Fueling the Backlash against Affirmative Action

Fueling the Backlash against Affirmative Action The Quiet Influence of Right-Wing Foundations and Patrons

Daniel N. Lipson, Assistant Professor Department of Political Science SUNY New Paltz [email protected]

Prepared for presentation to the 2011 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, Washington, September 1-4, 2011. Do not cite without permission.

Abstract While informed Americans are becoming aware of the power of right-wing foundations and patrons in areas of economic regulation, few know of their funding of the “colorblind” organizations seeking to dismantle civil rights policy. The failure to uncover the “invisible hands” is no accident — the “free enterprise” right-wing foundations and patrons have deliberately kept a low profile in their efforts to shift the U.S. far to the right. By focusing primarily on two anti-affirmative action ballot measures — California‟s 1996 Proposition 209 and Michigan‟s 2006 Proposal 2 — this paper raises concerns about the capacity of a small, elite, radical faction to quietly bankroll a right-wing backlash while the seemingly moderate public entrepreneurs shield them from the limelight.

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Introduction Ever since the Great Depression, right-wing foundations and patrons have funded disparate causes primarily including a “pro-market” economic agenda but also including a social conservative agenda on matters of race and education. This right-wing funding garnered little media or scholarly attention prior to the growth of the “Tea Party” backlash since Obama became president. Since the rise of the Tea Party, in contrast, the right-wing funding by the two exceptionally wealthy brothers David and Charles Koch and the Koch Industries they inherited has begun to attract extensive media coverage. Attentive Americans have become much more aware of the (Koch brothers‟) funding behind the right-wing Tea Party agenda, in particular in opposition to environmental regulations as well as opposition to the Obama-backed health care reform. Numerous reports have focused on the Koch brothers‟ influence in climate crisis denial, opposition to the Obama-backed health care reform, opposition to financial regulation, opposition to environmental protection, and/or support for privatization of Social Security and Medicare. Yet none of the above reports call attention to the Koch brothers‟ — and other allied right-wing foundations‟ and patrons‟ — bankrolling of racial conservatism, in particular their attacks on affirmative action and school desegregation plans. Not surprisingly, it is little known that for the past generation these very same funders have been bankrolling numerous disparate conservative causes including the backlash against affirmative action and desegregation. When focusing on the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party, attentive Americans are increasingly aware that a small cabal of powerful and exceedingly wealthy right-wing patrons and foundations are bankrolling right-wing causes. Curiously, few journalists, scholars, or attentive citizens realize that these same right-wing funders and patrons are bankrolling the racial

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backlash agenda. In the rare instances when reporters or scholars examined the funding sources for anti-affirmative action ballot measures at all, the news reports asserted that black conservative California millionaire Ward Connerly was spending his own fortunes via his American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) in Sacramento. But the opposite was the case; rather than depleting his own wealth, he was actually profiteering off of separate funders. While the Koch family foundations haven‟t directed their donations toward the American Civil Rights Institute, they have contributed to allied organizations such as the Center for Individual Rights that engage in litigation strategies to challenge liberal racial policies. And the American Civil Rights Institute hasn‟t struggled with fundraising. The funders of the ACRI include highly conservative foundations including the Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Scaife family foundations, to name a few. While it is becoming well known that scores of Fortune 500 companies have bankrolled the defense of affirmative action against ballot initiatives and litigation over the past dozen years, less attention has been paid to the “colorblind” cause‟s funding from right-wing foundations and patrons. Recent works have analyzed the role of major liberal and/or centrist foundations and patrons1 in establishing diversity and backing racial justice policies2 as well as the role of lesser-known conservative organizations in challenging such racial policies.3 This paper continues this emerging line of scholarship by further analyzing the right-wing foundations that have bankrolled anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, beginning with California‟s Proposition 209 in 1996. More recently, many of these same backers have stepped up their contributions and political strategies by unifying their funding of “Tea Party” organizations, events, and political candidates. Whereas the new generation of “colorblind” entrepreneurs has wisely packaged its cause as moderate, compassionate, and even supportive of class- and disadvantaged-based

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reforms, the philanthropists funding this “colorblind” cause represent the highly controversial backlash agendas of the old guard, some even with ties to the far-right John Birch Society. While it is a gross mischaracterization and oversimplification to reduce Ward Connerly and allied “colorblind” entrepreneurs to being pawns of these right-wing foundation patrons, the tenuous affair between the seemingly moderate public entrepreneurs and the unapologetic right-wing private philanthropists they strategically shield from the limelight raises concerns about the capacity of a small, elite, radical faction to quietly bankroll a backlash against social and economic policies. This paper sets out to examine several questions about Connerly‟s “colorblind” ballot measures. First, who is bankrolling these ballot measure campaigns, and why has this question received such little public attention? Second, how have affirmative action defenders sought to portray the moneyed interests behind Connerly‟s ballot measures, and why hasn‟t an exposé of his funding sources constituted a significant part of that strategy prior to 2008? Third, what difference do the funders make? That is, does the evidence suggest that Connerly is a pawn of the hidden interests who are bankrolling this effort? Or has Connerly maintained autonomy over his agenda with few strings attached? Fourth, what drives wealthy right-wing industrialists — and the executives running their foundations — to care so deeply about rolling back the liberal civil rights policy framework? It is not difficult to see the short-term economic benefits that flow from their attack on liberal regulations and on taxation policies, but what drives their commitment to repealing affirmative action and integration? This paper will proceed by first providing a brief review of scholarship on conservative legal and political mobilization. The second section will provide a brief introduction of Ward Connerly‟s backlash against affirmative action via ballot measures in California, Washington

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State, Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona. The third section will document who the largest funders have been for Connerly‟s organizations. The fourth section will address the puzzle of why there has been so little coverage of who‟s bankrolling these initiatives. Section five will examine the allegations that Connerly is a pawn in a right-wing “assault on diversity.” The sixth section will speculate on whether defenders of affirmative action have missed opportunities to accurately disclose information about Connerly‟s funding sources.

