10/31/2022

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal leads off with an essay by Richard Samuelson at the Claremont Review of Books. Samuelson argues “that landmark anti-discrimination laws” of the 1960s, which “were written in race-neutral terms…to correct laws and social conventions which discriminated against” black Americans, are now being enforced through the prism of wokeness. The unpopularity of court-created concepts such as disparate impact, protected classes, and affirmative action, he argues, “suggests that most Americans would prefer to move beyond modes of enforcement that grew out of the ’60s,” a time of when legislators were trying to crush the glaring issue of state-enforced segregation. But he says that the problem today is that “our woke elites view the mere suggestion of such a preference” among voters who are facing a very different set of circumstances in modern America “as heresy.” Borrowing from James Madison, he posits that extending the sphere – in this case the number of identity groups on government documents – “into a proliferation of smaller and more diverse, not to mention more accurate, categories” could help our situation. “If we continue to view all discrimination through the woke, intersectional binary lens, treating all conflicts between the ‘privileged’ and the ‘oppressed’ as moral equivalents of Jim Crow,” Samuelson cautions, “we are on the road to postmodern religious wars—wars that will make the fights of the Trump presidency seem trivial by comparison.”

At the Washington Examiner, Salena Zito covers the rise of a useful tool that has helped voters in elections for over two decades: RealClearPolitics’s polling averages. “Founded in Chicago 20 years ago by John McIntyre, a former stock market trader, and Tom Bevan, an advertising executive,” Zito writes, “the two former college classmates created something that at the time that was new and innovative: a polling average.” She notes that by “averaging the publicly available polls,” RCP allows voters, “political scientists such as Madonna, and even the campaigns themselves to see where the races” are. RCP’s latest venture is the creation of a new tool that ranks the reliability of the polls themselves, an important project in a time of decreasing levels of public trust. As McIntyre notes, “Accountability is an important thing. Whether it’s business, sports, life, government, accountability's important, and that is our goal with this project.”