Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits

 by Nathan Alexander  

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A credible argument can be made that Richard Nixon's implementation of affirmative action undermined the American tradition of liberal individualism, transformed the individual citizen into a member of a race or ethnic group, and gave birth to our modern racial identity politics. A review of Kevin Yuill's Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action.

Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits
by Kevin Yuill
published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (August 28, 2006)
Pbk., 280 pgs.
ISBN-10: 0742549984
ISBN-13: 978-0742549982

Is Richard Nixon responsible for the racial "identity" politics of today? Thirty-three years after Nixon left office, his legacy seems overdue for a reassessment. Recently, military historians have argued that Nixon nearly won the war in Indochina. In his recent book on Nixon and Kissinger, Robert Dallek argues that Nixon was more pragmatist than ideologue, and while he often spoke in hyperbole, he rarely followed course. In his recent book, Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action, Kevin Yuill confirms Dallek's assessment, arguing that affirmative action was Nixon's practical (if authoritarian) response to black rioting in American cities. However, what began as a pragmatic response to America's pressing racial problems, was part of a larger cultural movement that transformed the individual citizen into a member of a race or ethnic group and spawned the birth of a "clientele" citizenry. This was nothing less than a radical undermining of the tradition of liberal individualism and replaced the idea of individual justice with federally mandated orders to achieve "group justice."

The Failure of Liberal Individualism

Until 1968 Americans in both Republican and Democratic parties refused to legally acknowledge the existence of "race." At an ideological level, American liberalism saw race and other forms of group identity as being a threat to individualism. Indeed, racial quotas in the early fifties were identified with Nazi racism. The only groups to speak in racial terms were racist Southerners and the American Communist Party, which called for a black homeland in the South. American liberalism believed that racial consciousness was an "irrationality," something that employment and education could overcome in time. For this reason, American liberalism embraced the necessity of economic expansion.  A growing economy was the best way to resolve social problems.

While John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are both associated with advancing civil rights for African-Americans, neither was willing to challenge the liberal consensus and legally recognize race as would later proponents of affirmative action. Both believed the federal government could only help Afro-Americans indirectly. Kennedy and Johnson believed that the problem of black unemployment would be resolved by federally funded "job training" and desegregation efforts. The natural competition of the market economy would overcome remaining sentiments of racism.

Despite Kennedy's and Johnson's efforts, black unemployment remained generally unaffected. The Watts riots of 1965 were only the first in a series of ruinous urban uprisings predicted by Martin Luther King, Jr., who had argued that liberalism was taking effect "too slow." The 1966 Coleman Report confirmed King's insight, arguing that despite desegregation, Afro-Americans were not achieving equality. More significant, however, was the 1967 Kerner Report which argued for the first time that the cause of black unemployment was not inadequate implementation of liberal ideas: it was white racism.

1968 brought more violence. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been preceded by four straight summers of rioting in the inner cities and on university campuses. Black militants took over Columbia University and the Weathermen rampaged through the streets of Chicago. In the south, George Wallace harassed civil rights workers under the guise of "law and order." There was talk of a "white backlash."

Civil unrest enabled Nixon to co-opt much of Wallace's "law and order" rhetoric and, upon taking office in 1969, he made it a priority to restore social peace. With respect to the question of black violence, conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr. and business-oriented journals such as Fortune and the Harvard Business Review called for a "pro-negro discrimination:" this meant, in short, using race as a means of ensuring that blacks received jobs. While Democrats continued to oppose distinguishing Americans by their race, Nixon saw his task as "break[ing] up the problem of black rage" into "manageable pieces." His motivation for using the federal government to identify Afro-Americans not just as citizens but as a particular race was practical: "You have a person who has a stake in our system, he is going to stand up for our system. It's just as simple as that."

Historians have generally assumed Nixon's position on civil rights was, at best, incoherent. He opposed establishing a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. and made disparaging remarks about "negro bastards on welfare roles." Nevertheless, Nixon also boosted ethnic minorities among federal workers by nearly twenty percent, doubled aid to black colleges and increased aid to minority businesses by over one-hundred-and-fifty percent. The percentage of black children in all-black schools decreased under Nixon from forty percent to twelve percent. It was Richard Nixon who established "negro history week."

The "incoherence" of Nixon's position becomes less so, Yuill argues, if you understand his motivation: to split wealthy blacks from those in the ghetto. In Philadelphia, in what was the first federally ordered case of "affirmative action," Nixon ordered contactors working on large, federally funded projects "to adopt numerical goals and timetables" in order to ensure that the "lily white" unions in the city were broken and blacks employed. On August 18, 1968 Nixon issued EO 11478 which mandated, for the first time, affirmative action in the federal government. "We must through positive action make it possible for our citizens to compete on a truly equal and fair basis for employment and to qualify for advancement within the federal service." The result was, Yuill argues, an overwhelming success. By 1970 the riots in the inner city had ceased. Affirmative action had stripped "Black Power" of its leaders. The ghettos, leaderless, could now, Yuill argues, be forgotten.