The rise of conservative mobilization Scholarship on legal mobilization has grown rapidly over the past generation, since Zemans4 challenged interest group and social movement scholars to systematically analyze the role of law in political systems. The previous and ensuing writings5 had until recently predominantly focused on liberal legal activism. For the purposes of this paper, I will briefly highlight and synthesize the literature on conservative legal and political mobilization in five domains: the socio-legal scholarship on the rise of conservative cause lawyering combined with judicial politics scholarship on the rise of conservative judicial activism, the American political development scholarship on the rise of conservative organizations in an era of activist government, critical race theory scholarship on conservative legal mobilization as a form of racial backlash, and progressive writing on conservative legal mobilization as a shady façade for profiteering and right-wing extremism. Whereas the socio-legal and judicial literature has tended to focus on pluralism within the “big tent” of conservatism as well as the substantial impact this conservative activism has had, these scholars have generally remained agnostic about the dangers or promises of conservative legal activism. In contrast, the critical race theory and progressive scholars have explicitly framed the rise of conservative legal activism as a dangerous

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anti-egalitarian backlash rooted in the possessive investment in whiteness.6 Some American political development scholars have credited the conservative cause for having the foresight to develop an effective long-term strategy that learned politically from the successes of the liberal activist state and largely chose to counter big government liberalism with big government conservatism, to the dismay of the economic libertarians and fiscal-conservative wings of this counter-mobilization.7 In the realm of socio-legal studies, early research on the growing power and presence of conservative interest group litigation8 has been followed up with contemporary work on conservative cause lawyering9 and evolving conservative litigation strategies.10 Recent work has turned attention to differences in ideas and identities,11 commitment,12 and organizational culture13 among conservative legal activists. Definitional questions have arisen about the meaning of “public interest lawyering”14 and “cause lawyering”15 and the space for conservatism in these traditionally liberal conceptions of egalitarian social and legal change. Southworth‟s recent work has highlighted how loose and fractured the following six conservative “constituencies” of “lawyers of the right” are: religious conservatives, anti-abortion activists, order maintenance groups, anti-affirmative action activists, libertarians, and business groups.16 The literatures on judicial behavior, the politics of judicial selection, and legal mobilization focus on the overlapping networks of conservative foundations and philanthropists, think tanks, interest groups, legal organizations and societies, corporations, religious institutions, and political parties (especially the Republican Party) and their effectiveness in shifting federal judges and federal case law in a conservative direction.17 This growing body of scholarship has shed important insights into the nature, power, and diversity of conservative legal activism,

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broadening our understanding of the internal fractures, the funding sources, the legal strategies, and the tight-knit hierarchies of the various interrelated movements. In the realm of affirmative action policy, scholars have uncovered the power and strategic vision of a small network of “colorblind” elites who secured vast resources from a handful of conservative foundations and conservative businessmen in order to build a small number of colorblind legal organizations (e.g. Center for Individual Rights and the American Civil Rights Institute) that have attacked affirmative action policies via high-profile court cases (e.g. Hopwood v. Texas,18 Gratz v. Bollinger19)20 and ballot initiatives (e.g. Proposition 209, Initiative 200, Proposal 2).21 The American political development scholarship has taken the “long view” of the rise of conservative mobilization by tracing its origins as a reaction against what conservative entrepreneurs perceived to be liberal entrenchment in activist government during the middle of the 20th century.22 During the 1960s and 1970s, the leading think tanks, university scholars, and media outlets were seen by these conservative entrepreneurs as promoting a liberal agenda, and conservative entrepreneurs became disappointed by both business interests and Republican lawmakers for doing little to build a conservative movement to counter entrenched liberalism.23 These conservative intellectuals learned from the strategies of liberals and began to plant the seeds for the conservative counter-mobilization.24 It would be necessary to create and sustain a set of conservative think tanks to disseminate conservative policy proposals and to promote their vision to the public via media exposure and to lawmakers via reports and reform proposals. An organization would be needed to provide conservative law students and legal professionals with networking opportunities and institutional support. And conservative foundations and patrons would need to play a major role in funding this movement.25

