In America's system of government, only Congress is authorized to make social policy.
That's supposed to be the will of the people, with the president enforcing the law.
However, as American society has become more regulation-ridden, the executive has acquired increased power,
so much so that the lines between his implementing, influencing and initiating policy have blurred.
By manipulating the levers that now lie ready to his hand, a president can, with relative ease, affect aspects of society that should not be under his or indeed anyone's control.
This state of affairs is particularly visible in the areas of racial and gender equality, my own area of interest and a good subject for a talk about social engineering.
It is useful to begin by defining social engineering, and for that it is necessary to distinguish
social from political relations. Political relations involve power. They are not expected
to engage the emotions or, except for the individuals wielding power, to afford personal
gratification. The relations of policeman to citizen, politician to voter are political.
Social relations do not involve power, are consensual, are often emotion-based, and are
expected to produce emotional satisfactions.
Friendship is the standard example.
The informal rules governing social relations rest not on law, but mutual expectation, where
an expectation is mutual when it is held because everyone knows, everyone else expects them
to be held.
Sort of a philosopher's definition. So, for instance, men once doffed their hats to women, that would now result in a lawsuit, I suppose.
Men once doffed their hats to women because everyone expected them to.
Men knew everyone expected them to, and everyone knew that men knew this.
Social engineering is the attempt to shape social relations by political means.
Sex education in public schools, supposedly to discourage extramarital pregnancy, is one example.
Another is the war on sex stereotypes that requires the presence of women in occupations, presumably thought unsuitable.
Yet another, that I'll discuss, is the attempt to normalize homosexuality by upgrading its place in the military.
A final example is school integration ordered by the courts in the hope of making children
of different races see how similar they are.
The common strategy here is to constrain behavior so as to alter expectations, the structure
of expectations, thereby changing the social rules.
Just as bridge builders must know mechanics, all forms of engineering rest on theoretical
foundations.
Since behavioral science, sociology and psychology, is a creature of the 20th century, social
engineering is virtually unknown before then.
Presidential policies of previous eras, whatever their merits, were particularly driven.
I think the first attempt at social engineering in the world's history was when the Jacobins
renamed the months to create social solidarity.
A more serious effort was the attempt at creating the new man under Bolshevism, although most
Most of these ideas are already in Plato's Republic.
Perhaps the first clear-cut social engineering project undertaken by an American president
was Harry Truman's integration of the armed forces after World War II.
This action, of course, had its antecedents.
During the war, Roosevelt's Executive Order 8801 had prohibited discrimination by government
contractors.
However, 8801 does not appear to have been intended as an attack on basic racial attitudes,
and the War Department seldom disciplined the many contractors who ignored it.
Truman's goal was more ambitious.
In a June 1947 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he had already committed
himself to using Federal power against not only lynching and the poll tax, but the whole
quote racial caste system.
In doing so, Truman crossed an important line.
Lynching, a form of violence against persons, is a proper concern of government.
as is the franchise, although that shouldn't be a Federal matter.
However, caste systems, in so far as they are extra statutory arrangements, not based
on force, are quite different.
They reflect voluntary associations and fall outside the purview of government, certainly
of the presidency.
Truman's Executive Order 8991, issued in 1948, integrated the military.
At the same time, he created the Civil Rights Commission.
As commander in chief of the armed forces, the president bears responsibility for their
morale and efficiency.
But improving morale and combat readiness was clearly not Truman's motive.
The military was not happy with Truman's edict, with some officers complaining that the military
is not a vehicle for social change.
It may be relevant that in the aftermath of the war, the Carnegie Foundation was preparing
a study, ultimately published as the American Soldier, whose sociologist authors urged the
integration of the army in the interest of justice and smoother race relations.
I am unaware of any reference to this study and any of Truman's speeches or communications
to Congress concerning civil rights, but it is quite possible that some of his advisers
were influenced by it.
His own characterization of his actions qualify them as social engineering.
