of an ambiguously subjective category called “supplemental criteria.” Accusations against Berkeley claimed that the supplemental criteria category was being manipulated to keep down the number of Asian American admissions. Travers and Gardner claimed that Asian Americans were “overrepresented” based on number that matriculated to Berkeley in comparison to the graduating high school population. Their overrepresentation, they argued, undermined the diversity on campus. Admissions officers throughout the country defended affirmative action by depicting admissions as a zero-sum game. They were alarmed by the declining black enrollment statistics, which had been triggered by a scale back in affirmative action after the 1978 Bakke case.

These cases dramatize the dilemmas raised by the pursuit of diversity. Conservatives in particular have employed the example of Asian Americans to focus criticism on affirmative action. For example, in the 1980s Reagan administration official Reynolds blamed affirmative action for the discrimination against Asian Americans. Referencing GPA and SAT scores, Reynolds argued, “there has been substantial statistical evidence that Asian American candidates face higher hurdles than academically less qualified candidates of other races, whether these candidates be minorities (black, Hispanic, Native American) or white.” Reynolds saw both discrimination and diversity as “two sides of the same bad coin, affirmative action.” In his 1988 article in the New Republic, James Gibney reiterated this argument, “if Asians are underrepresented based on their grades and test scores, it is largely because of affirmative action for other minority groups. And if blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented based on their fraction of the population, it is increasingly because of the statistical overachievement of Asians. Both complaints can’t be just, and the blame can no longer be placed solely on favoritism towards whites.”

Conservatives have found an especially sympathetic ear for campaigns against affirmative action among Asian Americans in California. Kenneth Lee’s article “Angry Yellow Men” conveys the sentiments of Asian in California. During Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, he delivered his only anti-affirmative action speech to a 2000 member receptive audience of Vietnamese Americans in Little Saigon, California. In fact, Dole’s reception typifies many Californian Asian sentiments. The fact that the receptive audience was a Vietnamese one, statistically poorer and less educated, reveals the power of the manner in which affirmative action is propagated to ethnic audiences. In 1993, the California Policy Seminar conducted a poll that found that 2/3 of Asians oppose affirmative action. Moreover, the National Conference of Christians and Jews determined that Asians in California identified more with whites than with any other racial groups. It is no wonder, then, that in 1996, 40 percent of Asians voted for Proposition 209, a California measure outlawing preferences based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, education, or contracting. Not all Asian Americans, however, face the dilemma of Asians in California. In fact, a large coalition of 28 Asian American groups filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy.

This third perspective reveals that affirmative action spawns division not only between racial groups, but also among ethnic groups. As America becomes an increasingly multiracial country, the example of Asian Americans testifies to the unique conflicts created by race-based public policies that are implemented in multiracial contexts.

This is the second entry in a six-part ACE Forum on affirmative action.

Sam suggests that conservatives who oppose race-based affirmative action must necessarily oppose class-based affirmative action, ending his post with a call for conservative opinions on the subject. I don’t like to term myself conservative, but I do fit the label here. So I’ll give a go at explaining why class-based affirmative action is more appealing than race-based affirmative action, but still wrong. (From here on out, AA = Affirmative Action). Books have been written on this subject, so please forgive my incompleteness. I’d really like, for example, to address Sam’s post on the SAT, but I’m already over a thousand words here so I will abstain.

Sam begins by briefly referencing Matt Yglesias’s lament: “The presumption that you can solve any significant problem of social justice in America by fiddling with Ivy League admissions policies is dead wrong.” He inserts it more as a caveat than a substantive point, but I think it gets to the heart of the matter: current thinking about AA muddles up equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Sam describes the liberal argument for AA using the first term:

[Liberals] can get behind class-based affirmative action because they assume that the following things are true:
1. We are very far from achieving anything like true equality of opportunity,
2. It would be a good thing if we came closer to achieving equality of opportunity, and
3. We can do so by giving a leg up in admissions to students from low-income families.

