21 The President as Social Engineer Michael Levin

In America’s tripartite system of government, only Congress is authorized to make social policy. “The will of the people” is to be expressed in laws passed by the people’s representatives, thus ensuring that rules are imposed only when a majority, at least, wants them. The application of the law to particular cases will sometimes be unclear; then, the task of interpreting it falls to the judiciary. For its part, the executive branch, headed by the president, exists to enforce the law and ensure that the people’s will is realized. There are, of course, limits, too often ignored, to what even democratically elected legislators may do, and a federal system such as ours is supposed to keep most rulemaking local. The point is, such rules as there are, are fixed by legislation.

As American society has become more regulation-ridden, however, the executive has acquired increasing power, so much so that the lines between implementing, influencing, and initiating policy have blurred. By manipulation of the many levers that now lie readily accessible to his hand, a president, with relative ease, can affect aspects of society that should not be under his—or indeed anyone’s—control. This state of affairs is especially visible in the area of social engineering, particularly of racial and gender equality.

It is useful to begin by defining “social engineering.” For that, it is necessary to distinguish social relations from political relations. Political relations are those involving power, legitimate authority, and subordination. They are not expected to engage the emotions or, except in the case of the individuals exercising power, to afford personal gratification. The relations of policeman to citizen, politician to voter, and, in a metaphorical sense, boss to employee, are political. (That is why we speak of office politics.) Social relations, by contrast, do not involve power, are consensual, are often based upon emotions, and are expected to be a source of satisfaction. Friendship is the standard example. The informal rules governing social relations rest not on law but in great part on mutual expectations—expectations that are held because everyone knows everyone else expects them to be held. Men once doffed their hats to women because everyone expected them to, men knew that everyone expected them to, and everyone knew that men knew this. Social engineering, then, may be defined as the attempt to shape social relations by political means, generally in the service of what is thought to be a higher good. Sex education in public schools, supposedly to discourage extramarital pregnancy, is one example. Another is the war on “sex stereotypes” that requires the presence of women in occupations previously thought unsuitable. Yet another, which is discussed later, is the attempt to normalize homosexuality by upgrading its place in the military. A final example is school integration ordered by the courts in the hope of making children of different races see how similar they are. As the latter examples illustrate, a common government strategy is to constrain behavior so as to alter expectations and thereby change the social rules.

Just as bridge-building requires knowledge of mechanics, all forms of engineering rest on theoretical foundations. Since behavioral science—sociology and psychology—is a creature of the twentieth century, social engineering was virtually unknown before then.[1] Presidential policies of previous eras in particular, whatever their merits, were politically driven. In buying the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson was seeking to enlarge the country, not to work the effects on the American psyche that the westward expansion allegedly had. Even such a Rooseveltian initiative as Social Security seems to have been intended economically, to keep people from destitution in old age, rather than to change how they get along with each other.

The first clear-cut social engineering project undertaken by an American president was Harry Truman’s integration of the armed forces after World War II. This action, of course, had its antecedents. The civil rights movement was already well under way. During World War II, Roosevelt’s Executive Order (EO) 8801 had prohibited discrimination by government contractors. That order, however, does not appear to have been intended as an attack on basic racial attitudes, and the War Department seldom disciplined the many contractors who ignored it. Truman’s goal was more ambitious. In a June 1947 speech to the NAACP on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he had already committed to using federal power against not only lynching and the poll tax but the whole “racial caste system.” In doing so, Truman crossed an important line. Lynching, a form of violence against persons, is a proper concern of government, as is the franchise—although, arguably, neither is a federal matter. However, “caste systems,” insofar as they are extra-statutory arrangements not based on force, are quite a different matter. They reflect voluntary associations and expectations built thereon. They would appear to fall outside the purview of government and certainly of the presidency.

