E Pluribus Unum?

By Edwin Warner

AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION by NATHAN GLAZER 248 pages. Basic Books. $10.95.

In this presidential season, busing, Big Government and judicial usurpation are under almost as much fire from liberal candidates as conservative. In fact, some of the most trenchant assaults on liberalism have been mounted by liberal renegades, whose arguments are honed by their disappointment. Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer is among the "neoconservative" writers, clustered about Commentary and The Public Interest, who object to the antidemocratic temper that has infected much of the liberal-left in America.

Glazer argues that in the name of the best of causes liberals in and outside Government have resorted to a coercion without precedent in U.S. history. The author was an eager participant in the liberal consensus that brought about the epochal 1964 Civil Rights Act. In an attempt to correct centuries of injustice toward minorities, the bill banned discrimination in education, employment, voting. But the same law^ Glazer reminds readers, prohibited busing or preferential hiring to achieve racial balance. Not long after it was signed, however, zealous bureaucrats and activist judges began adopting these very devices to attain a mathematically precise racial distribution.

Irrelevant Languages. Glazer provides a useful civics lesson in how difficult it is to stop bureaucratic action once it has been set in motion. When President Nixon was making headlines for his supposed slowdown of desegregation in the South, just the opposite was happening, says Glazer. Bureaucrats directed by Leon Panetta, head of the Office of Civil Rights, ignored Nixon and kept pressure on the South. While the end was desirable, the means were dangerous. Panetta even withheld relief to noncomplying Southern school districts in the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969. Writes Glazer: "There is much to be learned about how one ideological and narrow-minded bureaucrat may stalemate a national administration."

Guidelines flowing from the bureaucracy have increasingly insisted on racial balance at the expense of other considerations. An Ivy League university was informed by HEW that it did not have enough women in its department of graduate religious studies. The university replied that a reading knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was required. HEW quite literally commanded: "Then end those old-fashioned programs that require irrelevant languages. And start up programs which minority groups can study without learning languages."

Glazer is well qualified to speak on the subject of minorities. In Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), he and his co-au thor Daniel ("Pat") Moynihan pointed out that ethnic ties were strengthening in America, not weakening as many people thought (or hoped) at the time.

Glazer argues that Government-imposed distinctions among minorities make no historical, moral or practical sense. He questions why blacks, Spanish-surnamed Americans, American Indians and Orientals are officially classified as minorities deserving of federal assistance, while Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Greeks -- to name a few-- are not considered to be minorities.

Today membership in an ethnic group is growing more important than American identity. Unless present fed eral policies are modified, Glazer fore casts a continuing rise in ethnic consciousness and combativeness. In short, Glazer concludes that liberal policy makers, as they seek to knit an inte grated society together, are unraveling it as they go.

Edwin Warner

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