While he often represented his policy as a limited moral and constitutional duty, he
often expressed a wish for the end of a social system in which he said, quote, Negroes have
been preyed upon by all types of exploiters from the installment salesmen of clothing,
pianos and furniture to the vendors of vice.
Murray is describing voluntary economic interactions, matters beyond equality before the law.
Taking steps to end them exceeded his constitutional obligations.
Over the 15 years, after 8991, the Department of Defense took two further steps.
It forbade soldiers to use segregated bus or rail facilities, and it instructed the
discipline boards of military bases to declare all segregated businesses off limits.
These measures, unnecessary for integration per se, could only have been intended to advance
integration in civil society by means of the Defense Department's economic clout.
During this period, the mobilization after World War II, Korea, the Cold War, millions
of military personnel were crisscrossing the country, making it financial suicide for any
carrier to remain segregated.
The bars and restaurants near military bases faced failure if soldiers were denied access
The New Regulations Governing Local Businesses Violated the Spirit of the Off-Limits Concept, originally an ad hoc protective device to keep soldiers out of places that were, for example, liable to roll them.
The new measures were intended solely to end practices found on customer preference.
Again, the effectiveness of these tactics depended on the size of the military.
When in the 1930s the U.S. had a very small number of men under arms, carriers could more
easily have absorbed the loss of military contracts.
It was only because the post-war military commanded many more resources that resistance
to it was impossible.
Thus does the power of the President to influence social behavior depend upon the resources
at his disposal.
The more he controls, the juicier the carrots he can dangle.
Well are federal carrots coercive?
After all, it will be argued, the government, at least before the Civil Rights Act, was
not forcing businesses to integrate.
A bar could choose to remain segregated and risk going under just as it could risk alienating
customers by not serving certain brands of beer.
This analogy ignores a difference in the ways in which civilian and military customers pay
for services.
A civilian who won't patronize or be a bar that won't serve duff beers holding back resources
acquired consensually.
The money is originally his or earned in an exchange with its previous owner.
But the money held back by the government was and is acquired coercively from taxpayers.
The difference is the more significant as the government's agents, say in the 1950s,
largely draftees, were forced into government service.
The second exercise of presidential power I'll discuss, affirmative action, was also
meant unambiguously to bring about a racial and sexual equality that had never existed
previously on the apparent assumption that forcing this equality would make it voluntary
and permanent.
The flood of litigation affirmative action has produced obscures its virtual lack of
on a statutory basis. Numerous federal and state laws do reserve proportions of public work contracts for firms owned by blacks or females, set hiring quotas of public employment, aid minority businesses and so on, but no legislature would dare tell private firms across the board to hire a fixed number of blacks.
While court-ordered quotas in specific cases are common, no judge has ever ordered society-wide
preferences for non-whites and women.
The entire structure rests mainly on executive orders issued during the 1960s and 70s.
Affirmative action was first used by Kennedy, but came to public attention under Lyndon Johnson.
Speaking in 1965 at Howard University, Johnson called for racial equality and compared blacks
Johnson compared blacks to, or he said, not just in theory, but as a fact and result,
and compared blacks to a recently shackled runner.
You do not make a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberated and bring
them up to the starting line and then say you are free to compete with all the others.
Johnson followed up with Executive Order 11246, requiring all Federal contractors and subcontractors
to take, quote, affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and ensure that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.
Enforcement fell to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs at the Labor Department.
In 1967, Johnson issued E.O. 11375, extending the forbidden grounds to sex.
In one stroke, the coverage of affirmative action expanded from 12% of the population to over 50%.
I note that Section 202-3 of Subpart A of that EO reads,
The contractor will, in all solicitations or advertisements for employees placed by or on behalf of the contractor,
state that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, national origin or sex,
a provision that clearly violates freedom of speech and the press.
The requirements on Federal contractors were made more stringent in 1971 under the so-called Philadelphia Plan.
And Richard Nixon's Order No. 4 required Federal contractors with more than 50 employees and $50,000 in contracts to set
quote, goals and timetables for the proper utilization of blacks, defined to mean the rate of minority applicants recruited
must approximate or equal the rate of minorities in the population shortly after Revised Order No. 4 extended goals to women.
