Let's call him Donald.
The last time I saw him he was a high-powered lawyer in LA with a house in the Hollywood hills next to that English guy who used to play on Star Trek: Enterprise. I assume Don’s still there; I don’t know about the English guy.
I've known Don since we started out at a community college here in California. He was one of the conservatives among the political enthusiasts that largely made up my circle of friends.
Don was the quintessential Young Republican. Conservative in thought, dress, and hairstyle, he was an unapologetic advocate of all things GOP. Well, maybe not all things. Most of the conservatives I knew at that time considered themselves intellectual conservatives, and they bristled at the influence of the religious right in their movement. Don didn’t really care about abortion, gay rights, or school prayer. What he did care about was government interference in the free market and misguided government attempts at social engineering.
His personal history reinforced the conservative values he had apparently picked up at a very young age. He fondly reminisced about how he and his older brother had dressed for Halloween in 1980. Wearing cardboard sandwich boards that spelled out "12 %," they would respond to the inevitable question with, "We're dressed as double-digit inflation. Now that's scary!"
The two brothers ran away from home in their teens to escape a mother they described as a welfare moocher with mental issues. The two brothers were fiercely loyal to each other. They had fled halfway across the country to escape their mother's corrupting influence, and their only regret was having left their youngest brother alone with her. A few years later they would try to rescue him only to find that, in their absence, he had become as fiercely loyal to their mother as the two older brothers were to each other.
The Republican philosophy of self-reliance and its criticism of the welfare state and all government efforts to transform society was the music Don and his brother grew up with. It had been the lullaby they heard as children, comforting them in place of a mother from whom they felt hopelessly alienated. It was the anthem that celebrated their adventure in independence as young men. It provided the epic soundtrack to their vision of a glorious future. It was the beloved music of their hopes and dreams.
The two brothers had always known they wanted to be lawyers, and they never let anything deflect them from that dream. They worked hard and stayed focused.
After we all left for different universities, Don and I stayed in touch and visited each other occasionally. As he approached graduation from UCLA, he began to prepare for the LSAT and to consider law school choices. I remember how excited he was when Michigan Law accepted him. It was the most prestigious of the schools to which he applied.
And so he went back to the Midwest, far from California. We still talked on the phone occasionally. He was in his second year when he gave me a call and we had an unexpected conversation.
We were catching up and he was talking about his experiences at law school. He said it was hard and there was a lot of pressure to arrange summer internships and things like that. I could tell he felt he was in a crucible - that he was being tested and his actions would have an impact on the rest of his life. Then, out of the blue, he said, "By the way, I've changed my mind about affirmative action."
"What do you mean," I asked.
"They can take away affirmative action for minorities when they take away affirmative action for rich white people."
This was not the Don I had known all those years.
His attitude had changed because he was appalled at how many people he met who were only at Michigan Law because of who their father was, or how much their family had donated to the school, or because they had grown up in a privileged environment that had been carefully managed to slide them effortlessly into a waiting slot. And it didn’t end there. Coveted internships and even employment opportunities after law school were already reserved and waiting for some of these students.
Don had worked hard to get to the point he was at. He had sacrificed, struggled, and taken risks. He knew what it was like to try to rise above your circumstances and fight the odds to achieve things nobody in your family had before. He had thought that everybody at a prestigious school like Michigan Law would have had to prove themselves in a similar way. But he met too many spoiled kids who were intellectually underdeveloped and had no appreciation for the honor they had been bequeathed by being admitted into a law school to which Don had only applied on the barest hope he would be deemed adequate.
He went on about it for some time, expressing disgust and disappointment. In the end he summed it up by reiterating his original assertion: "They can get rid of affirmative action for minorities when they get rid of it for rich kids." All I could say was, "Wow."
I flew out to visit him in Ann Arbor later that year. After he had graduated and started his career, I visited him once more in his amazing house in the Hollywood hills. That was the last time I saw him.
Then a few years ago somebody talked me into getting a Facebook account and, like a lot of people, I found myself reconnecting with friends to whom I hadn't spoken in a long time. Don was one of them. After so many years watching the sad deterioration of the conservative movement, I was rather eager to open a discussion with some of the conservative intellectuals from my college days, Don and others. Surely they were as appalled as I was by the direction the GOP and the conservative movement had taken in recent years. Well, maybe not as appalled as me, but they would certainly have to admit, if only grudgingly, that the conservative movement had gone off the rails.
But, no.
Sure, they would say things like, "I hate to find myself defending Sarah Palin, but..." and other things that suggested they were a little embarrassed by some of the voices of the Right. But mostly I found that their minds had been corroded by FOX News as much as the minds of the old men in my family who keep sending me chain emails about Obama's anti-American sympathies and his burning desire to take everybody's guns.
No conservative intellect seems immune to the brain acid that is FOX News, but that's a subject for another time.
Don eventually "de-friended" me. His brother did not, however, and so I can still check up on them occasionally. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I was too combative when responding to his political posts. It was never a problem when we all used to argue over beer at King's Tavern on State Street back in the day. Maybe it just doesn't work without the beer. More likely, it doesn't work over the internet. Arguing with people you love is a delicate process, even when done in a jocular spirit. You need to be able to see them, to hear the subtle signals in their voices and read their faces.
I don't know what Don thinks of the Supreme Court decision in the Schuette case. Something tells me his current views are more in line with current conservative views, and his experiences at Michigan Law have faded from his thinking. I guess I'll never know. But for a while, at least, even the quintessential Young Republican saw the truth about how our society allocates certain rewards, and he understood the logic of affirmative action.