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As Teles recounts, conservative legal activists until the 1980s relied heavily on corporate contributions to fund their organizations. But leaders of the economic libertarian, social conservative, anti-abortion, and racial conservative causes soon became disappointed by the failure of the business interests to adhere to their principled conservative agenda. Instead, businesses were quick to withhold their contributions when they deemed their support of these conservative organizations to challenge their short-term economic interests because of harmful public relations or because the conservative organizations‟ agenda threatened their bottom-line. Conservative entrepreneurs were disillusioned by a series of instances in which corporations‟ short-term profit motives trumped any purported long-term commitment to conservative principles.26 Given that reliance on corporate funding was risky, visionary conservative entrepreneurs (including the Koch brothers) began to build a powerful conservative countermobilization that relied on wealthy individual patrons in addition to conservative foundations.27 They created think tanks such as the economic libertarian Cato Institute, the conservative Heritage Foundation, the pro-market American Enterprise Institute28 as well as the Federalist Society.29 Conservative legal entrepreneurs in the 1980s began to conclude that their limited involvement with submitting amicus briefs was no longer sufficient, and leaders such as Michael Greve and Clint Bolick decided to create and invest in new litigating organizations such as the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) and the Institute for Justice to initiate lawsuits to engage in much more aggressive legal strategies.30 As supporters of affirmative action and school desegregation have increasingly courted centrist-to-conservative allies, and as they have sought to persuade an increasingly conservative Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of such racial inclusion policies, they have emphasized the pro-affirmative action argument as an instrumental diversity issue31 and

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deemphasized affirmative action as a civil rights issue. While affirmative action supporters were building a defense that has increasingly abandoned rights-based rhetoric in favor of diversity management rhetoric, the colorblind leaders have continued to claim to be the true descendants of the civil rights movement because of their shared insistence on “colorblind” policymaking.32 A brief perusal of the names of the major colorblind organizations and initiatives reveals the rights-based orientation of their rhetoric. Note the names of the colorblind ballot initiatives (California Civil Rights Initiative, Washington Civil Rights Initiative, Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, and Colorado Civil Rights Initiative) and colorblind organizations (Center for Individual Rights, Center for Equal Opportunity, American Civil Rights Institute, and Michigan Civil Rights Institute). Paradoxically, the leading defenders of affirmative action have partially ceded rightsbased rhetoric to the colorblind cause rather than defending their claim to civil rights rhetoric. Thus, diversity logic now forms the core of the affirmative action legal and cultural defense.33 University officials have largely come to buy into this conception of affirmative action as diversity management.34 With some powerful backing from Fortune 500 executives and highranking, retired military leaders,35 the narrow Supreme Court majority has also now bought into the argument. While the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action under equal protection law, the Court did not do so primarily on the terms of liberal equal protection jurisprudence. Rather, the Court upheld affirmative action (against accusations that the policy violates the equal protection clause) by finding the organizational justifications compelling enough to warrant what would otherwise be seen as reverse discrimination. The critical race theory and progressive scholarship has sought to expose conservative legal activism as anti-egalitarian in its goals and anti-democratic in its strategies and tactics.

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Critical race scholars have sought to generalize across conservative legal activism, asserting that rights-based conservatism is united by a “backlash” rooted in “resentment” against alleged “special rights”36 in post-civil rights America. According to Dudas, this conservative legal activism is motivated by “(1) resentment over the increased political participation of historically marginalized Americans and (2) principled allegations that these historically marginalized Americans are making illegitimate claims for „special,‟ not equal, rights.”37 Whereas Dudas examines the constitutive nature of “special rights” discourse, Goldberg-Hiller and Milner focus on the strategic, instrumental power of this discourse as a “political device and a way to mobilize power” that “inverts relations between majority and minority, threatens a cultural contract that distributes universalistic and particular norms, and alters relations of governance.”38 The work by Dudas as well as Goldberg-Hiller and Milner conclude that “special rights” discourse has become a central part of post-civil rights politics in the United States.39 Cokorinos40 accuses the conservative activists of engaging in an “assault on diversity… and racial and gender justice,” and his book seeks to expose the agenda of its right-wing organizations‟ leaders and financial backers. Hardisty41 accuses conservative activists of pursuing a conservative resurgence rooted in the mobilization of resentment. The related argument by progressive populists — which tends to come from journalists and popular authors rather than academics — paints a picture of conservative legal mobilization as a hypocritical cause that projects an image of genuine commitment to American principles but is instead a façade covering up selfish profiteering via deceptive practices and finances of moneyed interests.42 Even paleo-conservative journalists have joined the tirade against Connerly‟s alleged profiteering.43

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Thus, one of the central debates among those in the know about Connerly‟s backers is whether Connerly is about uncovering the “true” agenda behind the “colorblind” cause. According to the populist and critical race theory critiques, multiracial Connerly (who is typically referred to as being black, but he is actually multiracial and objects to any attempt at racial categorization) is a front man for a regressive counter-mobilization. These scholars challenge the myth of the colorblind cause as being part of a popular groundswell against affirmative action44 and accuse these conservative activists of employing undemocratic tactics such as ballot fraud and deception in obtaining the petition signatures required to place the measures on states‟ ballots. In contrast, some American political development scholars credit conservative activism as a cause that is reaping the rewards of a long-term investment learning the lessons behind entrenched liberalism in order to counter it effectively by promoting conservative ideas.45 Such scholars are skeptical of the notion that Connerly is the tool of rightwing foundation patrons. Instead, they would argue that he — rather than his right-wing funders — has been in control of his mobilization against affirmative action. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on conservative legal mobilization in two ways. First, this paper compiles information on who actually has been bankrolling the antiaffirmative action measures. Second, this paper seeks to explain why certain distorted causal stories explaining the “colorblind” agenda have been projected to the public whereas few citizens, journalists, or scholars are even aware of more accurate causal stories. The next two sections (three and four) of the paper will briefly review Connerly‟s efforts to eliminate affirmative action via ballot measures. The fifth section will focus on the financial backers behind Connerly‟s American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC) organizations. The sixth section will delve into the debate over the extent to which the

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right-wing donors are engaging in the kind of (a) economic self-interest via the kind of bait-andswitch Thomas Frank46 accuses Republican lawmakers of engaging in (namely, baiting white rural conservative voters with social conservatism and then once elected switching to pursuing policies to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations) as opposed to (b) a genuine, principled commitment to racial conservatism that is consistent with their professed devout commitment to free enterprise. The paper will conclude by suggesting more accurate yet effective causal stories for both sides of the affirmative action controversy.