The step from the first one to the second one, from race to sex, was perhaps Johnson's most momentous.
For the first time in human history, the state actively sought to replace men by women in the breadwinner role,
Where quotas for blacks have been an injustice, an irritating one, quotas for women became part of a reversal of sex roles whose adverse consequences, including a below replacement birth rate in the United States and the rest of the Western world, are just beginning to be felt.
The next extension of the quota reach occurred in 1977, when the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare prohibited racial or sexual discrimination by recipients of federal assistance.
It not only required that any recipient must take, quote, affirmative action to overcome prior discrimination, but added, quote,
Even in the absence of prior discrimination, a recipient in administering a program may take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limiting participation, yada, yada, yada.
Affirmative action now apply to higher education, including colleges merely enrolling recipients of federal aid to students.
In 1987, I estimated the coverage of the OFCCP regulations to lie between 16 and 25 million workers.
When you add the DHEW regulations that added 12 million college students,
the half a million professors and all the rest of the staff that they govern,
and the growth in the population since that time, well, we're probably talking 50 million people covered.
The regulations affecting the university show how executive initiatives reverberate.
Getting federal grants and enrolling students receiving aid now depended on a university's
hiring more blacks and women, who, even when academically minded, often ignore normal subjects.
Blacks tend to go into black studies and newly invented black sub-genres of academic subjects,
And women likewise had disproportionately, for women's studies or phallic politics and
art history or something like that, universities are forced to hire incompetents to teach rubbish,
further polluting the well of scholarship.
Johnson probably also did not want to change medical care, but this is now touted as another
welcome result of quotas.
Black doctors are supposedly more inclined than white to practice in slums, so admitting
Having more blacks into medical school enhances the health of blacks generally, that is decreases
the number of white doctors, thereby degrading medical care for whites, or equivalently increasing
its costs.
There is no evidence that black doctors do prefer black patients, but this is the kind
of broad effect affirmative action was supposed to have.
Appearances, allowance of quotas in the absence of discrimination by HEW did not exceed Johnson's
original analogy.
After all, the other runners in that hypothetical race were innocent.
They were not the ones who did the shackling of the poor guy.
Yet they are being asked to give an opponent a head start.
In fact, much of the criticism of affirmative action has centered on this point, its cost
to the Innocent.
As restitution requires the tortfeasor alone give up what is wrong cost his victim, placing
the other runners, typically white males, at a disadvantage is unjust.
It is unjust to give blacks an advantage over whites who never harm them, but that's what
Johnson was advocating.
But Johnson's analogy failed more seriously.
Whether the traditional notion of compensation is kept or the concept is stretched so that
that even the innocent must pay, Johnson obscured a key distinction.
Truman's goal was more ambitious.
In a June 1947 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he had already committed
himself to using Federal power against not only lynching and the poll tax, but the whole
quote racial caste system.
In doing so, Truman crossed an important line.
In other words, a form of violence against persons is a proper concern of government,
as is the franchise, although that shouldn't be a Federal matter.
However, caste systems, insofar as they are extra statutory arrangements, not based on
force, are quite different.
They reflect voluntary associations and fall outside the purview of government, certainly
of the presidency.
Truman's Executive Order 8991, issued in 1948, integrated the military.
At the same time, he created the Civil Rights Commission.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the President bears responsibility for their
morale and efficiency.
But improving morale and combat readiness was clearly not Truman's motive.
The military was not happy with Truman's edict, with some officers complaining that the
It may be relevant that in the aftermath of the war, the Carnegie Foundation was preparing
a study, ultimately published as the American Soldier, whose sociologist authors urged the
integration of the army in the interest of justice and smoother race relations.
I am unaware of any reference to this study and any of Truman's speeches or communications
to Congress concerning civil rights, but it is quite possible that some of his advisers
were influenced by it.
His own characterization of his actions qualify them as social engineering.