Affirmative Action and a Theory of Justice

Yuill argues that Nixon's use of affirmative action was part of a larger change that shifted the emphasis of government from promoting economic expansion to the preservation of stability. It was probably the latter which brought William F. Buckley, Jr. to support a position which later he would oppose. While traditional liberalism had seen a healthy economy as bringing about an end to cultural conflict, the unrest of the late sixties had brought about a much broader change that was not immediately obvious. Toeffler's Future Shock, Galbraith's Affluent Society, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nadar's Unsafe at any Speed were all testimony to the end of American faith in "growth liberalism." However, it was unclear at that time what would replace it.

The new relationship between American government and the citizen, Yuill argues, may be found through the revisions of the most famous work of America's most famous political philosopher, John Rawls. In his 1958 essay, "Justice as Fairness," Rawls expressed philosophically the basic principles of American liberalism. His first premise established the primacy of individual liberty – liberty of the individual: Each "person participating in a practice, or affected by it, has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all."

Rawls' second premise brought the idea of individual liberty into harmony with the principles of the free market by presuming that the long-term benefits to all Americans from the functioning of the capitalist economy compensated for short-term inequities.  Rawls wrote: "Inequalities are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out for everyone's advantage, and provided the positions and office to which they attach, or from which they may be gained, are open to all." In this respect, Rawls' theory was in harmony with the "growth liberalism model" of the 1950s. In Rawls' early writing, what he presumed to be the "representative man" in American society was an individualist who worked for the benefit of all. He "received a moral blessing since the inequality [in society] generated [by individuals] worked [in the long run] for the good of everyone." In Yuill's pithy summary, "What was good was right and what was right was good."

Rawls modified his theory somewhat in the 1967 edition of his monumental work, A Theory of Justice. Rawls nuanced the idea of "representative man" by introducing the concept of a "veil of ignorance." The "veil of ignorance," though preserving the argument that the economic system bettered the "representative man" on the whole, nevertheless was a way of acknowledging obvious inequalities within American society. In Rawls' new way of envisioning a just social order, he insisted that, "No one knows his position in society, nor even his place in the distribution of natural talents and abilities." Thus, instead of justifying inequalities by their acceptability to anyone "playing the game," Rawls now argued that "inequalities had to be justified by their acceptability to the representative man of those who are least favored by the system of institutional inequalities." While Rawls continued to believe in the necessity of economic progress, it was "now measured by how much [it] helped the least advantaged."

In the final, 1971 version of A Theory of Justice, Rawls "stapled" the old principle of equal opportunity into a new position which demanded "compensation" for those who could not compete. The first principle was now combined with a second: "Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and b) attached to office and position open to all under condition of fair equality of opportunity."

Yuill argues convincingly that the final version of Rawls' A Theory of Justice marks a decisive cultural (and political) shift in the significance accorded the individual and citizen in American society. He argues that the understanding of equality as equality of opportunity was now replaced in his thinking by a stipulation of justice that superseded it. While previously Rawls had argued that what was good for all was also morally just (by showing that "all self-interested reasonable parties would agree to the present rules"), Rawls' new way of thinking suggested something different. The "greatest happiness for the greatest number was not necessarily what was right." It was the arrangement of society, something which preceded "equal opportunity," which now took moral precedence.

Rawls' theory, Yuill argues, parallels Nixon's federal directives to mandate equality of opportunity, but both also radically undermine the individual's role in politics. "If the question of equality cannot be dealt with politically, remove it from the political/public sphere." But this results in a paradox: Rawls' philosophy must thus, for "the sake of preserving democracy . . . place it beyond the reach of the people." Rawls' philosophy easily accommodates Nixon's federal orders (he does not consult congress in this) by moving the problem of equality into the purely administrative sphere and out of the political sphere. The result, as Daniel Bell observed, was a radical violation of personal liberty in the name of "justice:"  "But in the larger context, the wholesale adoption of the principle of fairness in all areas of life shifts the entire society from a principle of equal liability and universalism to one of unequal burden and administrative determination." Yuills summarizes: "By showing that all reasonable people agreed with his proposition, Rawls short-circuits democracy, just as Nixon did by removing race from political discussion."

It is worth going over the significance of this a bit more. In the eyes of the German critic Jurgen Habermas, Rawls had accomplished nothing less than the destruction of the essence of democracy, the public sphere. Rawls "sets down the rule of the game a priori, making the public good of rights meaningless because they cannot be exercised by the parties themselves."