The ballot measure backlash against affirmative action Since 1996, proposed bans on affirmative action in public education, employment, and contracting have appeared on the ballots in California, Washington State, Michigan, Nebraska, Colorado, and Arizona and were being pushed in several other states (Florida, Missouri, and Oklahoma). With the exception of Colorado voters‟ defeat of the “Colorado Civil Rights Initiative” in 2008 in part thanks to the coattails of Barack Obama‟s presidential victory, these anti-affirmative action measures have passed in the other five states (California in 1996, Washington State in 1998, Michigan in 2006, Nebraska in 2008, and Arizona in 2010). Given elected officials‟ resistance to eliminating affirmative action policies (“One Florida” by formerGovernor Jeb Bush being the main exception) — as well as the United States Supreme Court‟s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger47 decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School admissions policy — “colorblind” entrepreneurs have found state-by-state ballot measures to be the most effective path to dismantling affirmative action in the short-term. Prior to 1996, critics of affirmative action came up short in their efforts to put such antiaffirmative action measures on the ballots.48 But the ballot measure effort breathed new life in

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1995 when University of California Regent Ward Connerly successfully mobilized the majority of his fellow Regents to pass Regents Directives SP-1 and SP-2, which banned affirmative action across the University of California System in admissions, employment, and contracting.49 Having recently been appointed to the Board of Regents by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, Connerly quickly became a rising star among critics of affirmative action.50 Connerly was ambitious, politically savvy, and well-connected in Republican circles and in the business community. His multiracial background provided the “colorblind” cause with some cover from accusations that it was driven by racial animus.51 Connerly claimed that he only became an antiaffirmative action crusader once he learned as a Regent about Chinese American applicants being rejected from the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) while African American and Latino students with less impressive grade point averages (GPAs) and standardized test scores were being admitted.52 Beginning in 1995, Connerly saw tremendous success in defeating affirmative action through ballot measures. The success of Connerly‟s “colorblind” ballot measure strategy has raised many research questions, spawning new scholarship in sociology, legal studies, and political science. One line of research has sought to better understand the rise and success of conservative legal mobilization.53 Another has sought to situate this anti-affirmative action mobilization as a case of racial backlash and resentment.54 Much research has been done on the impact of these affirmative action bans on diversity levels in university admissions as well as public employment and contracting.55 More recently, scholars have begun to evaluate the effectiveness of the tactics defenders of affirmative action have employed to counter these ballot measures as well as to suggest new approaches.56

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As the battles over affirmative action have played out via litigation and ballot measures over the past two decades, scholars and journalists have begun to call attention to the centrality of corporate and military backing of affirmative action.57 While it is becoming well known that dozens of Fortune 500 companies have backed the defense of affirmative action against “colorblind” ballot initiatives and litigation over the past dozen years,58 less attention has been paid to the funding sources behind the anti-affirmative ballot measures and litigation. This lack of coverage may seem surprising given the substantial costs required to wage a ballot measure campaign. Campaign costs include the purchasing of blocks of airtime for television advertisements in expensive media markets in addition to paying firms to gather the number of petition signatures required to put the measure on the ballot. Hiring polling firms and public relations firms is also standard practice. As the primary leader of the campaign to defeat affirmative action via state ballot measures, Ward Connerly has portrayed his cause as David going up against Goliath; his rhetoric portrays the colorblind cause as an outmatched, moderate movement.59 According to this “causal story,”60 anti-affirmative action entrepreneurs are charged with waging an uphill, populist battle against a status quo of unfair and misguided “diversity” policies being defended by a betterfunded coalition of powerful corporations, political leaders from both major political parties, and even celebrities.61 In contrast, activists seeks to defend affirmative action haven‟t made it a priority to expose the funders behind the Connerly initiatives. To the extent that reporters have mentioned the financing of these measures — with few exceptions, as I discuss below — they have tended to assert without evidence that millionaire California businessman Ward Connerly financed ballot campaigns by drawing upon his own riches. While some pro-affirmative action

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organizations have attacked Connerly since 1996 by publicizing white supremacist leaders‟ and organizations‟ support for his initiatives, few exposed his financial backers. One notable exception has been the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), which began an aggressive strategy in 2008 to defeat his initiatives in Colorado (successfully) and Nebraska (unsuccessfully) by portraying Connerly as a hypocritical, carpetbagger lobbyist who seeks to dupe the public into voting for deceptive initiatives while profiting personally from a campaign funded by a combination of right-wing ideological extremists and self-serving, conservative business interests.62 While the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center‟s approach has begun to call attention to the donors behind the “colorblind” ballot measures, it still obscures the focus on these backers by keeping the attention on Connerly, whom the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center portrays as the enemy. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center‟s website is titled “Big Money Connerly,” and it focuses its attention much more on Connerly for profiteering and much less on the “invisible hands” who have built and funded the backlash over the past half century by funding measures like this that are in line with their right-wing agenda. Recent scholarship has focused on the role of major liberal foundations in establishing diversity and backing racial justice policies63 as well as the role of lesser-known conservative foundations in challenging such racial policies.64 In addition, recent work has called attention to the liberal turn among wealthy patrons.65 This paper continues this emerging line of scholarship on the influence of philanthropy by further analyzing the conservative foundations and patrons that have bankrolled anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives across the country, beginning with California‟s Proposition 20966 in 1996. The new generation of conservative “colorblind” leaders has been successful in keeping most reporters, citizens, and even most scholars from learning that right-wing foundations are the primary funders of the anti-affirmative action cause.