Truman’s Executive Order 8991, issued in 1948, integrated the military. (At the same time, he integrated the federal Civil Service and created the Civil Rights Commission.) Although more than a half-century later it is difficult to know precisely why he did so, the question is an important one. As commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, the president bears the ultimate responsibility for their morale and efficiency, but improving morale and combat readiness clearly was not Truman’s motive. The military was not happy with Truman’s edict, with some officers complaining that the military is not a vehicle for social change. It may be relevant that in the aftermath of the war, the Carnegie Foundation was preparing a study, ultimately published as The American Soldier, in which sociologist authors urged the integration of the army in the interests of justice and smoother race relations.[2] Although there apparently were no references to this study in any of Truman’s speeches or communications to Congress concerning civil rights, it is quite possible that some of the president’s advisers were influenced by it.

In any case, Truman’s own characterization of his actions qualify them as “social engineering.” While he often represented his integration policy as a limited moral and constitutional duty, he equally often expressed a wish for the end of a social system in which “Negroes have been preyed upon by all types of exploiters, from the installment salesman of clothing, pianos and furniture to the vendors of vice.”[3],[4] Here he is describing voluntary economic interactions and tastes, matters beyond equality before the law. One can understand Truman’s dismay at black addiction to “vice,” but taking steps to end it exceeded his constitutional obligations.

Fifteen years after EO 8991 the Department of Defense took two further noteworthy steps: It forbade soldiers to use segregated bus or rail facilities, and it instructed the discipline boards of military bases to declare all segregated businesses off limits. These measures, unnecessary for integrating the military itself, could only have been intended to advance integration in civil society by means of the Defense Department’s economic clout. During this period—which included the demobilization after World War II, the Korean War, and the cold war military buildup—millions of military personnel were traveling across the country, making it financially suicidal for any carrier to remain segregated. Likewise, the many bars and restaurants near military bases faced failure if soldiers were denied access to them. Incidentally, the new regulations governing local businesses violated the spirit of the “off-limits” concept, originally a protective device designed, for instance, to keep soldiers from being victimized by bars known to make a practice of rolling drunks. Given this purpose, off-limit orders were usually issued on an ad hoc basis. The new measure was intended solely to end practices founded on customer preference.

The effectiveness of these tactics depended on the size of the military. When in the 1930s the U.S. had fewer than 150,000 men under arms, carriers more easily could have absorbed the loss of military contracts. Few bars, restaurants, and shops needed military custom. It was only because the postwar military commanded many more resources that resistance to it was impossible. This illustrates how the power of the president to influence social behavior is a function of the resources at his disposal. The more he controls, the juicier the carrots he can dangle, and the higher the supplicants for his largesse will jump.

An important question is whether federal carrots are genuinely coercive. After all, it will be argued, the government (at least before the Civil Rights Act) was not forcing businesses to integrate; a bar could choose to remain segregated and risk going under, just as it could risk alienating customers by not serving certain brands of beer. But this analogy ignores a difference in the ways in which civilian and military customers pay for services. A civilian who won’t patronize a bar that won’t serve Blatz is holding back resources acquired consensually. The money is originally his, or was earned in an exchange with its previous owner. But the money held back by the Department of Defense was and is acquired coercively, from taxpayers. The difference is all the more significant as the government’s agents circa 1955, largely draftees, were forced into government service. The state must raise its revenues coercively, whether by taxing, collecting tariffs, or some other means, and insofar as its activities are legitimate, so is the coercion needed to finance them. But it is misleading to describe compliance with government regulations to get government business as fully voluntary.

The second exercise of presidential power is affirmative action, and it contains no lingering ambiguity. It cannot be interpreted as enforcing any law or neglected provision of the Constitution. It was meant, rather, to bring about, by the use of public revenue as bait, a racial and eventually sexual equality in wealth and status that had never existed previously—on the apparent assumption that forcing this equality would somehow make it voluntary and permanent.

The flood of litigation, referenda, and contention that affirmative action has produced tends to obscure its virtual lack of a statutory basis. To be sure, numerous federal and state laws reserve some proportion of specific public works contracting for firms owned by blacks or females, set hiring quotas for public employment, or provide start-up aid for “minority” businesses, but no legislature would dare tell private firms across the board to hire fixed numbers of blacks. Hubert Humphrey famously promised in 1964 to eat his hat if the pending Civil Rights Act sanctioned quotas. Likewise, while court-ordered quotas in specific cases are common enough, no judge has ever ordered societywide preferences for nonwhites and women. The entire extant structure rests principally on executive orders issued during the 1960s and 1970s.

