At the heart of Justice Thomas's dissenting opinion was a highly personal critique of affirmative action, which he called the "cruel farce of racial discrimination".
He has long fought brilliantly as a field general in America's cultural wars, from hisDartmouth Reviewdays in the 1980s to his prescient early 1990s critiques of affirmative action.
These "cards" have been sorted into manila files, grouped into brown accordion folders, stacked into the tubs and labeled by argument type: affirmatives, disadvantages, counterplans, critiques, case arguments/negatives, backfiles.
But whatever you think of his solution, it's hard not to find some truth in his critique of traditional affirmative action.
In its absence, lukewarmism is a critique without an affirmative agenda, a theory of the case without a party that's prepared to ever act on it.
One promising way forward, which we endorsed in our critique of race-based affirmative action earlier this year, is to recruit students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.
But I think they'll have to do it in an affirmative, pragmatic way the "party of no" critique is a little hackneyed, but is probably fairly effective counter-messaging.
He has tried to soften the edges of conservative decisions by, for example, sidestepping in his critique last week of the University of Michigan's affirmative action program the compelling question of whether race should remain a consideration in college admissions.
24 School Policies Criticized The Civil Rights Commission plans to issue a harsh critique of policies in Florida, Texas and California that have replaced affirmative action with guaranteed college admission for top high school graduates.
The United States Commission on Civil Rights plans this week to issue a harsh critique of policies in Florida, Texas and California that have replaced affirmative action with admission to public universities for the top graduates in every high school in the state.
These are so multifarious, their significances so varied yet so irrefutable, that the novel creates something of the multi-colored polyphony of history itself, and its scope and exuberance make it an oddly affirmative and even joyful novel that is simultaneously an ambitious critique of modern times.
