Yuill occasionally attributes unnecessarily nasty motives to Nixon’s decision making–but on the whole his book is one of the few to respect the complexity of Nixon’s presidency. He also deserves kudos for being one of the first to seriously try and explain where the current obsession with race has come from.

I think he’s working on a second book which will be on how AA played out in the 1970s. This should be fascinating. He offers a few hints as to what is coming. –for instance, he argues that it was only in the 1980s that conservatives came to oppose Affirmative Action, seeing it as a way of taking jobs “away from whites.” Today, he seems to argue, what whites want is not to have a “free opportunity to secure a job,” but to have their own “victim-status’ recognized. He cites the Michigan Law case of 15 years ago as evidence.

–It is the deeper cult of the victim, which has replaced the old individualism, which is the real bane of contemporary American society.

Society, through government, has established a K-12 public educational system throughout the country. There is even night school for those who did not finish. There are community colleges that offer remedial instruction, vocational courses, and transfer-level courses to four-year colleges. The unemployment office has a federal grant program to train the chronically unemployed and re-train those who have been displaced because of job obsolescence, as do some employers. There is NO shortage of educational opportunities in this country. What about the individual’s responsibility to avail himself of those opportunities in order to utilize his talents and “participate” in the economy?

Everyone has an obligation to work, and children are no exception. That is not to say they must engage in paid labor, but to point out that their work is to attend school, study, learn, and do their homework. All children, both rich and poor, are offered immense wealth in the form of education, often at great sacrifice to their tax-paying parents; and for individual students, through willful recalcitrance, to squander that wealth is also a great social injustice. Where does anyone in political leadership say anything about that?

There are those who refuse to accept authority. We have all seen them: all their lives, they have defied their parents, defied their teachers, defied their employers, defied any and all civil authorities. From the pre-school brat to the man who can’t get a job because he won’t cut his hair because, in his own words, “No one can tell me what to do.” This behavior his completely contrary to our obligation to respect legitimate authority, and has got to stop. The consequences of such behavior are necessarily suffering a low standard of living (who will employ a person who lacks the most basic skills or refuses to carry out instructions?). This is not to say these types do not need our help; but to blame their condition on a “lack” of social justice (a.k.a., “it’s all society’s fault”) is to misplace the blame and to commit resources to solving the wrong problem.

My particular scorn is reserved for the ‘60s generation whose members, by their sheer numbers, sought to defy society, simply for the sake of defiance, by re-designing it after their own image. They are still having a profoundly negative effect on America’s concept of morality, and consequently have placed heavy burdens on the rest of society. Think of the immense human pride that is required for a single generation to convince itself that it knows more than all the collective knowledge of all of Western Civilization distilled down through 800 generations! Yet, its only accomplishment was to put a different spin on ancient sin in an attempt to give it respectability. The message of that generation to its members was, “You don’t have to care what others think of you; consequently, you don’t have to care about them.” Also, sometime during the 1960s, the American culture passed a “cross-over” point. Prior to that, individuals felt a need to “pull their own weight” and avoid becoming a burden to society, and consequently, there was great social pressure for individuals to work. After that, there was no stigma to sloth; indeed, admiration and glorification of the rogue who “beat the system” generated (surprise!) more rogues! They are those who, attempting to avoid personal responsibility, “mine” the system: the welfare queen who drew 32 checks from 32 different welfare offices and lived with her lover in a luxury home with four luxury cars in the garage.

In a quest to increase social justice, we must be careful not compound that which we are trying to reduce.