The phrase “affirmative action,” first used during the Kennedy administration, came to wide public attention under Lyndon Johnson. Speaking in June 1965 at Howard University, Johnson called for racial equality “not just as a right and a theory but . . . as a fact and a result.”[5] He memorably compared blacks to a recently shackled runner: “You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, and bring him up to the starting line, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” (Those words were actually written, it is said, by Daniel Moynihan.)[6]

Johnson followed up on September 24 of that year with Executive Order 11246, requiring all federal contractors and subcontractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and [insure] that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.”[7] Enforcement fell to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs of the Labor Department. In 1967, Johnson issued EO 11375, extending the forbidden grounds to sex:. In one stroke of the pen, the coverage of affirmative action expanded from 12 percent of the population to 50 percent. Section 202(3) of Subpart A of EO 11246 read: “The contractor will, in all solicitations or advertisements for employees placed by or on behalf of the contractor, state that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin,” with “sex” added in EO 11375. This provision seems clearly to violate First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. The requirements on federal contractors were soon made more stringent. In 1971, under the so-called Philadelphia Plan, Richard Nixon’s Labor Department’s Order Number 4 required federal contractors with more than fifty employees and $50,000 in federal contracts to set “goals and timetables” for the proper “utilization” of blacks, defined to obtain when “the rates of minority applicants recruited . . . approximate or equal the rate of minorities in the population of each location.”[8] Shortly thereafter, Revised Order Number 4 extended “goals and timetables” to women.

Little noticed at the time—and now hardly ever mentioned in histories of the period—the step from EO 11246 to EO 11375 was perhaps Johnson’s most momentous. For the first time in human history, throughout which men had supported the women who, in turn, had raised the next generation, the state was actively seeking to replace men by women in the breadwinner role. Where quotas for blacks have been an intense irritant to the sense of justice, quotas for women became part of a reversal of sex roles whose adverse consequences—including a below-replacement birthrate among the white population—are just beginning to be felt. The phrase “social engineering” is almost too modest for this seismic change.

The next extension of the quota reach occurred in 1977, when regulation 45 CFR 80 (1977) of the then-Department of Health, Education, and Welfare prohibited racial or sexual discrimination by any recipient of federal financial assistance. It not only required that any recipient “must take affirmative action to overcome the effects of prior discrimination,” but added that

even in the absence of such prior discrimination, a recipient in administering a program may take affirmative action to overcome the effects of conditions which resulted in limiting participation by persons of a particular race, color, or national origin.[9]

Affirmative action now applied to higher education, and not merely to universities funded directly for, say, government-sponsored research, but those merely enrolling recipients of federal student loans. In 1987, the coverage of the OFCCP regulations was estimated to lie between 16 million and 25 million workers—a figure considerably greater by now; the DHEW regulations added the approximately 12 million students enrolled in American colleges, along with the 400,000 faculty who teach them and supporting staff.[10]

The aftermath of the regulations affecting the university shows how executive initiatives reverberate throughout society. Most conspicuously, getting federal grants and enrolling students receiving federal aid now depended on a university’s hiring more blacks and women. Blacks tend to go into Black Studies and newly-invented black subgenres of recognized academic subjects; women, likewise head disproportionately for “Women’s Studies” or metastatic feminist growths on normal subjects, like “Gender Politics in Art History.” As a result, universities have been forced to hire incompetents to teach rubbish, giving students the impression that what goes on in Black Studies and Women’s Studies has something to do with scholarship. Thus is the well of knowledge polluted.

