Transcription
The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision to strike down Louisiana's congressional map hits right in the heart of Cleo Fields' seat. The Democrat represents the sixth congressional district, which links from Shreveport to Baton Rouge. But the high court ruled the newly drawn majority-minority district was an unconstitutional gerrymander since it was based on race.
"We can realistically end up having six congressional districts with no African-American or Democratic representation."
What does this decision mean? Not only in terms of the law but for American democracy.
"The point of our constitution and the Voting Rights Act is that everyone is guaranteed an equal opportunity to vote. They are not guaranteed success in the candidates that they think should be elected."
"How do we chart a course that can solve for this problem? This problem of living together in a multicultural, multi-racial society. Something that humans don't have a great track record on. Don't have much of a track record at all in the long history of humans on this planet."
Well, I think the efforts that have been made so far have run out of gas, and we need to try something new. Something new and old, actually. So, speaking of old, the regime that we are currently under is still fundamentally the one that was kicked off by Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.
"The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice to which we're totally committed in our time. So will you join in the battle? We have the power to shape the civilization that we want."
"We have the power to shape the civilization that we want." What happened here? This was the Civil Rights moment. This was the birth of the Civil Rights Act, which did several things that were necessary and important at the time. The most important of which was disbanding the Jim Crow laws. Segregation in the South in this country was indeed a reflection of popular beliefs. So, it wasn't singularly a government phenomenon, but it was also a function of state and local laws, the Jim Crow laws.
And one of the reasons why, frankly, I actually, I asked Bob Woodson, a longtime civil rights advocate and an older Black conservative, a voice of the right from the '60s through to today, who was there on the front lines of the Civil Rights Act but went a different way ideologically than a lot of his peers. And I asked him at the time because we were doing some work together, I said, "Bob, it is weird that at the time something north of 95% of Black Americans vote for a single party. You can't really find that anywhere else. That is a more unified voting base than even, like, Berkeley, California. What is going on there?"
He said, number one, an actual majority of Black Americans at the time that we were having this conversation worked for the government in one form or another: federal, state, local, social work, police, fire, etc. And so, there is somewhat of a built-in pro-government bias in that fact. The second piece he said was that you have to understand that for Black Americans, the federal government came to the rescue in the face of local laws. This is why, and this sounds sort of unfamiliar to modern ears, but this idea of states' rights, that we are all different states with different legal structures that have their own sovereignty and that, you know, the 10th Amendment says that anything not explicitly enumerated for the federal government should be left to the states – that's federalism, states' rights – that was a dirty word because the states were imposing Jim Crow laws, segregation, and structural, federal, formal legal racism. And it was actually the federal government that came to the rescue of that.
I am for that. I am glad that that happened fundamentally. I'm glad that these local versions of government tyranny were broken. But the other pieces of the puzzle have outlived their usefulness, namely the construction of legal privileges for not just Black people, but for women and for an increasing list of protected classes. This has created our modern problems in a very real sense, legally, as a matter of the institutions of America.
When we talk about what kind of change do we need to bring about if we can have a new, healthy, prosperous society going forward, I think this is an area where we need to take a fresh look. Specifically, I think it is time to abolish all of this. I think it is time for us to embrace true equality for all, which is to say, end all forms of legal discrimination in America. That would require the dismantling of a lot of what is currently US labor law and the structures of affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act that specifically discriminate in favor of certain groups and against disfavored groups, which has increasingly only meant white men. This is the engine of grievance of our time today.
And here's the thing: this structure, the structure of affirmative action, of equity, of trying to use the government to ensure equal outcomes, not just equal treatment – this was opposed by thinkers like Thomas Sowell, going back to the 1980s, going back to the early days of this movement. And you can see him battle Frances Fox Piven, whose name is important, and I will come back to who she is exactly in a minute, but just hear out this exchange.
"People are born into this world in a given sector of a society, and many, many of them are born at the bottom of the society. The argument for equality of results was an argument that was linked to equality of opportunity. People recognized that unless there was a degree of equality in a degree of enough food, enough security, access to education, unless these things were available to all children, then equality of opportunity was merely a mockery. That's why equality of results became an issue, and it became an issue for Black people in the United States, and they expressed their concern."
"Whatever the opinion..."
"You expressed it, damn it. Look, let's..."
"No, they did not. They did not."
"Democrats and then replied..."