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Uncovering the funders behind Connerly’s “civil rights initiatives” News coverage of Connerly‟s ballot campaigns commonly portrayed his efforts — whether explicitly or implicitly — as self-funded. Take the following Chronicle of Higher Education story for example. Reporter Wiedeman emphasized Connerly‟s funds, implying that Connerly is relying on his own personal resources: “Future anti-affirmative-action campaigns may suffer from an even bigger deficit in resources should Mr. Connerly scale back his role. While the opposition to preferences is much broader than Mr. Connerly alone, his financial support and his name have been crucial to the campaigns in each state.”67 Wiedeman then quoted University of Nebraska political science professor John R. Hibbing as saying that “my sense is that in Nebraska it wouldn‟t have passed without his money and influence.”68 Note how the reporter employed this quote in a way that appears to attribute the money to Connerly rather than to his organizations‟ wealthy right-wing donors. Julie Novkov‟s chapter titled “The Conservative Attack on Affirmative Action” mentions that the American Civil Rights Institute “provided strategic and institutional support for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative”69 and that the coalition fighting for the initiative received crucial support from the Center for Equal Opportunity.”70 But nowhere is it mentioned that both organizations (the American Civil Rights Institute and the Center for Equal Opportunity) are funded almost entirely by right-wing foundations and patrons. They are all part and parcel of the same network. The November 2008 Kirwan Institute report on anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives by Jessica Larson and Stephen Menendian references Lydia Chavez‟s book titled The Color Bind; as is the case with Daniel HoSang‟s Racial Propositions,71 Chavez calls attention to Connerly‟s superior fundraising.72 The Kirwan Institute report advises coalitions defending affirmative action in the future to emphasize “the fact that the initiative was being brought into

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the state by an outsider [as well as] the fact that money from outside the state was funding the initiative,”73 but nowhere does the report interrogate who the funders are. Media Transparency has raised similar criticisms of the failure of most news reports to cover the millions of dollars of funding from highly conservative foundations and donors.74 Peter Slevin of the Washington Post explicitly claimed that Connerly “…bankrolled similar battles in California and Washington” in an article about Michigan‟s Proposal 2.75 Peter Schmidt of The Chronicle of Higher Education also attributed the funding to Ward Connerly‟s organizations, stating that “on the other side of the issue, the chief group campaigning for Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative Committee, has derived more than half of its direct financial support from the American Civil Rights Coalition, and has benefited from an additional $744,000 in in-kind contributions — such as mailings and donated services — from the group, which is based in Sacramento.”76 Most news coverage failed to even address the finances behind Connerly‟s ballot campaigns. But of those news reports that did touch on this question, the above news article is typical of how reporters covered this topic. This is particularly ironic, given that in 2008 populist critics of Connerly accused him of profiteering from these ballot measure campaigns. That is, Connerly has been contributing to his wealth from these campaigns rather than depleting his own personal wealth to fund these campaigns. According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (which compiled its data from U.S. Representative John Conyers based on available Internal Revenue Service (IRS) form 990), Connerly has “lined his own pockets with over $7.6 million in profits from 1997 to mid-2006.”77 Between 2004 and mid-2006, Connerly received over $500,000 in salary as well as an additional $2.2 million in “speaking fees and interviews.”78 According to Michael Dougherty of The American Conservative (Pat Buchanan‟s paleo-conservative magazine), Connerly‟s salary plus

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speaking fees used up 49 percent of his non-profit organizations‟ combined revenues in 2001, a figure that rose to 66 percent in 2006.79 Indeed, Representatives John Conyers (D-MI) and Charles Rangel (D-NY) requested that the House of Representatives investigate Connerly for “possible excessive compensation practices.”80 So who are the funders behind Connerly‟s campaigns? The direct answer is that Connerly‟s two tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations — the 501(c)3 American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and the 501(c)4 American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC) — are the major funding sources. As mentioned above, many news reports probed no further than to say that the ballot campaigns were being funded by Connerly‟s organizations. But this of course begs the question: who is funding the American Civil Rights Institute and American Civil Rights Coalition? It is quite naïve to assume that non-governmental organizations are funded by their public leader. Anyone with any knowledge of the non-profit sector ought to know that fundraising is one of the most central and challenging components of creating and sustaining a non-profit organization. So who funds the ballot campaigns to ban affirmative action? The bulk of the funding comes from the major foundations of the right (particularly the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation), and most of the remainder can be traced to conservative business interests and wealthy individual businessmen who are in most cases highly conservative. Given the small and tight network of exceptionally well-funded conservative foundations, newly-formed conservative colorblind organizations such as the American Civil Rights Institute and the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) had little difficulty securing generous funds from foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife family foundations, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Adolph Coors Foundation.81 Ward Connerly formed the American

