California voted for Biden over Trump by a 2-1 margin. And yet California voters decisively rejected a ballot initiative that would have restored affirmative action in public employment and college admissions by at least a dozen points.
One might have thought that affirmative action (or "diversity" as it is now wrongly called) is a staple of the Democratic brand in American politics, yet voters can overwhelmingly prefer the Democratic candidate and yet also overwhelmingly reject this policy. What might we learn from this?
Affirmative action is deeply unpopular, even with many Democratic voters, because admissions and employment are zero-sum games, and the outcomes of those "games" are perceived to be life-and-death matters, which to some extent they are: under capitalism, everyone the market doesn't need is disposable, so not getting a job or a spot in a prestigious university can seem a serious matter. And any perception of according an advantage in this life-and-death struggle to a whole group that one is not part of is, perhaps not surprisingly, quite unpopular with those adversely affected.
So why are these anti-affirmative action voters nonetheless supporting the Democrat over the Republican by a wide margin? There are various possible answers, but I'll conclude with a suggestive anecdote from longtime reader S. Wallerstein from Chile. Shopping in an open air market, Mr. Wallerstein was chatting with a Chilean woman about the U.S. election: he expressed his preference for Biden, she expressed that she liked Trump. As the conversation went on, she also revealed that her truly favorite American political figure was Michelle Obama. As Mr. Wallerstein observed: "I realized that for her and for many others, Trump, Biden and Michelle Obama do not represent political positions on the left and right spectrum, but are simply celebrities who appear on TV: some appeal to her and some don't for completely non-political reasons."
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