Opinion | I’m an Alum of Columbia and Paul, Weiss. There’s an Uncomfortable Lesson in Trump’s Tactics.

We should remember that something similar happened before: In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the heroes of the civil rights movement — and they were heroes indeed — had largely achieved their original aim, the elimination of the Jim Crow regime in the South. But they, as heroes often do, looked for new worlds to conquer, and many of them and their successors went on to call for racial preferences in hiring, contracting and academic admissions, under the euphemism of affirmative action, to remedy the effects of past discrimination.

Soon they had a sympathetic federal government on their side. Among other things, executive orders by Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and federal laws like Section 8(a) of the Small Business Act served directly or indirectly to establish minority preferences. Taking race into account in university admissions was for decades common practice, until the Supreme Court banned it in 2023.

Doubtless, at the outset, some leaders of such institutions as Columbia and Paul, Weiss thought racial preferences were wrong, but they really had no choice but to practice them, because their institutions were dependent, for one reason or another, on retaining the favor of the government and avoiding the censure of the impassioned elites who drove federal policy.

Affirmative action policies were supposed to be transitional, to last only until social justice had been achieved; but they lasted for more than half a century, and many of those who had doubts learned to tolerate, even approve of, discrimination against those perceived as overprivileged. Many younger people today cannot remember a world without such discrimination, and perhaps do not think one ever should exist again.

But latter-day heroes — and now I use the term ironically — sought more worlds to conquer still, and affirmative action helped sow the seeds for the monstrosities known as D.E.I. and cancel culture, in which institutions were afflicted not only by diversity bureaucracies that were useless at best, but in many cases by the punishment or banishment of those who did not worship at the newly established church. Even those evils, I grant, were not remotely comparable to the evil of Jim Crow. But they were sufficient unto the day.