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Civil Rights Institute in 1997 to pursue “colorblind” ballot initiatives with major financial backing from the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee ($5,375,000 between 1997 and 2008) in addition to the John M. Olin Foundation of New York ($1,000,000 between 1997 and 2004) and the Sarah Scaife Foundation of Pittsburgh ($1,675,000 between 1997 and 2009).82 The Scaife family foundations (Sarah Scaife Foundation, The Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation) are financed by the fortunes of Mellon from oil, industry, and banking. The John M. Olin Foundation (which closed its doors in November 2005) was financed by the wealth of John M. Olin‟s industrial ventures in chemicals and munitions. The Smith Richardson Foundation was financed by the fortunes from the Vicks VapoRub pharmaceutical product. And the Earhart Foundation was founded by Harry B. Earhart based on his fortunes from the White Star Oil Company. The Bradley Foundation was founded by brothers Lynde and Harry Bradley from their fortunes in the Allen-Bradley Company, which was bought by major defense contractor Rockwell International. The right-wing foundations tend to have similar patterns — they were founded based on fortunes from oil industry (or related fossil fuel industries), the defense industry, the petrochemical industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. To quote David Axelrod (Obama‟s Senior Advisor until January 2011), “What they don‟t say is that, in part, this [Tea Party] is a grassroots citizens‟ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”83 The same claim about the funders of the Tea Party applies to the funders of the racial backlash. The Bradley Foundation has become most controversial for its funding of the heavily criticized book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray titled The Bell Curve, which linked educational performance and intelligence to racial genetic factors.84 Murray is a Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is funded by the same tight network of right-wing

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foundations (as well as Exxon Mobil). The Bradley Foundation advocates conservative positions on welfare reform, school vouchers, and business regulation. Like Fred C. Koch, Harry Bradley had been an early financial supporter of the John Birch Society. Among the scores of other organizations funded by the Bradley Foundation are Connerly‟s American Civil Rights Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Center for Individual Rights, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, the National Association of Scholars, and the Pacific Legal Foundation.85 Beyond the foundations of the right, funding has come from industry and right-wing patrons. PBS did an exposé of how the contracting and property development industries have contributed significantly to the funding of the anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives. Connerly himself won $4.5 million in state contracts while serving as the Executive Director of a lobbying group called the Roofing Contractors Association of California.86 In addition, his Connerly and Associates was registered as an official lobbying firm between 1995 and 2006. The accusation is that he‟s doing the bidding for big contracting firms that may be white-owned and stand to make big profits.87 According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, “This is an industry based advocacy group that is headed by one of their lobbyists, who is Ward Connerly.”88 According to the Sacramento Bee, Connerly uses approximately half of his salary from ACRI and ACRC to reimburse Connerly & Associates.89 According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, one of Connerly‟s biggest backers has been Jonny Zamrzla, who was president and chief executive officer of the Western Pacific Roofing Corporation in addition to president of Chicago-based National Roofing Contractors Association. Serving as the chair of the board of the American Civil Rights Institute as well as

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one of the directors of the American Civil Rights Coalition, Zamrzla has been very close to Connerly.90 According to Cokorinos, Connerly‟s campaigns are “…not, as Connerly would have it, the product of some groundswell of mass anger against equal opportunity measures in major institutions, but of political action by a small group of wealthy and powerful right wing corporate tycoons who are trying to turn back the clock on civil rights. Indeed, 95 percent of Connerly‟s pro-Prop 54 campaign was paid for by seven individuals with powerful connections to the California and national right wings.”91 According to Cokorinos: Some interesting names are on the list of contributors, including John Moores, Sr., University of California Regents board member and owner of the San Diego Padres ($400,000); Rupert Murdoch, head of the Fox News empire ($300,000); Joseph Coors, the late Colorado beer baron and longtime financial angel to the right wing, who in one of his last acts of reactionary activism weighed in with $250,000; William J. Hume, head of the anti-labor San Francisco-based company Basic American Foods, who gave $200,000; Kansas City businessman John Uhlmann, $190,000; Harlan Crow, a Dallas financier $140,000; and Peter Schaeffer, a Texas-based investor, who gave $62,703.92 For the prior Proposition 209 campaign in 1996, Connerly received $5.2 million in contributions for the Proposition 209 campaign in 1996 in California, including “more than $3 million from state and national Republican parties and $750,000 from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owns FOX.”93 Connerly recounts in his memoir how Thomas L. “Dusty” Rhodes (founder and co-chairman of Connerly‟s American Civil Rights Institute as well as chairman of the board of the Bradley Foundation, president of The National Review, board member of the

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Heritage Foundation, and co-chairman of the powerful Club for Growth anti-tax organization) joined him in a crucial meeting with Rupert Murdoch that led to a $1 million donation by Murdoch.94 The coalitions to defend affirmative action in the various states have attempted to portray Connerly as a carpetbagger and an extremist. The carpetbagger accusation has been the more plausible of the two. After all, the vast majority of his money has come from out-of-state in every campaign except the Proposition 209 and Proposition 5495 efforts in California. In the Colorado campaign over Amendment 46 in 2008, for example, 98 percent of the money came from out of state; most came from the American Civil Rights Institute and the American Civil Rights Coalition.96 According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, 97 percent of all contributions to the 2008 anti-affirmative action initiative campaign came from the American Civil Rights Institute and a subsidiary organization of the American Civil Rights Coalition called Super Tuesday for Equal Rights. In total, $2,845,415.76 was raised, and only $73,608.72 was raised in the states where the campaigns were taking place.97 The One United Michigan (OUM) coalition opposing Connerly‟s Proposal 2 in 2006 also portrayed him as a carpetbagger. Whereas One United Michigan boasted of an impressive coalition with dozens of corporations, numerous universities, and a plethora of civil rights organizations, Connerly‟s Michigan Civil Rights Institute (MCRI) didn‟t list a single coalition partner on its website. The vast majority of the funding came from out-of-state, and the effort had little support from any Michigan organizations besides College Republican chapters on campuses in the state. Even the highly conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos (heir to the Amway fortune in Grand Rapids and wife of then Michigan Republican Party chair Betsy DeVos) officially opposed Proposal 2 and explicitly defended affirmative action. But