"They expressed their will by their extraordinary participation in a protest movement that began in the late 1950s and didn't end until..."
"I have never... intellectuals were not in that protest movement. You want me to answer in that process?"
"You want me to answer?"
"I finished."
"Good. Black people have never supported, for example, affirmative action policies or anything of that sort. Wherever polls have been taken, Black opinion on such matters of should people be paid equally or should there be this or that, Black people have never taken a position that you describe. So, it is not a question of what Black people chose to do. It's what you choose to put in the mouths of Black people. It is what you choose to project. A very small handful of intellectuals have generated an enormous amount of noise. When I look at opinion polls, particularly if I look at opinion polls of Blacks in the United States, most Blacks in the United States do not take any strong position in favor of equality of results. In fact, most of the polls that I've seen of Blacks put them, if you want to use this expression, very well to the right of most intellectuals on most of these social issues. It is not the people who are stirring. It is a handful of intellectuals."
"The question is not absolute equality. It's a question of what concept of equality you're aiming at, whether you're getting it absolutely or to one degree or the other. Are you aiming at a concept of equality of opportunity at the outset, or are you aiming at a concept of equality of results?"
I would go beyond the question of equality and put it more generally that any process to ascribe any status to any group of people – equality, inferiority, superiority – must necessarily reduce freedom. Because whatever the government wishes to ascribe to any group, whatever place, to use the phrase that was very common in the South, that Blacks should have their place, whatever place the government is going to assign to people, that place will not coincide... wait, that place will not coincide either with what all those people are doing or with how others perceive all those people. Because there's too much diversity among human beings to maintain any system of ascribed status from the top. It is going to mean reducing people's freedom across the spectrum.
The most important public intellectual of our times, from my perspective, Thomas Sowell, laying waste to the ideology of affirmative action and of unequal treatment by the law. His opponent there, the high-minded social signaling intellectual professor, who was none other than Frances Fox Piven, of the rightfully maligned, by some at least by me, clouded Piven strategy. Let me just read this from Wikipedia, or Wikipedia, depending on how you look at it these days.
The clouded pivot strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists. Those are basically the same thing at this point. All of sociology is a scam. Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize militant anti-poverty groups to facilitate a political crisis by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and redistributing income through the federal government.
One way you might imagine this could happen, let's say, is if you radically increased immigration at the same time that you tried to expand the use of welfare benefits to these new immigrants, many of whom are coming in having not contributed to the system in the first place. Just a thought. There's something similar going on there, one might say. And I am broadly more pro-immigration than most of the right-wing, actually most of the public in general, to be perfectly transparent on that. But it is interesting that Ms. Piven really seemed to be perfectly fine and interested in using people as tools to create political crises in the name of growing the state.
This is the crossroads we're at as a country. A non-trivial percentage of people that are out there on the left and the right see this as entirely a power game to be fought along ideological and specifically identitarian lines. Our founders, even though they owned slaves, had an understanding of an ideal, an American ideal, the fundamental American ideal articulated by slave-holding Thomas Jefferson, and that was this: "The idea took form, something new was expressed by men. A new and revolutionary doctrine, the greatest creative force in human relations. All men are created equal. All men are entitled to the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That's the goal we set for ourselves. Defeat meant hanging. Victory meant a world in which Americans rule themselves.
"All men are created equal." Now, this is false. All men are not created equal. All people are not created equal. We are a diverse, different creature. We have wildly different capabilities. And those capabilities end up expressing themselves in a modern context with the most unequal outcomes one can possibly imagine. An incredible basketball player can earn a multiple of my income. That is truly astonishing. And that's just the nature of the world we live in. And that is the nature of a modern, broad society where you have the potential to create value for millions of people with your work, with your effort.
So, unequal outcomes and inequality of material reality are facts. They are facts. And I think the only way we can ever make progress in this world is by being rooted in reality, in facts. We can't... You know, Ayn Rand has this saying, "You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." And the entire ideology of critical race theory, of affirmative action, of a legal set of institutions designed to actively discriminate on the basis of your identity – these run counter to the facts of how people work and how people respond.
