Why the architecture of affirmative action was always destined to collapse

As the Supreme Court considers the arguments it heard on Students for Fair Admissions, here are three observations — two obvious, the other perhaps less so.

First, data from Harvard seem to confirm the suspicion that elite schools were effectively capping the number of Asian matriculants. That is racist and un-American, and it should stop.

Second, this practice has apparently given a hostile court the excuse it wanted to end affirmative action as we know it. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2007; he is now the leftward flank of the court’s conservative majority.

Third, no matter what you think of this court, we were probably going to eventually end up here. America’s decades-old racial settlement had many cracks, but it was a workable solution to real problems. However, it has gone on for far longer than could have been anticipated, a fact that came up repeatedly during Monday’s oral arguments, and time has deepened the early cracks into gaping fissures. Immigration and demographic change have made all those problems more difficult still, and under those pressures, the old compromises have simply become untenable.

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