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as was the case in California, Washington State, and later in Nebraska and Arizona, Connerly had the last laugh. On an election night that was otherwise glorious for liberals and Democrats, Proposal 2 passed in Michigan in 2006 with the support of 58 percent of the voters. The accusation that Connerly is an extremist rests on shakier ground. Pro-affirmative action coalition groups — in the Proposition 209 campaign in California, in the Proposal 2 campaign in Michigan, and in the Amendment 46 campaign in Colorado and Initiative 424 campaign in Nebraska campaigns in 2008 — sought to smear Connerly as being close with white supremacists and other racist forces. On the surface, this was easy to do. Connerly‟s ballot measures received the support of David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the Minutemen, and other right-wing anti-immigrant groups. As HoSang and Chavez recount, the coalition to defend affirmative action in California by opposing Proposition 209 in 1996 became splintered; the Stop 209 Campaign in southern California was driven by women‟s rights organizations seeking to push a moderate, centrist strategy. In contrast, the Northern California-based faction (the Campaign to Defeat 209) was more strident in its desire to keep the focus on allegations of racial subordination. The Campaign to Defeat 209 sought to link Connerly and the Yes on 209 campaign with right-wing racist extremists.98 This Northern California coalition aired a controversial television advertisement showing former KKK leader David Duke endorsing Proposition 209 while speaking at California State University, Northridge (CSU-Northridge). In 2006, the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center featured a photograph of Connerly shaking hands with Michigan Council of Conservative Citizens (MCCC) leader John Raterink99 in addition to running an advertisement claiming that Connerly said “God Bless” the Ku Klux Klan. However, the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center television advertisement about Connerly blessing

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the KKK — which was featured in a documentary by Firelight Media entitled Arise: The Battle over Affirmative Action100 — is taken out of context. The footage shows Connerly saying that “If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right, God bless them. Thank them for finally reaching the point where logic and reason are applying — or are being applied — instead of hate.”101 Connerly identifies as an economic and civil libertarian with a record of supporting same-sex benefits as a University of California Regent. By all reputable accounts, he is committed to an individualist conception of racial equality known as racial conservatism.102 But he is not a defender of or apologist for white supremacist views. As Connerly has said over and over, he does not support extremist, hate-mongering organizations that support his initiatives. While he can‟t prevent such groups from endorsing his agenda, this does not mean that he accepts their endorsements or agrees with their agendas. One accusation that has plagued Connerly revolves around his covering up the funders behind his initiatives. In many cases, Connerly only released this information when state officials found that he had violated state campaign finance laws by unlawfully withholding information about contributors. For example, the State of California fined Connerly‟s group $95,000 in 2005.103 The same objection was raised in Nebraska.104 Connerly‟s defense was that he was withholding the names of his longtime donors to protect them from real and threatened violence by intolerant defenders of affirmative action.105 The larger concerns over Connerly‟s campaigns, as mentioned above, have been the refusal to disclose contributors (which violates campaign finance laws in many states) and the reliance on a highly controversial petition signature gathering firm — National Ballot Access — that has been challenged in courts on allegations of fraudulent behavior.106 One of the major accusations, raised by U.S. District Judge Tarnow in Operation King’s Dream v. Connerly

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(2006),107 is that Connerly‟s organizations “engaged in systematic voter fraud by telling voters that they were signing a petition supporting affirmative action.” In a report that included testimony of over 500 people, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded that paid agents of Connerly engaged in “shameful acts of deception and misrepresentation” in gathering signatures to put Connerly‟s Michigan Civil Rights Initiative on the November 2006 ballot.108 Allegations of fraud in petition signature collection contributed to Connerly‟s initiative being kept off of the ballot in Arizona in 2008. But ultimately this initiative was placed on the ballot in 2010 and passed easily with the support of 60 percent of the voters. Similar allegations — that petition signature gatherers went into heavily African American neighborhoods and obtained signatures by misleading residents into believing that they were petitioning to put a progressive, pro-affirmative action measure on the ballot — were raised in every state that Connerly‟s organizations sought to put anti-affirmative action measures on the ballot.