Johnson almost certainly did not have in mind a changed pattern of medical care, but this is now touted as another welcome result of affirmative action. The idea is that black doctors are more inclined than white to practice in slums, so admitting more blacks into medical school enhances the health of blacks generally. Looked at another way, quotas are intended to decrease the number of white doctors, degrading medical care for whites or, equivalently, increasing its cost. There is in fact no evidence that black doctors do prefer black patients, but this is the kind of broad effect affirmative action is intended to have.

Despite appearances, the DHEW’s allowance of quotas in the absence of discrimination did not exceed Lyndon Johnson’s original rationale, at least as expressed in his chained-runner analogy.[11] After all, the other runners in Johnson’s hypothetical race were not the ones who did the shackling, but they were being asked to give an opponent a head start. In fact, much of the criticism of affirmative action has centered on this very point: its cost to the innocent. As restitution normally requires that the tortfeasor alone give up what his wrongful act cost his victim, placing the other runners—that is, typical white males—at a relative disadvantage is unjust. It is unjust to give blacks an advantage over whites who never harmed them.

But Johnson’s analogy failed in a more serious respect. Whether the traditional, narrow notion of compensation is retained or the concept is so stretched that even the innocent must pay for past wrongdoing, Johnson obscured a key distinction. Like that of every civil-rights advocate of the past fifty years, his rhetoric implicitly conflated private discrimination with discriminatory laws, such as those ordering separate seating by race on public or private conveyances. Whether such laws actually harmed blacks and how, in general, governments should rectify their own past misdeeds are questions that may be debated, but at least Jim Crow laws were state actions, whose bad consequences, whatever they were, can be laid at the feet of the individual states. Private discrimination, sanctioned by freedom of association, is another matter. It is not a harm at all, let alone a compensable harm, but in any case private discrimination is not government action; it implicates the state only in that the state allows it, and if that is enough for the state to step in, the state has a right—indeed, a duty—to rectify any misuse of freedom whatever.

In other words, even if affirmative action retains the fig leaf of restitution, the restitution at which Johnson aimed exceeded anything that government at any level is supposed to pursue. EO 11246 was not meant to return to blacks what had been taken from them or to restore them to a position from which they had been wrongly dislodged, but to penalize and thereby extinguish longstanding patterns of consensual behavior. This is clear even from Johnson’s Howard University speech, in which he deplored the fact that fewer than half of black children lived to age eighteen with both parents—a figure that now, thirty-five years after the civil rights revolution Johnson welcomed, is below 20 percent. He blamed that squarely on whites: for “the breakdown of Negro family structure, most of all, white America must accept responsibility,” he said.[12] (Apparently no white public figure challenged this ignorant canard.) Johnson was out to stabilize marriage and decrease illegitimacy, a goal light-years beyond the faithful execution of the laws.[13]

Affirmative action was not Lyndon Johnson’s only effort to remake his society. His symbolic actions were many, including dispatch of Army troops to protect the 1964 Selma, Alabama, civil rights march. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 cannot be held to Johnson’s account, as it was an act of Congress, but it would not have passed if not for his extraordinary efforts. During and just prior to Johnson’s presidency executive orders and legislation had placed a wide array of agencies with civil rights responsibilities under the executive branch: the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Housing, the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Community Relations Service in the Commerce Department, and the President’s Council on Equal Opportunity. Johnson used them all.

Complementing the bad-cop pressure these agencies brought were good-cop incentive programs, like the National Alliance of Businessmen, a jobs-training program set up in January 1968 in response to the black riots of 1967. Nominally a voluntary effort, businessmen who participated in the NAB were promised government reimbursement for “extraordinary” costs, including those for health services, teaching reading and writing, and counseling in basic work and life skills. No wonder the Ford Motor Company could afford to let one of its executives work full time for the NAB. This tidbit is reported in Joseph Califano’s highly sympathetic The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, which also frankly characterizes Johnson’s use of the billion-dollar congressional appropriation under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as a “carrot [and] a sizable stick” to “encourage” compliance with school desegregation.[14]

Of the individuals mentioned so far, Truman’s motives were the clearest. While he personally regarded some separation of the races as appropriate and natural, his belief that he was obligated as president to pursue integration was, based on the evidence, sincere.[15] Nixon’s extension of affirmative action is more opaque. Perhaps he sought to disarm his critics on the Left; perhaps his Labor Secretary George Shultz became convinced that blacks could not prosper on their own. Yet in 1971, the feminist bracketing of women with blacks as victims of oppression was accepted only by intellectuals, who despised Nixon no matter what he did, and Nixon’s “silent majority” constituency hardly wanted to smash patriarchy. It appears that his administration slid down the slippery slope of consistency: Once one group’s baseless claims to special treatment are accepted, so must be the claims of any other.