So what is opportunity, and how do we make it equal? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an invaluable resource) defines equality of opportunity as a social ideal, in which “the assignment of individuals to places in the social hierarchy is determined by some form of competitive process, and all members of society are eligible to compete on equal terms.” That is, there are a range of jobs, some of which are better than others, and applicants to those jobs should be assessed on their qualifications alone. Insofar as those things happen, society has “formal” equality of opportunity.

A further step can be made, to “substantive” equality of opportunity, by addressing the circumstances which produce those qualifications. The example the SEP article gives is nutrition: in a warrior society, all children should be adequately nourished or they will not have equal opportunity to become warriors. This leads from Substantive Equality of Opportunity to Equality of Fair Opportunity – a concept proposed by John Rawls – in which “any individuals who have the same native talent and the same ambition will have the same prospects of success in competitions that determine who gets positions that generate superior benefits for their occupants.” (For a much deeper look at the subject, see the SEP entry. It’s long).

Here, then, is the reason that class-based AA is more appealing than AA based on race. Being poor necessarily interferes with substantive equality of opportunity, but belonging to a certain racial group does not. The primary disadvantage suffered by blacks in the United States has been overt discrimination, in the form of preferential access to jobs for less-qualified whites. The way to end that is to stop giving preferential access to any group other than the qualified. But the poor may not be able to afford the same kinds of educational or other experiences that wealthier parents can afford for their children. Those experiences – a private high school with half the number of students per teacher, traveling sports teams, etc – will benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, without regard to talent or ambition. Well, perhaps ambition, but perhaps not. In any case, who could oppose giving everyone a level playing field?

Note, however, how far afield Equality of Fair Opportunity has taken us from the simple suggestion that applicants be evaluated on their merits. We have arrived at a social guarantee with far-reaching implications. For example, if rich kids’ parents pay money for them to have private tutors, should the government put up the money for children whose parents can’t afford that expense? There’s an economic problem there, since that level of transfers would destroy any markets in child-related services. But let’s focus on the philosophical issues.

As I’ve said, I think the solution lies in distinguishing opportunity from outcome. Based on the above description, we can define “opportunity” as “access to resources which produce merit.” “Outcome,” on the other hand, is the result of a competitive application process. I think it’s clear that under this definition of equal opportunity, getting into Harvard is both an opportunity and an outcome. In fact, every job you have is an opportunity to succeed in later jobs, and every school you apply to competitively judges applicants in order to award a preferential status. The only pure outcome is your retirement account, and the only pure opportunity is the circumstances of your birth. So how do we separate the two?

I think we should conceive of opportunity as a category of resource, and outcome as the quality of that resource. That is, “college student” refers to a category of educational attainment, whereas “Ivy League” refers to the quality (better, worse, nerdier, jockier, more snobbish, what-have-you). Similarly, filet mignon and ramen noodles are different levels of food quality. CEO and secretary are different levels of employment quality, etc. Why is this crucial? Because a system of social insurance can guarantee that children will receive a high school education, and a postsecondary education if they want one. But it can’t guarantee everyone admission to Harvard or Penn or wherever, because those places aren’t big enough.

So what criteria have to be satisfied for someone to have been afforded “equal” or “fair” opportunity to succeed? What guarantees can the government give? I’m not sure, and nor am I sure how the government should implement them. The point is that the adjustment of inequities should take the form of guarantees, not preferential treatment in competitive situations. I side with what Sam terms the “deontological” view that if we are trying to give people equal access to competitive positions, we shouldn’t give them unequal access. We cannot burn the village to save it. But there’s plenty we can do, so let’s get to work.

This is the first in a six-part ACE Forum on class-based affirmative action.

Class-based affirmative action is an issue on which unorthodox liberals and unorthodox conservatives seem to have found common ground. (For summaries of what’s been said in the blogosphere in recent weeks, see here and here.)

But, much as I love cross-ideological harmony, I share Matt Yglesias’s suspicion that debating the issue of class-based affirmative action is akin to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” That is, if we focus (as we almost always seem to do) on the admissions criteria of super-selective private colleges, we’re never going to have any impact on structural inequalities, either racial ones or class-based ones.

