I'm not sure what other meaning of "affirmative action" there is.
Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....
I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.
I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".
I generally agree with your points above, especially that it’s not a far left idea. It’s a mainstream left idea.
But one quibble. “Affirmative action,” as used by Kennedy and Nixon, originally meant the government taking “affirmative action” to eliminate discrimination in government hiring: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/learn-origins-term-af... see also https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu.... So it wasn’t sufficient not to have officially discriminatory hiring policies, but you had to take affirmative steps to root out discrimination in the hiring process. Even today, affirmative action can refer to measures like broadening the recruiting pipelines. Recruiting at HBCUs might be considered a sort of affirmative action policy.
What the polls consistently show is that minorities support “affirmative action” in the abstract, but don’t support using race as an express consideration with respect to individual decisions. I don’t think its fair to say they’re not “thinking deeply” about the question. I think that instead the questions are referring to somewhat different substantive policies, and you’re seeing the result of people who agree with the general ends of “affirmative action” drawing lines between specific means they support and ones they don’t.
Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....
I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.
I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".
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