While he often represented his policy as a limited moral and constitutional duty, he
often expressed a wish for the end of a social system in which he said, quote, Negroes have
been preyed upon by all types of exploiters from the installment salesmen of clothing,
pianos and furniture to the vendors of vice.
Murray is describing voluntary economic interactions, matters beyond equality before the law.
Taking steps to end them exceeded his constitutional obligations.
Over the 15 years, after 8991, the Department of Defense took two further steps.
It forbade soldiers to use segregated bus or rail facilities, and it instructed the
discipline boards of military bases to declare all segregated businesses off limits.
These measures, unnecessary for integration per se, could only have been intended to advance integration in civil society by means of the Defense Department's economic clout.
During this period, the mobilization after World War II, Korea, the Cold War, millions of military personnel were crisscrossing the country, making it financial suicide for any carrier to remain segregated.
The bars and restaurants near military bases faced failure if soldiers were denied access to them.
The new regulations governing local businesses violated the spirit of the off-limits concept,
originally an ad hoc protective device to keep soldiers out of places that were, for example, liable to roll them.
The new measures were intended solely to end practices found on customer preference.
Again, the effectiveness of these tactics depended on the size of the military.
When in the 1930s, the U.S. had a very small number of men under arms, carriers could more easily have absorbed the loss of military contracts.
It was only because the post-war military commanded many more resources that resistance to it was impossible.
Thus does the power of the President to influence social behavior depend upon the resources at his disposal. The more he controls, the juicier the carrots he can dangle.
Well, are federal carrots coercive? After all, it will be argued, the government, at least before the Civil Rights Act, was not forcing businesses to integrate.
A bar could choose to remain segregated and risk going under, just as it could risk alienating customers by not serving certain brands of beer.
This analogy ignores a difference in the ways in which civilian and military customers pay for services.
A civilian who won't patronize a bar that won't serve duff beer is holding back resources acquired consensually.
The money is originally his or earned in an exchange with its previous owner.
But the money held back by the government was and is acquired coercively from taxpayers.
The difference is the more significant as the government's agents, say in the 1950s, largely draftees, were forced into government service.
The second exercise of presidential power I'll discuss, affirmative action, was also meant unambiguously
to bring about a racial and sexual equality that had never existed previously,
on the apparent assumption that forcing this equality would make it voluntary and permanent.
The flood of litigation affirmative action has produced obscures its virtual lack of a statutory basis.
Numerous Federal and State laws do reserve proportions of public work contracts for firms owned by Blacks or females.
Set hiring quotas of public employment aid minority businesses and so on,
but no legislature would dare tell private firms across the board to hire a fixed number of Blacks.
While court-ordered quotas in specific cases are common,
no judge has ever ordered society-wide preferences for non-whites and women.
The entire structure rests mainly on executive orders issued during the 1960s and 70s.
Affirmative action was first used by Kennedy, but came to public attention under Lyndon Johnson.
Speaking in 1965 at Howard University, Johnson called for racial equality and compared blacks
to, or he said, not just in theory, but as a fact and result, and compared blacks to a recently
You do not make a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him and bring him up to the starting line and then say you are free to compete with all the others.
Johnson followed up with Executive Order 11246 requiring all Federal contractors and subcontractors, so you really reach down, to take, quote, affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and ensure that employees are treated during employment
during employment without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.
Enforcement fell to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the Labor Department.
In 1967, Johnson issued E.O. 11375, extending the forbidden grounds to sex.
In one stroke, the coverage of affirmative action expanded from 12 percent of the population to over 50 percent.
I note that Section 202-3 of Subpart A of that EO reads,
The contractor will, in all solicitations or advertisements for employees placed by or on behalf of the contractor,
state that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, national origin or sex,
a provision that clearly violates freedom of speech and the press.
The requirements on Federal contractors were made more stringent in 1971 under the so-called Philadelphia Plan.
And Richard Nixon's Order No. 4 required Federal contractors with more than 50 employees and $50,000 in contracts to set,
quote, goals and timetables for the proper utilization of blacks, defined to mean the rate of minority applicants recruited
must approximate or equal the rate of minorities in the population shortly after Revised Order No. 4, Extended Goals to Women.