It was Johnson’s zeal that was most enigmatic. His dealings with black, Mexican, and other ethnic voting blocks in his native Texas were exceptionally corrupt and cynical during his political ascendancy in the 1930s and 1940s.[16] As a congressman in 1947 and a senatorial candidate in 1948, he denounced Truman’s civil rights program as “an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.”[17] He criticized proposed antilynching laws “because the federal government has no more business enacting a law against one form of murder than against another,” and he opposed the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission—a step incomparably more modest than quotas—on grounds that “if a man can tell you whom you must hire, he can tell you whom he [sic] cannot employ.”[18] Yet Johnson waxed euphoric the day before signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, telling an aide, “Get a table so people can say . . . This is the table on which LBJ signed the Voting Rights Bill.” Afterward he urged

every Negro in this country: You must register. You must vote. [T]he vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.[19]

Equally strange was Johnson’s embrace of feminism, which was even more precocious than Nixon’s. His actions remain a puzzle for future psychohistorians.

Where Nixon and Johnson were complex men and Truman was a straightforward one thrown into a world made complex by the A-bomb and the rise of communism, Bill Clinton was simplicity itself, at once devious and transparent.

Clinton’s attempt to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military was a break not only with centuries of military policy but with Judeo-Christian ethics.

There was no mystery here about motives. Clinton had supported homosexuals, and they, in turn, supported him. Among his most prominent backers, for instance, was David Geffen, a wealthy, flamboyantly “out” Hollywood mover. Despite media attempts to portray Clinton as a “centrist” and a “new Democrat,” only 39 percent of the white electorate voted for him in 1992, and 43 percent in 1996. He was the first president whose core constituency was minority groups and deviants: blacks, Hispanics, Jews, feminists, lesbians, and, as the activists among them prefer to call themselves, gay men.

Among Clinton’s 1992 campaign promises was an executive order forbidding the military to ask applicants about their sexual orientation or to expel servicemen discovered to be homosexual. He assured traditionalists that homosexuals would still be held to all other standards of military conduct, but the operative effect of the proposed order would have been to raise homosexuality to the status of heterosexuality by erasing any distinction in the treatment of the two. If one soldier were allowed to brag in the barracks of seducing a young lady, another could with equal impunity brag about same-sex promiscuity.

Upon election, Clinton moved quickly to keep his promise. At a press conference on January 29, 1993, only nine days after his inauguration, he reported that the issue had been under discussion “over the last few days.” In other words, ending the homosexuality exclusion policy topped Clinton’s agenda, a point of great symbolic value to homosexual activists. But what Clinton found in these discussions were career military men so perturbed and congressmen so infuriated by his proposal, that a congressional override of his proposed order seemed inevitable. Eventually, in September 1993, the House and Senate did arrest Clinton’s ambitions. In response to this setback, he apologetically announced a six-month delay for further negotiations, the upshot was his “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy: a homosexual enlistee need not declare his homosexuality and his superiors may initiate no steps to investigate him, but he subjects himself to discharge by declaring his homosexuality or performing certain other acts, such as attempting to marry a person of the same sex.

To gauge more finely what Clinton was up to, we should note that the reasons he gave for his initiative were so obviously flawed as to amount to a wink to homosexual activists that he didn’t mean them. These reasons were stated most fully in his January 29, 1993, press conference, and in a speech on July 16 of that year to the joint chiefs of staff.

