Meritocracy now!

Last Friday, a day after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, I noted the gap between the Democratic Party’s leaders and its voters on race-based admissions. Polls find a majority of Democrats opposed to using race as a factor in admissions. The party’s elite, however, is almost universally in favor of affirmative action — as hysterical reactions from the president and others made clear.

But that was last week. Now that the dust has settled, and everyone has had a chance to cool down over July 4, have the Democrats gained some Independence-Day perspective on the…

Last Friday, a day after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, I noted the gap between the Democratic Party’s leaders and its voters on race-based admissions. Polls find a majority of Democrats opposed to using race as a factor in admissions. The party’s elite, however, is almost universally in favor of affirmative action — as hysterical reactions from the president and others made clear.

But that was last week. Now that the dust has settled, and everyone has had a chance to cool down over July 4, have the Democrats gained some Independence-Day perspective on the end of race-based decisions? Not really. Emotional denunciation remains the dominant tone, and elected officials willing to side with the majority of their party’s supporters are no easier to come by than they were last Friday. For the left more generally, it has been a week of impressive mental contortions to avoid any awkward realities about the discrimination against millions of non-white Americans made possible by affirmative action. NPR gets the gold medal for this news story suggesting Asian Americans are white supremacists. Or something.

Missing from the Democratic reaction to the Supreme Court decision is any suggestion that they see the bigger picture. Were the Democrats a genuine working-class party, they might use this decision to highlight the many ways in which America’s elite schools fall short of their meritocratic potential.

Ruy Teixeira, an expert guide to the Democrats’ many blind spots, advises that affirmative action might not be “the hill Democrats should choose to die on. Rather than implicitly or explicitly pledging to resist the law of the land and promote racial preferences by any means necessary, they would be far wiser to use the decision as an opportunity to rebrand the party as the party of America’s working class — the entire working class.” Teixeira makes the political and practical case for class-based affirmative action as a substitute for race-based discrimination. The Financial Times’s Edward Luce calls the affirmative action debate a sideshow. I’d argue that the institutionalized racial discrimination is something worth fighting against, but he’s right that there are many, many more pressing concerns when it comes to boosting the life chances of disadvantaged Americans.

The Economist wonders if last week’s decision might be a catalyst for fairer admissions: perhaps legacy admissions will now be in the crosshairs. I certainly hope so. There are so many ways in which the Democrats could jump on the end of affirmative action as a chance to build a fairer, better, more meritocratic college system. Instead they have opted for hysteria. That choice speaks volumes about who and what the party prioritizes.

On our radar

THE WEST WING COCAINE CAPER Which one of you left your cocaine in the White House? Time to confess, because the White House conveniently thinks this mystery will be close to unsolvable. Cockburn has the latest.

JOB GROWTH SLOWS US employers added 209,000 workers in June according to job and wage data published today. That figure is lower than expected and the lowest since 2020, while wages grew at 4.4 percent. Analysts say the numbers mean the Federal Reserve remains on track to raise rates again later this month.

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Follow the money

The takeaways from the fundraising numbers for the second quarter of 2023 are fairly obvious: Donald Trump still occupies a dominant position, raising more than $35 million — nearly double what he raised in the first quarter. Ron DeSantis, in the six weeks his campaign was officially live during the quarter, raised $20 million. No other campaign has reported their fundraising numbers yet — and if they were mind-blowing, believe me, they’d want you to know.

Yet those numbers don’t tell the full story. Trump’s set-up is a joint fundraising effort — when people donate, the money is split between his campaign and his PAC, Save America. That split was adjusted during the quarter to go from sending 1 percent to sending 10 percent of every donation to the PAC. Since the campaign didn’t offer how much cash they have on hand, it’s logical to assume the PAC needed the additional money, probably because it’s been covering Trump’s legal bills.

On DeSantis’s side, his total between campaign and PAC was much higher than the headlines indicated. His Never Back Down super PAC announced that it had raised $130 million in the quarter, a figure that includes more than $82 million transferred from DeSantis’s Florida-based leadership PAC last month, as well as more than $20 million from megadonor Robert Bigelow, who’s already pledged to back DeSantis all the way. Another GOP megadonor is showing interest in DeSantis as well: Chicago-based Dick Uihlein and his wife are on the host committee of a Wisconsin fundraiser for DeSantis next week.

In the absence of surprising numbers from other campaigns, it seems clear at the moment that only DeSantis has the resources to make this primary a contest. And for Trump, the drip-drip-drip of millions from his effort toward already significant legal fees certain to grow massive in the coming months is a definite drag on the campaign side.

As for Joe Biden and the DNC: there are no plans to release information prior to the July 15 deadline on his fundraising numbers. As an incumbent, Trump and the RNC raised $105 million in the same quarter in 2019. Once again, Biden 2024 is sending off some major low-budget basement campaign vibes.

–Ben Domenech

Biden continues appease-and-hope foreign policy

Part of crafting an effective foreign policy is consistent messaging and following through on what you say. Biden, as is clear to any observer at this point, is lacking on both fronts. At a fundraiser on June 27, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports that Biden told a group of Syrian activists that he would like to see Bashar al-Assad out of power, replying “I agree” when one told him “Assad must go.” Rogin also points out in earlier articles that the administration’s actions indicate it is clearly not interested in doing much even to keep the squeeze on the regime.

What else is new with Biden? Syria is just one of many cases where the administration ceded the field while offering sporadic and inconsistent tough messaging without much in the way of tangible policy to back it up. Think of Iran. In November 2022, in the midst of massive unrest inside the Islamic Republic, Biden said, “We’re going to free Iran.” Just eight short months later, Biden is looking to grant Iran sanctions relief in the interest of a nuclear agreement that is both largely unenforceable and not comprehensive enough. Rather than pursuing the policies necessary to “free Iran” — strong and rigorously enforced sanctions, international isolation, and a credible threat of military force — the administration is trying the failed approach of Obama: appease and hope for results. All it has gotten for its policy is continued Iranian aggression.

We’ve seen the same blunders repeat themselves from Ukraine to Taiwan, and there is no end in sight. Despite what Biden’s cheerleaders say, his foreign policy is a mess, and his long-overdue about-face on cluster munitions (which followed similar about-faces over HIMARS, APCs, tanks and fighter jets) only drives the point home. Until the administration can fall in line behind a unified vision of a strong America on the world stage, Biden’s foreign policy of contradiction will continue — to the detriment of America.

–John Pietro