From Bad to Worse: Affirmative action and prescription drugs, and what they have to do with each other.

In the last week of June, conservatism suffered two of its worst defeats in a generation -- the Supreme Court's endorsement of state-sponsored racial preferences and congressional passage of a huge new prescription-drug entitlement. Worse yet, President Bush praised the Supreme Court decision -- and twisted arms in Congress to pass the drug bill. Both of these defeats illustrate modern democracy's inexorable drive to provide large benefits to the few at the expense of the public good. Politicians tend to favor government programs that will reward identifiable interest groups to the disadvantage of the general citizenry, because the narrow groups are almost by definition better organized to influence elected officials. The racial- preferences issue mobilizes particular groups that focus on identity politics; similarly, the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) makes prescription drugs the main determinant of its political support.

In contrast, the costs of the programs in question are too diffuse to affect political outcomes. While large in the aggregate, the prescription-drug bill imposes costs individually too small to drive taxpayers to opposition; likewise, citizens face only a relatively small statistical chance of being harmed by racial-preference programs, so -- while they are happy to vote against preferences in referenda -- they will not invest resources in lobbying their legislatures to kill preferences.

Racial preferences and the prescription-drug program also resemble each other in that they distribute benefits to people on the basis of immutable characteristics: race and age. At the time of the framing of our Constitution, religion was a close-to-immutable characteristic, in that few people would willingly change it and risk damnation; with the Establishment Clause, the Bill of Rights wisely prohibited the federal government from handing out benefits on the basis of religious identity. Today, race and age offer easy rationales for excluding others from differential government benefits, just as religion did in the era of the Founding. Of course, supporters of racial preferences and prescription-drug benefits justify their favored exclusive benefits with much high-minded rhetoric about justice and social cohesion -- but then, so did 19th-century British politicians trying to justify special benefits to those connected with the Anglican Church.

These special-interest programs will have broad -- and truly unfortunate -- consequences. As racial preferences grow more prevalent, so will divisive identity politics. As prescription-drug costs grow, the government will be more and more likely to engage in price controls, which will discourage innovation and harm the nation's health. But by the time these social bills come due, our current legislators will have moved on to lucrative retirement.

Special-interest programs do face the danger that a rhetorically gifted or charismatic politician might be tempted to wake the public to their costs. Therefore both these programs travel under a heavy armor of evasions and outright lies. "Diversity," of course, is a term that skirts the issue of both preference and race: It suggests that universities are pursuing a program to expose students to different ideas of all kinds, when in reality most university professors want to perpetuate a left-liberal orthodoxy that preferences help sustain. Witness the testimony in the Michigan case that some professors want to exclude Cubans from preferences generally available to Latinos -- on the grounds that Cuban Americans are predominantly Republican.

The mechanics of preferences are also shrouded in secrecy. The Supreme Court rulings last week themselves promote covert discrimination. The Court invalidated Michigan's undergraduate program -- which awarded specific point totals for membership in particular ethnic groups -- but upheld the law- school program, in which admissions officers evaluate each file "holistically" before giving a very similar boost to the racially preferred. Michigan's undergraduate program can get results much like those it got before, simply by hiring more admissions officers. That is a small price to pay for the political benefit of keeping discrimination behind closed doors.

The campaign for the prescription-drug benefit is also rife with deceit. It claims to be structured as an insurance program rather than as an entitlement program. The elderly purchase insurance and receive benefits in return -- and what is obscured is that they are also receiving a large transfer from the government. The disguise is easy to see through: After all, any careful reader of the newspaper understands that the drug benefit, like Social Security, is an entitlement rather than simple insurance. But given that most people pay almost no attention to the issue, a little deception goes a long way. Just as a butterfly needs only the slightest protective coloration to improve its chances of survival, so a political program needs only a small amount of camouflage to ward off most attacks.

Finally, these programs are also alike in that they fail even the test of principled liberalism. John Rawls, the primary theorist of modern liberalism, wrote that programs were just if they were designed to help the worst-off. But neither of these programs is targeted for the worst-off, and they will frequently do damage to the needy. The prescription-drug benefit is not means-tested, but goes to all the elderly -- the wealthiest age cohort in the nation. The extra spending will harm most the youthful poor, who will subsidize richer citizens to an even greater extent than Social Security already requires. Diversity preferences, similarly, are not directed at individuals who have actually suffered discrimination; by design they can go to the daughter of the African-American doctor in Scarsdale, wealthy Latino immigrants, and even the nephews of the president at the expense of the truly underprivileged. The bully pulpit of the presidency is the best potential counterweight to this inevitable tendency of factions to try to maximize benefits for themselves at the expense of the common good. A president can mobilize citizens in behalf of principle, and he has an incentive to do so: He has his historical reputation to protect. Ronald Reagan, to cite a recent example, is already climbing the ranks of presidential ratings based in no small measure on his philosophical consistency.

For this reason, it is especially disappointing that President Bush has aided rather than obstructed these special-interest programs. By all accounts, the White House watered down a strong Justice Department brief against preferences that would have given far more political support for a Supreme Court decision banning discrimination; after the Court's ruling, the president seemed to praise a decision endorsing a program he had previously condemned as containing quotas. On the drug benefit, the president appears to want the bill enacted even if it lacks means testing -- and even if its weak privatization reforms will be outweighed by the encouragement it provides companies to drop private benefits for retirees altogether.

A Republican president needs to be a more articulate and frank exponent of conservative principles than President Bush has been on these issues. When Bill Clinton was president, the Right was far freer to attack such programs, and fight for better ones, than it is when a Republican president endorses them. Recall that Republicans under Clinton succeeded in passing welfare reform, while the key domestic achievement of the first Bush administration was the costly Americans with Disabilities Act.

The current administration's policies may pay political dividends in the short run. For instance, support for the prescription-drug bill will undoubtedly help in the key battleground states of Florida and Pennsylvania; as the economy sputters through no fault of his own, the president has taken out reelection insurance. Even more optimistically, perhaps his plan is to convert a huge reelection victory, with the prospect of additional Republican senators, into a push for fundamental entitlement reform. But special-interest tendencies are so powerful that the principles constraining them must be laid out again and again to have any hope of being effective. Unfortunately, the actions the president has taken have obscured the principles of colorblindness and entitlement reform that are essential to arresting the use of race and age as wedges to divide the polity. And the victories by minority- and age-based interest groups today only embolden them to redouble their future efforts.

The president and his administration still have time to enunciate principles that will limit such special-interest exactions. He can make it clear that colorblindness must be the general rule for government programs outside of higher education now, and even within higher education in the relatively near future. He can lay out principles for future entitlement reform that will eventually apply to prescription drugs. George W. Bush still has the opportunity to go down in history as a politician who tamed rather than rode the special-interest state.