The step from the first one to the second one, from race to sex, was perhaps Johnson's most momentous.
For the first time in human history, the State actively sought to replace men by women in the breadwinner role,
Where quotas for blacks have been an injustice, an irritating one, quotas for women became part of a reversal of sex roles whose adverse consequences, including a below replacement birth rate in the United States and the rest of the Western world, are just beginning to be felt.
The next extension of the quota reach occurred in 1977, when the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare prohibited racial or sexual discrimination by recipients of Federal assistance.
It not only required that any recipient must take, quote, affirmative action to overcome prior discrimination, but added, quote,
Even in the absence of prior discrimination, a recipient in administering a program may take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions, which resulted in limiting participation, yada, yada, yada.
Affirmative action now applied to higher education, including colleges merely enrolling recipients of federal aid to students.
In 1987, I estimated the coverage of the OFCCP regulations to lie between 16 and 25 million workers.
When you add the DHEW regulations that added 12 million college students,
the half a million professors and all the rest of the staff that they govern,
and the growth in the population since that time, well, we're probably talking 50 million people covered.
The regulations affecting the university show how executive initiatives reverberate.
Getting federal grants and enrolling students receiving aid now depended on a university's
hiring more blacks and women, who, even when academically minded, often ignore normal subjects.
Blacks tend to go into black studies and newly invented black sub-genres of academic subjects,
and Women Likewise head disproportionately for women's studies or phallic politics and art history or something like that.
Universities are forced to hire incompetents to teach rubbish, further polluting the well of scholarship.
Johnson probably also did not want to change medical care, but this is now touted as another welcome result of quotas.
Black doctors are supposedly more inclined than white to practice in slums.
So admitting more blacks into medical school enhances the health of blacks generally, that is, decreases the number of white doctors, thereby degrading medical care for whites, or equivalently increasing its costs.
There is no evidence that black doctors do prefer black patients, but this is the kind of broad effect affirmative action was supposed to have.
Despite appearances, allowance of quotas in the absence of discrimination by HEW did not exceed Johnson's original analogy.
After all, the other runners in that hypothetical race were not innocent.
They were not the ones who did the shackling of the poor guy.
Yet they are being asked to give an opponent a head start.
In fact, much of the criticism of affirmative action has centered on this point.
it's cost to the innocent as restitution requires the torque fees are alone give up what is wrong cost is victim placing the other runners typically white males and a disadvantage is unjust it is unjust to give blacks an advantage over whites who never harm them but that's what johnson was advocating but johnson's analogy failed more seriously whether the traditional notion of compensation is kept or the concept is stretched so that even the innocent must pay
Johnson obscured a key distinction. He conflated private discrimination with discriminatory laws such as those ordering separate seating by race on public or private conveyances. Jim Crow laws were state actions whose bad consequences, whatever they may have been and however they should be rectified, can be laid at the feet of the State. Private discrimination sanctioned by freedom of association is another matter. It is not government action
and it implicates the state only and that the state allows it and if that is enough for the state to step in the state may rectify any misuse of freedom whatsoever and the scope of intervention is practically unlimited so even if affirmative action retains the fig leaf of restitution the restitution Johnson aimed at exceeded anything that government should pursue his eos were not meant to return to blood
This is clear even from that original speech that I quoted, in which he deplored the fact
that fewer than half of black children lived to age 18 with both parents.
This is what affirmative action was supposed to rectify.
The figure, 35 years later, is now about 17 percent, thank you very much, and he blamed the situation on whites for, quote, I'm quoting Lyndon Johnson,
the breakdown of Negro family structure, most of all, white America for, for the breakdown of Negro family structure, white America must accept responsibility.
No white public figure challenged this canard.
Johnson, in other words, was out to stabilize marriage and decrease illegitimacy, a goal light years beyond the faithful execution of the laws.
Affirmative action was not Lyndon Johnson's only effort to remake society.