The press conference began with a non sequitur of head-spinning abruptness: “The issue is not whether there should be homosexuals in the military. Everyone concedes that there are. The issue is whether men and women . . . should be excluded from military service solely on the basis of their status.” Compare: “The issue is not whether there should be stock fraud. Everyone concedes that it occurs,” or “The issue is not whether there should be racial discrimination. Everyone concedes that it exists.” Or, for that matter, “The issue is not whether we should excise that tumor in your pancreas. All your doctors concede it is there. The issue is whether a biological entity ought to be removed solely on the basis of its status.”

Clinton muddied the rhetorical waters further by lamenting antihomosexual “witch hunts.” This term has become a surprisingly popular device for dismissing any inconvenient inquiry as hysteria—surprising, given that the whole reason the witch hunts of old made no sense was that there weren’t any witches, and the belief that there were was completely irrational. Homosexuals, by Clinton’s own insistence, are very much in evidence.

After this start, Clinton added that the military spent $50 million in the 1980s to separate about 17,000 homosexuals from the service, a sum he also raised in his July speech. Now, it ill-becomes a president presiding over an annual $1.7 trillion budget to bemoan a yearly expenditure of $50 million. Clinton never complained of the billions spent refitting warships so that women could be deployed on them, redesigning aircraft cockpits and ejection seats to accommodate women, and arranging virtually all facilities to provide the “privacy” women would not need in the sex-blind military that egalitarians said they wanted. The real question was one Clinton begged: If an all-heterosexual military is a good idea, isn’t a relatively modest expenditure to keep it so also a good one?

The positive considerations Clinton offered for admitting open homosexuals into the armed services were that everyone otherwise qualified has a right to join the military and that closeted homosexuals have “served with distinction.” The question remains how military service can be a right when throughout history it has been viewed as at best an onerous duty and sacrifice. And the necessarily unsystematic record of homosexuals to date fails to reflect the critical fact that they were closeted, assumed by fellow soldiers and superior officers to be heterosexual. Any effects their orientation, were it known, might have had on morale or unit cohesion, were suppressed. Indeed, since homosexuals are already free to enlist so long as they stay in the closet, the contributions they might make—Clinton’s ace in the hole—provide no serious reason to alter the status quo. They are free to make those contributions anyway.

Since Clinton was offering homosexuals nothing material that they lacked, his real point must have been to offer them something symbolic—namely, validation. In this man’s army, a homosexual would not so much be able to serve, but be able to serve and tell everyone within earshot that he’s gay. The only point there could be to allowing this openness was relief of the stigma that taints homosexuality. Clinton wished to confer on homosexuals the gift of legitimacy, not just in the military but absolutely.

Indeed, stigma-relief was the point of prioritizing the exclusion issue in the first place: It gratuitously rammed into the public’s face a subject, homosexuality, that in the normal course of events most people never think about, but which homosexual activists want everyone to take as seriously as they do. The sheer fact of constant, unavoidable discussion of a subject such as homosexuality tends to inure people to it, dulling their instinctive, visceral aversion. (L’Affair Monica, of course, desensitized the American public about sexual matters once considered unfit for public airing.) One might call this symbolic social engineering.

This was not the only way the Clinton presidency entered the age of symbolism. Clinton conspicuously flouted old precedents and set new ones. Social relations, as was earlier noted, depends on what we think others expect of us, and people have always determined this, in part, by watching salient figures—leaders—whose behavior is considered a reference point to the acceptable. This cuing was once local, for the most part, its effects slowly spreading. But that has changed in the present century. The trendsetting movie star bears witness to the media’s immense acceleration of the process, and no one achieved greater celebrity than President Clinton during his tenure in the White House. This happened almost insensibly. One hundred years ago, boys might have wished to model themselves on George Washington’s probity, but one can hardly imagine Washington, or, say, James Garfield, being admired for their chicness. But newsreels made people aware of Eisenhower’s eponymous jacket, and TV showcased the famous Kennedy style. Now a president’s image is inescapable, everywhere.

