The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy.

• Author: Bernstein, David E.

The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privileges Destroy Democracy is a provocative but frustrating book. The heart of the book is a well-researched history of how civil rights litigation and legislation ultimately led to today's ubiquitous racial quotas and preferences. No boring academic tome, The New Color Line is well-written and concise. It is likely to be the leading conservative study of affirmative action for some time.

But even though the book is often insightful, it suffers from many of the flaws typical of conservative critiques of affirmative action. First, the authors fail to acknowledge at appropriate points America's history of oppression of racial minorities, particularly blacks. Second, the authors never discuss what would replace affirmative action. Third, the authors exhibit some confusion as to why they oppose affirmative action. Is it, as the title of the book implies, because affirmative action "destroys democracy"? Or is it, as the authors sometimes suggest, because affirmative action creates special privileges that destroy the liberal order? Or perhaps, as the authors argue in one chapter, civil rights laws that apply to private parties violate individual liberty, whether or not they are accompanied by racial preferences.

Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton initially focus on the argument that affirmative action subverts democracy. According to the authors, the assault on democracy began with the 1944 publication of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal's treatise on the state of black America, An American Dilemma. Myrdal's book, a true masterpiece because of the prodigious research effort that produced it, put the neglected issue of the outrages suffered by black America in the forefront of the liberal agenda. But the book concluded on a pessimistic note: As a practical matter, segregation was too popular to be ended democratically.

Roberts and Stratton vigorously dispute this point, and contend that segregation was on its way out through democratic processes by the late 1940s. That may be true, but the authors fail to recognize that from Myrdal's 1944 perspective, America's recent history with regard to racial and ethnic minorities gave him no cause to be sanguine.

In addition to the day-to-day apartheid faced by blacks in the South, Japanese Americans were imprisoned in military internment camps; American Indians were, for lack of a better term, still being oppressed on their reservations; Chinese Americans were forbidden to marry whites in California, Oregon, Idaho, and other states; and the United States government, refusing to fill even the pitiful Eastern European quotas allowed under the discriminatory 1924 Immigration Act, was keeping its doors firmly closed to Jewish refugees from the Nazi genocide.

Roberts and Stratton do, however, present a persuasive case that An American Dilemma influenced the Supreme Court's decision to ban public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The authors argue that Brown was a serious mistake for two major reasons: It retarded the democratic process, which would ultimately have resolved the segregation issue; and it was in clear conflict with the intentions of the framers of the 14th Amendment, who never would have dreamed that the Equal Protection Clause banned school segregation. Ultimately, according to the authors, Brown discredited both democracy and strict adherence to the Constitution among judges and legal scholars.

But the emphasis on Brown's antidemocratic tendencies begs...