Executive orders and legislation had placed an array of agencies in his hands.
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,
the President's Committee on Equal Opportunity and Housing, the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Community Relations Service in the Commerce Department, and the President's Council on Equal Opportunity. They're all different things.
Complianting the bad cop pressure these agencies brought were good cop incentive programs like the National Alliance of Business, a jobs training program.
A voluntary effort, businesses that participated were promised government reimbursement for extraordinary costs, including health services, teaching, reading and writing, and counseling and basic work and life skills.
No wonder the Ford Motor Company could afford to let one of its executives work full-time for the NAB.
B. Joseph Califano reports this, and he frankly characterizes Johnson's use of the billion-dollar
congressional appropriation under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as a, quote,
carrot and sizable stick to encourage desegregation.
Truman's motives, looking back, were clear. While he personally regarded some separation
of the Races as Appropriate, he did believe he was obliged as president to pursue integration.
I think that's so. Nixon is opaque. Maybe he sought to disarm his critics on the left.
Although in 1971, the feminist bracketing of women with blacks as victims was accepted
only by intellectuals who despised Johnson no matter what he did. And Nixon's silent
It is Johnson's zeal that is enigmatic. His dealings with blacks, Mexican and other ethnic voting blocs in his native Texas were exceptionally corrupt and cynical during his ascendancy.
This is all retailed in Robert Caro's multi-volume work.
In 1947, he denounced Truman's civil rights program as an effort to set up a police state.
He criticized anti-lynching laws because, quote, the federal government has no more business in acting a law against one form of murder than another.
Isn't that great today when somebody kills a homosexual and it's national news and somebody kills a white male and that's in the crime pages?
He opposed creation of a permanent fair employment practices commission, incomparably more modest than quotas, because, quote,
If a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom he cannot employ.
Yet this same man waxed euphoric when signing the Voting Rights Act, telling an aide,
get a table so people can say, this is the table on which LBJ signed the voting rights bill.
Equally strange was Johnson's embrace of feminism, even more precocious than Nixon's.
His actions remain a puzzle for future psycho-historians.
I now turn to Bill Clinton's attempt to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military.
Truman, Nixon, Johnson were all complex men.
Bill Clinton is very simple, very clear.
This break, not only with centuries of military policy, but the Judeo-Christian ethics,
Why Clinton has supported homosexuals and they have supported him, no mystery.
Despite media attempts to portray him as a centrist, he is the first president whose
core constituency includes deviance.
Among Clinton's 1992 campaign promises was an executive order forbidding the military
to ask applicants about their sexual orientation or expel servicemen discovered to be homosexual.
He assured traditionalists that homosexuals would be held to all other standards of conduct,
but in its net effect, the proposed order would have raised homosexuality to the status
of heterosexuality by erasing any distinction in the treatment of the two.
Upon election, Clinton moved quickly to keep his promise.
At a press conference only nine days after inauguration, he reported that the issue had
had been under discussion, quote, over the last few days.
In other words, ending the homosexuality exclusion topped Clinton's agenda.
That's the most important thing facing America, a point of enormous symbolic value to homosexual activists.
But Clinton found career military men so perturbed by his proposal and congressmen so infuriated
that a congressional override of his proposed order seemed inevitable.
In response to this setback, he apologetically announced a six-month delay for further negotiations,
whose upshot, as we know, was the present don't ask, don't tell policy.
A homosexual need not declare his homosexuality, and his superiors may initiate no steps to
investigate him.
But he subjects himself to discharge by declaring his homosexuality, or get this, attempting
to marry a person of the same sex.
in the Federal Law and Regulation.
Now, what the heck was Clinton up to?
We should note that the reasons he gave for his initiative were so obviously flawed as
to amount to a wink to homosexual activists that he really didn't mean them.
These reasons were stated most fully in the press conference I mentioned, and in a speech
he gave a few months later to a military audience.
The press conference began with a gross non-sequitur.
The issue is not whether there should be homosexuals in the military.
Everyone concedes that they are there.
