Equality of opportunism.

AFTER more than four months, the Clinton Administration's review of affirmative-action programs concluded with a ringing defense of a corrupt status quo. To be sure, President Clinton's speech enunciated some limits to the scope of affirmative action: it cannot create a quota, involve preferences for the unqualified, lead to reverse discrimination, or continue forever. But these criteria are elastic. Consider the response of Christopher Edley, the Harvard Law professor who directed the review, to the question of what "reverse discrimination" means to the President: "When we draw distinctions based on immutable characteristics, it has to be carefully justified . . . and it ought to be done with reluctance, caution, and attention to the details of minimizing the fallout." Reluctant discrimination, it turns out, is not discrimination at all. It should come as no surprise that Deval Patrick, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, could not identify one of the Federal Government's scores of affirmative-action programs that Mr. Clinton's standards would render suspect.

Mr. Clinton's speech received favorable press reviews ("a sermon the nation needed to hear," declared the New York Times); even a critic called it "moving and eloquent." Mr. Clinton's sincerity in supporting affirmative action should probably not be doubted. It is true that his political base would have revolted at anything less than unconditional support, but it seems likely that he shares the belief in it. Still, his speech was painfully disingenuous. He dismissed opposition to racial and sexual preferences by asserting that "the affirmative-action explanation for the fix we're in is just wrong -- it's just wrong. Affirmative action did not cause the great economic problems of the American middle class." True enough; but what major critic of affirmative action has ever said it did? Mr. Clinton said that discrimination had to have a remedy beyond simply being made illegal, because "that way still relegated blacks with college degrees as railroad porters." In fact, "that way" was tried for less than one decade, during which black America made more rapid economic progress than it has in the era of preferences.

The argument against affirmative action remains unrefuted by Clinton or anyone else. It is unjust for government to distinguish among citizens on the basis of immutable characteristics that have no relevance to their performance in school or on the job. Rather than canceling out the injustices of past and present discrimination, such preferences add to them. Moreover, they generate suspicions about the real accomplishments of minorities and women. And that is just one of the ways affirmative action needlessly poisons America's racial climate. It also creates more victims of discrimination and encourages race-consciousness. When pursued through lawsuits, it puts race relations in an adversarial context that cannot fail to magnify grievances and harden positions. The threat of legal action against employers who fire or fail to promote minority employees discourages small businesses from hiring them in the first place. In addition, the regulations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission directly undermine merit -- for example, by preventing employers from looking at job applicants' high-school transcripts because doing so would have a statistically "disparate impact" on minorities. It is hard to think of a set of policies more detrimental to the public welfare than affirmative action. If by defending it President Clinton has shown "a strong core of principle," as the Times remarked, he has inadvertently revealed that core to be rotten.

SINCE Democrats are ideologically and institutionally incapable of ending the governmental distribution of favors on the basis of race and sex, Republicans will have to do so. It is therefore disheartening to see signs of squeamishness in their ranks. Even Jack Kemp gives aid and comfort to affirmative action, warning Republicans not to run "a campaign that separates people by race and by gender" and complaining that opponents of affirmative action have yet to announce a policy "to replace it." He adds, "I'm going to get my head whacked" over this position.

If that's what it takes to knock some sense into Jack, NR is willing to oblige. In the first place, it is affirmative action that separates Americans by race and by sex; Republicans cannot fairly be blamed for noticing this. Since opposition to preferences is one of the party's most powerful issues, and since preferences can only be uprooted by exposing their outrageous details, the GOP should do everything it can to increase the visibility of the issue. Pete Wilson and Phil Gramm have set an example for other politicians, the former by pushing the University of California's Board of Regents to end racial preferences in hiring and admissions, and the latter by fighting almost alone in the Senate to defund federal set-asides.

Second, the alternative to affirmative action is a government that treats its citizens equally. No replacement for a destructive policy is wanted. Nobody asks a surgeon to replace a metastasizing tumor before excising it. For that reason, the current push among Republicans to link color-blindness to conservative urban policy initiatives is deeply misguided. Empowerment measures like tuition tax credits and the deregulation of labor and housing markets are worth championing for their own sake. But they present different issues from those raised by affirmative action. Packaging them together suggests that ending affirmative action is something that needs compensation. It doesn't; it is damaging to everyone's real interests.

Republicans must make it clear that the problem extends beyond formal quotas to any type of government-encouraged preference. Abolishing mandatory preferences in federal contracting and employment, as in legislation to be sponsored by Senator Bob Dole and Representative Charles Canady, is a step in the right direction. But the private sector must also be relieved of the burden of legal preferences. The EEOC must be forbidden to "remedy" instances of discrimination by forcing companies to employ or pay damages to minority members or women who were not themselves mistreated. More important, Congress should eliminate the "disparate impact" standard, under which a company whose work force differs in racial composition from the surrounding community is presumed guilty of discrimination. Conservatives may argue among themselves over whether purely voluntary, private affirmative action should be banned (as adherence to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would require), but market forces would probably minimize such discrimination once the steps outlined above were taken. That these steps had to be left out of Dole - Canady to avoid losing the support of Republican congressmen is testimony to the confusion and weakness prevalent in the party on matters involving race.

If Republicans ignore the racial and sexual preferences that affect most people, they will forfeit grassroots backing for their fight. Most people do not work for federal contractors and, while they may dislike preferences in principle, principle alone will not inspire them to act. Pete Wilson won over the Board of Regents and public opinion because he chose an issue about which parents care deeply: a good college education for their children. Moreover, the party gains nothing from this spurious moderation: the civil-rights establishment will attack any retreat from preferences, no matter how limited, as a return to Jim Crow.

The mistake lies in thinking that affirmative action can somehow be made more acceptable. It cannot. It is a grave social injustice imposed by the U.S. Government. It cannot be reformed, modified, or improved. It can only be uprooted and abolished altogether. Anything less than that is a betrayal of the American idea.

To be sure, no bill that seriously tackles preferences has a chance of becoming law while a Democrat sits in the Oval Office and Republicans lack a veto-proof majority. But conservatives can win the argument even as they lose the votes. We urge conservative congressmen to support Dole - Canady while offering amendments to improve it. The resulting congressional votes, and possible Clinton veto, would sort out who stands where -- not least among Republicans.