Peter Beinart, echoing Ross Douthat, thinks that “More white working-class kids at Harvard would mean an American educational elite less easily caricatured by Fox News, and more able to speak across the red-blue divide.” While that might do wonders for the media discourse, it won’t do much to produce real educational and economic opportunity for the vast majority of Americans.

Nevertheless, I think that class-based affirmative action is worth discussing, because this issue highlights the different sets of assumptions on which liberals and conservatives base their policy preferences.

It’s simple enough to see how this is true with liberals. They can get behind class-based affirmative action because they assume that the following things are true:
1. We are very far from achieving anything like true equality of opportunity,
2. It would be a good thing if we came closer to achieving equality of opportunity, and
3. We can do so by giving a leg up in admissions to students from low-income families.

Various liberals might not want to make the concession that they were wrong to favor race-based preferences (if they would even have to), but my point is that, as a matter of principle, liberals can readily endorse class-based affirmative action.

Given the support of people like Ross Douthat, Stuart Taylor, and James Joyner, you might think the same was true about conservatives. I’m not so sure. I don’t see how conservatives can consistently support class-based affirmative action and oppose regular old affirmative action. Their reasons for opposing the latter, in my view, preclude them from supporting the former.

Consider the three arguments put forward by philosopher Louis Pojman in his well-known article, “The Case Against Affirmative Action.”

First, you have the argument that affirmative action “requires discrimination against another group.” Argues Pojman:

Respect for persons entails that we treat each person as an end in him or herself, not simply as a means to be used for social purposes. . . . [Affirmative action] fails to treat White males with dignity as individuals, judging them by both their race and gender, instead of their merit.

This is a pretty familiar argument against race-based preferences. One hears echoes of Chief Justice John Roberts’s statement that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

The question is, don’t class-based preferences run into the same objection? Don’t they fail to treat people as individuals? Class-based affirmative action would require the government to make judgments regarding individuals based on assumptions about their group. Low-income people, as a class, would be assumed to have had overcome more hardship and thereby demonstrated more “merit” than middle and high-income people.

Second, Pojman argues that affirmative action encourages “mediocrity and incompetence.” He says, “Government programs of enforced preferential treatment tend to appeal to the lowest possible common denominator.” Assuming this is true about race-based preferences, why wouldn’t it also be true about class-based preferences?

Third, Pojman says that merit “should enjoy a weighty presumption in our social practices.” The first “pillar for meritocracy” is the deontological argument, seen above, that we should not treat people as “means to be used for social purposes.” The second pillar is the utilitarian argument that “we will be better off by honoring excellence.” It benefits everyone to have the best doctors, the best professors, the best students, etc.

Of course, supporters of race-based preferences have long argued that affirmative action, in fact, enhances rather than subverts meritocracy. They say that the “best” doctor is one who can gain the trust of his community, the “best” professor is one who can bring a diversity of life experiences to the classroom, and so on. They also point out that traditional barometers of merit are often less than trustworthy. (See my June post on the SAT.)

But conservatives have always rejected such arguments. They have assumed, like Pojman, that certain tests and measures really are reliable indicators of merit. But class-based affirmative action, like race-based preferences, would require de-emphasizing these indicators to some extent, in favor of mushier estimations of merit, like the amount of hardship one has overcome.

One way I can imagine conservatives like Douthat distinguishing between racial and class-based preferences is by saying that low income, as a general matter, imposes greater obstacles than does minority racial status. That is one reason a liberal might support class-based affirmative action as a substitute for the traditional kind. But can conservatives, who have argued that affirmative action doesn’t treat people as individuals and disregards the concept of merit, really get behind a proposal that seems just as guilty of making broad and crude assumptions about people, and of rewarding something other than merit strictly defined?

For these reasons, I’m very skeptical of the possibility of cross-ideological agreement on class-based affirmative action. As a practical matter, maybe I shouldn’t care so much. If conservatives really do embrace it, then who am I to fault them? But given the arguments and assumptions underlying conservative opposition to race-based preferences, I don’t foresee that embrace coming any time soon.

I’d love to hear from conservatives who either support or oppose class-based affirmative action. Or maybe some liberals think that I shortchange its potential to have an effect on structural inequality?