For the higher the veil of ignorance is raised and the more Rawls' citizens themselves take on flesh and blood, the more deeply they find themselves subject to principles and norms that have been anticipated in theory and have already become institutionalized way beyond their control . . . Because the citizens cannot conceive of the constitution as a project, the public use of reason does not actually have the significance of a present exercise of political autonomy but merely promotes the nonviolent preservation of political stability.

Yuill summarizes: "Rawls curtails political liberty in order to preserve the system founded upon it and embarks upon dismantling the public sphere because it cannot be made to admit all."

Nixon and Identity Politics

In his final chapter, "Nixon: The Father of Identity Politics," Yuill examines the consequences of Nixon's implementation of affirmative action. In Rawlsian terms, "the government's role went from one that rights wrongs to one that indemnifies damages." However, in Nixon's hands, this enabled a political opportunism. In the 1972 Republican Party platform, for instance, various "victim" groups other than blacks are identified (Indians, Alaska natives, Hawaiians). While these were to be targeted for affirmative action as had been blacks, Nixon's motive here was different. In this case, Yuill argues that, "Nixon clearly promoted the interest of groups that he felt could be an effective counterweight to black claims." Affirmative action, far from being a vehicle to eliminate poverty, had become a political tool enabling the authoritarian manipulation of dissent.

The "clientelization" of Americans would not be limited to a few minorities. In 1968 George Wallace would run a nationally competitive presidential campaign, appealing to "white victims." Nixon, hardly losing a beat, delivered his famous "Silent Majority" speech a year later. Both emphasized the role crime played in turning whites into victims. And yet curiously, Yuill points out, while whites would increasingly accept their role as "victims," they would become increasingly liberal in their attitudes towards blacks.   The reason, he suggests, was because the decline in "individualism" affected blacks and whites alike. The legal battle involving Gennifer Gratz and her denial of admission to the University of Michigan Law School is a case in point. What bothered Gratz was not that Afro-Americans received preference, it was that her own "victimhood" had not been recognized.

Yuill concludes by pointing out that the "clientelization" of Americans has not just undermined individualism and individual justice. It has generally not benefited the minorities who are the alleged beneficiaries. The relationship between American elites and citizens (clients) has generally benefited those who "legitimate themselves by adopting the enabler role." Hence the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action have been large corporations and public institutions, who make "diversity" their slogan. This should hardly be surprising. As Yuill reminds us, affirmative action was, from the outset, a non-democratic plan to control dissent, not address it. Nixon neglect co-opted the most able (and articulate) Afro-Americans – which enabled the rest to be forgotten. The adaptation of affirmative action, Yuill argues, has "covered a retreat from a commitment to real racial equality. The adaptation of affirmative action implied that democratic political efforts to convince whites that they must eradicate racism are hopeless and substituted bureaucratic methods." The "liberation of any people is unlikely to be accomplished in boardrooms and offices."

Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action may be read alongside such classics as Christie Davies' Strange Decline of Moral England or Walter Benn Michaels' The Trouble with Diversity.  All three are sharply critical of how "universal" slogans (ostensibly with humanitarian intentions) increasingly serve as excuses to diminish individual achievement and to eliminate individual legal rights and protections. No where is this more evident than current "child custody law," where the alleged universal ideal of "protecting the child," has become a convenient (and cost saving) excuse to simply get rid of American fathers.

By replacing the ideal of individual justice, which is often costly, with a vague universal goal ("save children," "save blacks"), corporate interests have been harmonized with state economic interests:  Pursuing a "just" outcome may be avoided and a blatantly unjust outcome affirmed – in the name of "universal" concern. Indeed, this has been the significant accomplishment of the modern "clientele" state. It has managed to co-opt its most vocal critics (generally those of the upper middle classes) and use the silence of the rest as a sign of its achievement. In this way, as Ben-Michaels has argued, the "struggle against racism" (or "sexism") in the last two decades has improved the lot of upper middle class blacks. It has generally not affected the average Afro-American (or woman).

The situation is not easily reversed. The "clientele" state appeals to the base instincts of the middle class majority – not the idealism that would protect the individual as an extension of oneself. Yuill's prognosis is grim: "As long as Americans [continue to see themselves as clients to a "mother" state], as long as [they remain cramped, risk-fearing individuals who fear the future, rue the past, and have no aspiration other than to survive the present], they lack the ability to change anything, let alone a huge but eminently resolvable problem like racial inequality."

Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action is available on Amazon.com.

Book Reviews, Features, Race & Ethnicity, Multiculturalism

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