One of the lessons of this election was that voters recognize bad ideas when they see them.
It is extremely telling that, after a concerted, nonstop media campaign for proto-Marxist “wokeness” in all corners of American life, voters in one of the most liberal states just said no to affirmative action.
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, banning the use of race and sex in determining government decisions about hiring and college admissions in the state university system. In the time since its implementation, nonwhite enrollment in California’s state universities has more than tripled. This has been and remains an inconvenient fact for advocates of affirmative action to explain, so they largely avoid bringing it up.
This year, liberal activists placed Proposition 16 on California’s ballot, which would have repealed Proposition 209 and allowed official discrimination once again. They felt quite certain that the measure would pass in the year of wokeness, revolutionary secessionist movements such as CHAZ, and pressure campaigns to make everyone in sports kneel for the national anthem. Proposition 16 also received high-profile endorsements from Democratic officeholders, including likely incoming Vice President Kamala Harris.
Fortunately for California, the repeal measure failed by what’s shaping up to be a 13-point margin. Race and sex discrimination remain illegal, thanks in large part to Asians’ strong opposition to a policy that heavily discriminates against them in admissions to California’s prestigious state university system.
But the result itself is not quite as interesting as the political context. If Californians reject a measure like this one by so much, what does that say about the seemingly ubiquitous propaganda campaign that has been raging all year, attempting to convince people in America that their nation is not only systemically racist but irredeemably so?
All of this sound and fury — from the New York Times’s 1619 Project to the NBA’s tedious politicization, and even to the hounding and ruination of people who accidentally make the wrong hand gesture or dare say things like “all lives matter” — could it be that all of this was never anything more than an artificial media creation?
All of the excuses that the media and Democratic politicians made for rioting, arson, and looting, to say nothing of the coronavirus exposure that various violent and nonviolent protests caused, look a bit different in that light. Is it any wonder that voters were less than enthusiastic about the Democratic candidates obsequiously bowing to political correctness, even as a nationwide popular majority came out to vote against President Trump?
In 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote of affirmative action, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest” in student body diversity that the court had upheld. With only eight years to go, this would hardly have been the time to reinstitutionalize state-sponsored discrimination.
