The More Things Change . . .

In a comment to my post yesterday on Laurence Tribe's testimony to the Judiciary Committee, Ron offered some insight into an aspect of the culture wars that I thought deserved room up top in the blog.

The conservative movement seems to have successfully "delegitimized" conscious efforts at diversity -- on the court, in business, in academia. They have successfully reintroduced the equivalent of the "civil service exam" as the sole criteria upon which a candidate should be judged with "an up or down vote."

At the turn of the twentieth century it was the WASP powerbase that was threatened by the urban (ethnic) machine politics. Today it's white male culture in general that is threatened. The cultural responses to both are similar.