The Muddled Mindset of Progressivism
It’s time we had a courageous conversation about the left’s incoherent stance on big government and race.
This muddled mindset was on full display last week as two progressive Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, attacked the majority’s decision rejecting affirmative action in higher education by crediting such race-based policies for progress while also claiming that nothing much has changed in our supposedly racist country.
“Today,” Sotomayor declares in the second paragraph of her dissent, “this court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” Despite that grand advancement, she asserts just one sentence later that the majority was cementing “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Momentous progress in an endemically segregated nation?
Both Sotomayor and Jackson try to show how race continues to matter by drawing on the pessimistic historical determinism of critical race theory to argue that African Americans are still shackled by the original sin of slavery.
