What Would Earl Warren Think?

From Investor’s Business Daily:

It’s interesting what Earl Warren might think if he had dozed off Rip Van Winkle-style in the mid-1950s and just woke up to hear the latest legal arguments over racial discrimination in public schools. He might be a tad disoriented.

One the one hand, he might be cheered by hearing Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling he wrote as chief justice, invoked so widely. On the other, he might wonder if people really got it — that Brown was meant to end the deliberate color-coding of schools, not justify it.

He would see his own words, in the famous passage about education being “the very foundation of good citizenship,” quoted by a lawyer in defense of the Louisville, Ky., public school system’s practice of using race to determine if parents get their choice of elementary schools for their children. He would see CNN call Louisville’s program and a similar one in Seattle an “outgrowth” of Brown.

He might not see the link when USA Today, in an editorial, suggested those programs were carrying on Brown’s work, and that the “tenuous advance” kick-started by Brown “would be undermined or even reversed” if the Supreme Court struck them down.

The whole civil-rights movement has indeed wandered far from its philosophical roots. What’s deemed “progressive” now — racial quotas, dressed up as “affirmative action” — was considered deeply unfair five decades ago. Of course, many still consider it unfair, but these people are now labeled conservative.

Actually, I suspect today’s liberals would have no trouble whatsoever if they happened to encounter a disinterred and revived Earl Warren scolding them for abandoning the non-discrimination principle on which he based his Brown opinion. “What do you expect?” they’d say. “He’s just another Republican.”