I want to give a specific example of how this actually plays out for real and why we need to get rid of all of this as one of the many reforms that America needs that could maybe even, as weird as this sounds, help de-escalate our explosive politics. So, when I was at MTV, actually at Spike a couple years later, I was a pretty caring manager. I got to have a reputation of taking care of my team and having a warm, good vibe, a good sense of community, a good sense of teamwork. My reward for that at one point was to be transferred a producer who happened to be female, who was kind of a disaster, and who bounced around between other teams, kind of wreaking havoc. And the question you have to ask yourself is, why did this happen? Why? If this person was such a problem that they got bounced off of two other teams, why weren't they fired? The answer is protected class status. She was a woman. We were in New York City, so she was in a protected class. This was not going to work for Viacom. A big company knows they're just going to get sued. So, they move people around. They keep people in positions that they shouldn't be in way longer, which is not good for the company, but it's also not good for that person. Because when you're in a job that isn't a good fit and you're not good at it, staying in it isn't good for you. You should find something else. You should learn some hard lessons, improve your behavior, perhaps. But that's not what happened. And it ended up falling on me ultimately, years later, to be the one to deliver the bad news. "I'm sorry, you're fired."
This is not the only time I watched this happen inside Viacom, inside of Deep Blue Hunger Games New York, where this legal framework is at its sort of peak of its power because it's not just the federal laws, it's also the state and the city laws that make these privileges granted to people by the government in a discriminatory way on the basis of their identity. That is the perverse, destructive evil of this stuff.
When you treat people special by law, you add costs onto them that they don't even realize you're adding. You undermine their credibility as having earned their way. Number one, so you become a diversity hire. That sucks. Nobody wants to be the diversity hire. Nobody wants to work hard, get into a job, and then have this cloud following them that they were maybe a diversity hire, that they didn't earn it themselves. Nobody wants that. And we shouldn't force it upon them by law. Number two, when you make it more expensive to hire particular groups, you make it less likely that you will do so. That is a fact. That is a reality. All of the utopian schemes of the left can't escape that reality. All of that sucks. All of that has poisoned our workplaces. It's poisoned our politics. And it is building a movement of young people, including young white males, who have had enough. And I don't want them to turn into shock troops that burn the country to the ground or ignite in reaction some kind of heinous civil war. That's not good for us. That's not good for this American experiment.
And so, I think it's time that we return to equal treatment under the law. Legal fairness for real. There are two ways to think about fairness. This is something I've explained to my son, going back to when he was 10, because it's quite easy to understand. If the country is a game, there are two sets of rules you could have. One set of rules, equal outcomes, says that whatever you do, wherever you come from, we change the rules so that you will either get the same score, or maybe a particular team, chosen in advance on the basis not of how they played but who they are, will win. Most of us understand that that's fundamentally unfair. But that is what's called distributive justice. That is the lefty academic term for that. That is affirmative action. That is the Civil Rights Act framework. The Title IX framework. Title IX is part of the Civil Rights Act. It should be abolished as well.
The other form of fairness is that we have an equal, impartial referee, and that referee will apply equal rules to all the players, and may the best man or woman win. And most of us understand that when it's a game, that is fair play. That's what fairness actually means. And when we play that kind of game, like as a sport, as a game, when we lose it, we understand. When we lose it, unless we're just a jerk, we can shake the hands of the other team and say, "Good game." We can have sportsmanship. We can have civility. I want that for this country more than anything else, as a father, as an American.
The only way you can have civility and sportsmanship is if we are all playing by the same rules. That doesn't even mean equal opportunity. I'm not sure that's a linguistic thing that right-wingers say as opposed to equal outcomes. We want equal opportunity. There's no such thing as equal opportunity. That's never going to be a thing, not fully. It shouldn't even be talked about that way. I think that that's a mistake. What we need is equal treatment. Equal treatment under the law. Everything else is going to be up to all of us to figure out. And if we had that, this society would start to heal. It's not the only thing we need. We need lots of other reforms, big reforms. This needs to be expanded beyond just race and identity. We need to have equal treatment under the law for everything. Namely, there should be no companies that get special privileges. In fact, companies should get no privileges at all. There should be no subsidies for particular industries. There should be no corporate welfare. In fact, we should kill that first, to be perfectly honest.
But if you take this principle of equality under the law seriously, it would radically restructure our society for the better. And in a time where there is more and more desire for radical change, this is the best one I can possibly offer you to consider. Take seriously what it would mean for the country, for every interaction we have, not just with the government, but with our own opportunities. Imagine a world where the government simply can't pick any winners or losers ever. Where it can't censor anyone for any reason ever. Where it can't play any kinds of favorites ever. I think there'd be a lot more sportsmanship and a lot more civility.
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