Clinton exploited this circumstance eagerly. In the interest of egalitarianism, he and the first lady almost never let themselves be photographed in a group without blacks or other minorities. The sole finding of Clinton’s highly publicized “Commission on Race” was the perfidy of whites. His favorite author was black, or so he said. He ostentatiously displayed his black best friend. His “spiritual adviser,” Jesse Jackson, was black. With great show he appointed women and nonwhites so government would “look like America.” By making second-class citizenship for white males less unthinkable, this drumbeat of gestures both instructed white males to prepare for lower status and helped to bring this new condition about.

A president can now influence the broad structure of society because of his power. Did Clinton not oversee a vast federal work force and armed force and did he not control the disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars, the private sector could have more easily ignored him. His celebrity also would also have shrunk, and, along with it, his capacity to legitimize social deviance.

There is a Bill of Rights to protect certain activities from all government intervention, but this sphere of autonomy has imploded under pressure from federal alphabet agencies issuing regulations where Congress would fear to tread with laws. Most of what these agencies do, from the FDA to the EEOC, should not be done by government at all, by any branch at any level. Indeed, this bureaucracy has grown so large that, as many political scientists have pointed out, it has to some extent captured the presidency itself. Staffed with idealists, that is, ideologies, committed to the mission, these agencies are hard even for the chief executive to control.

Eliminating the regulatory monster would leave a much reduced, much less intrusive presidency. In the penultimate analysis, that job falls to Congress; but in the last analysis, it falls, as it always does in a democracy, to the people.

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[1] Virtually every recommendation in Plato’s utopian Republic is social engineering. Historically Jacobin hopes of creating equality by renaming the months fit the definition; the first serious bid to reengineer society was Soviet efforts to make the New Socialist Man.

[2] Samuel Stauffer, et al., The American Soldier (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1949), vols. 1 and 2.

[3] See for example, David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 587.

[4] From a 1940 speech in Sedalia, Missouri; quoted in William Helm, Harry Truman (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947).

[5] Clint Bolick, in The Affirmative Action Fraud (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996), p. 53, gives 1969 as the year in which the labor Department adopted numerical goals and timetables. However, his reference is an article in the Los Angeles Times of February 22, 1995.

[6] A useful collection of early affirmative action documents is K. Greenawalt, Discrimination and Reverse Discrimination (New York: Knopf, 1983). Greenawalt’s introductory essays are useful, but he tends to declare without argument that one or another aspect of the “problem” of race “is national in scope,” begging the question of the federal role.

[7] Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (Transaction: New Brunswick, N.J., 1987), p. 206.

[8] Clint Bolick, in The Affirmative Action Fraud (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996), p. 53, gives 1969 as the year in which the Labor Department adopted numerical goals and timetables. Bolick’s reference is to an article in the Los Angeles Times of February 22, 1995.

[9] A useful collection of early affirmative action documents is Kent Greenawalt, Discrimination and Reverse Discrimination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). Greenawalt’s introductory essays are useful, but he tends to declare without argument that one or another aspect of the “problem” of race “is national in scope,” begging the question of the federal role.

[10] Michael Levin, Feminism and Freedom (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1987), p. 206.

[11] The Nixon Department of Labor Order No. 4 was officially issued to counteract documented labor-union discrimination.

[12] Quoted in Joseph Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 57.

[13] We see a tension, if not an inconsistency, here. Affirmative action for women knowingly weakens the mutual dependence of the sexes, hence the family; yet affirmative action for black women, and much of the rest of the Great Society programs, were intended somehow to strengthen the black family. As things turned out, the centrifugal forces exerted by these programs proved far stronger than the centripetal.

[14] Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, p. 226, and pp. 70 and 72.

[15] Rick Hampson, “Private Letters Reveal Truman’s Racist Attitudes,” Washington Times, October 25, 1991.

[16] They are recounted in Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power (New York: Vintage, 1983), and Means of Ascent (New York: Vintage, 1990).

[17] Caro, Means, p. 125.

[18] Ibid., pp. 125 and 196.

[19] Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, p. 57.