The issue is whether men and women should be excluded from military service solely on
the basis of their status.
Compare that to the following.
The issue is not whether there should be stock fraud.
Everyone concedes that it occurs.
The issue is not whether we should excise that tumor in your pancreas.
All the doctors concede that it is there.
The issue is whether a biological entity ought to be removed solely on the basis of its status.
And, you know, tumors have rights too.
Clinton added that the military spent $500 million in the 1980s to separate out about 17,000 homosexuals.
It ill becomes a president presiding over an annual budget of $1.7 trillion to bemoan a yearly expenditure of $50 million.
Nor has Clinton ever complained of the literal billions spent refitting warships so that women can be deployed on them,
redesigning aircraft cockpits and ejection seats to accommodate women,
and arranging virtually all facilities to provide the privacy women would not need in the sex-blind military that egalitarians say they want.
The hypocrisy and incoherence is bottomless.
Clinton begged the real issue. If an all-heterosexual military is a good idea, isn't a relatively modest expenditure to keep it so also a good idea?
The positive considerations Clinton offered for admitting homosexuals, open homosexuals, were that everyone otherwise qualified has a right to join the military, and that closeted homosexuals have allegedly served with distinction.
I will let wiser heads work out how military service can be a right when throughout history it has been viewed as at best an onerous duty.
And the necessarily unsystematic record of homosexuals to date fails to reflect the critical fact that they were closeted.
So any effects their orientation might have had on morale or unit cohesion were suppressed.
Indeed, since homosexuals are already free to enlist so long as they stay in the closet,
the contributions they might make, Clinton's ace in the hole, provide no reason to alter the status quo.
They can make those contributions anyway.
Since Clinton was offering homosexuals nothing material they now lack, his real point was to give them something symbolic, validation.
In his man's army, a homosexual would be able to serve and tell everyone within earshot that he's gay.
The only point to allowing this openness is relief of the stigma that taints homosexuality in this, like every society.
Stigma Relief was the point of prioritizing the exclusion issue in the first place, ramming
in the public's face a subject they would normally never think about, but which homosexual
activists want everyone to take as seriously as they do.
Even unavoidable discussion of a subject, such as homosexuality, tends to inure people
to it, dulling their natural aversion.
This is social engineering by symbol.
The Clinton presidency has entered the age of symbolism in other ways.
With few institutions left standing for a president to attack unilaterally, although
maybe I'm being optimistic in saying that, what remains is the conspicuous flouting of
of Old Precedents and the Setting of New Ones. Social life, I said, depends on what we think
others expect of us. And people determine this partly by watching salient figures, leaders,
whose behavior becomes a reference point to what is acceptable. This cueing was once local,
effects spreading slowly, but the media have accelerated this process in the present
century and no one has achieved greater celebrity than the president. Boys a hundred
years ago might have admired George Washington's probity, but not his
chicness. But newsreels made people aware of Eisenhower's jacket. TV showcased
as Kennedy's style, now a president's image is ubiquitous.
And Clinton has exploited this circumstance.
In the interest of egalitarianism, he and the First Lady seldom are photographed only among whites.
I haven't seen it happen yet, second term.
The sole finding of his much publicized commission on race was white perfidy.
His favorite author, or so he says, is a black, Walter Moseley.
His ostentatiously displayed best friend is black.
The spiritual advisor, Jesse Jackson, is black. He grandly appoints women and non-whites so government will look like America. By making second-class citizenship for white males less unthinkable by constantly holding it up, the drumbeat of gestures both instructs white males to prepare for lower status and helps to bring this condition about. Thirty seconds on what should be done.
To switch gears suddenly, to some extent, the President himself is partly a prisoner of this huge bureaucratic regulatory apparatus that exists, which is now stocked with true believers.
Even he, to some extent, is powerless to go against it. They just won't do what he wants. That's part of the reason Reagan got nowhere.
Ultimately, I'm sorry to say, it's up to the people of the United States to pass the laws to get those guys out and get other guys in, and if they don't do it, they have only themselves to blame. Thank you.