A pawn of the right? Given that Connerly has at times accused “civil rights professionals” of being part of a “racial spoils system” who have been captured by pro-affirmative action interests,109 perhaps it is only fitting that some of these defenders of affirmative action would in turn accuse Connerly of being a pawn of the right. The racial dimension of this causal story makes it all the more troubling: the accusation is that Connerly is the latest in a long line of leaders of color who are used as pawns by the white power structure to further racist causes. The following quote by Joe C. Gelman (campaign manager of Proposition 209) about the choice of Connerly as leader of the cause is seen by some as evidence of this Connerly-as-pawn argument: “It was like using affirmative action to defeat affirmative action. We were being pretty cynical, I have to admit.”110

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While Gelman surely would object that his quote was being taken out of context, these statements further the view that Connerly is being used to promote interests that are far more right-wing and racist than he lets on. The limitation of this capture theory argument, as Teles points out, is that it assumes that the philanthropists are much more proactive than they generally are and that political entrepreneurs like Connerly are much more reactive than they generally are. This is consistent with a line of research on resource mobilization theory in sociology111 as well as on interest group mobilization in political science,112 which emphasize that entrepreneurs like a Ward Connerly need patrons in order to create and sustain their organizations but don‟t view the patrons as commonly dominating the agendas of such organizations. While Teles does relay examples of conservative foundations proactively using their purse strings in the case of the Olin Foundation creating Law and Economics programs in elite university law schools,113 Teles suggests that this is one of the exceptions that makes the rule. Just because Connerly receives the vast majority of his financial resources from highly conservative foundations and patrons does not mean that he therefore shifts his ballot measures to be any more right-wing. The text of the ballot measures remains the same, and Connerly has maintained control over the political strategies to mobilize passage. Whereas law-and-politics scholars Teles and Keck place the conservative lawyers and intellectuals at the center of the rise of conservative legal activism since the 1980s and view the wealthy foundations and patrons funding the cause as peripheral players, historian Phillips-Fein begins her analysis half a century earlier and documents far greater influence by the “invisible hands” funding the conservative backlash.114 Whereas Teles tells the story of conservative legal activists being decades behind liberal legal activists and then copying the techniques of the

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liberal legal activists, Phillips-Fein tells the story of right-wing industrialists being decades ahead of liberal political activists in a full-court multi-decade plan to move America to the right. This began prior to the New Deal. Beginning with the du Ponts and their fellow wealthy industrialists, Phillips-Fein provides a genealogy of when and how a small handful of wealthy donors built the modern conservative movement. Whereas many historians and political scientists have focused on the ideas, institutions, political leaders, and activist leaders, PhillipsFein focuses on the central influence the donors have played in cultivating these very ideas, institutions, activists, and lawmakers. According to Phillips-Fein, “… these free-market activists understood, in a way that the liberal thinkers did not, the importance of ideas and the need to shape the terms of debate.”115 While the work of Phillips-Fein focuses primarily on the conservative economic backlash and only peripherally on the conservative racial backlash, her book does trace how little-known right-wing C.E.O of General Electric Lemuel Boulware hired and mentored Ronald Reagan in his evolution as an economic and social conservative with a populist appeal. Phillips-Fein writes, “the idea of a populist base for free-market politics, the vision of persuading working-class men and women to cheer for the boss, the faith that libertarian economic ideas were not only the province of the elite but could actually become the faith of the people as well, lived on outside the company through the influence it had on its most famous employee: Ronald Reagan.”116 Boulware persuaded Reagan that appealing to “white working-class voters afraid of the integration of their schools and neighborhoods by using the language of market idealism combined with resentment” would be a winning strategy.117 While the Koch foundations have not been major players in funding the backlash against affirmative action, their active involvement in building and steering the right-wing agenda in the

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U.S. is in line with Phillips-Fein‟s analysis of prior right-wing funders from the 1940s through the 1970s. As Jane Mayer wrote, “Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. „To bring about social change,‟ he told Doherty, requires „a strategy‟ that is „vertically and horizontally integrated,‟ spanning „from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.‟ The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. „We have a radical philosophy,‟ he said.”118 The numerous studies of the Koch brothers and allied conservative foundations and philanthropists have conveyed a story of wealthy industrialist elites committed to a comprehensive and aggressive long-term strategy to pull the U.S. further to the right. These “invisible hands” have funded, built, and steered numerous right-wing think tanks, university institutes, professional societies, political action committees, litigating interest groups, trade groups, political advocacy organizations, training seminars for lawmakers and judges, media outlets (radio, television, internet, newspapers and magazines), and “AstroTurf” social movements. The Tea Party can be seen in many ways as the culmination, the grand unifier, of the right-wing donors. The Tea Party policy agenda weaves together virtually all of the previously disparate causes near and dear to the hearts of these donors and projects the anti-intellectual “Republican populism”119 required to appeal to the Republican base, thereby gaining leverage in steering the Republican Party further to the right. Why do so many of these right-wing industrialists care about racial conservatism? As Jane Mayer and so many others have explained, much of the agenda of the right-wing donors serves their short-term economic self-interest. One can understand opposition to Obama-backed health care reform, ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the richest Americans, instituting

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environmental regulations (especially cap-and-trade and other regulations aimed at curbing global warming emissions), financial regulation, and other matters of pure short-term economic self-interest. Perhaps self-interest is driving elite right-wing donors, or perhaps it is not. But at the very least the short-term economic interests of the donors is well-served by their right-wing agenda. But how would the elimination of affirmative action and school integration plans serve elite right-wing philanthropists?

A bait-and-switch or genuine racial conservatism? Popular writer Thomas Frank120 provides a cynical answer to the question of why conservative political elites push social conservatism: they bait their conservative voting base with promises of promoting conservative stances on the culture war matters of God, gays, and guns (and racial backlash) and then put such promises on the backburner once elected. Instead, switch part of the bait-and-switch entails promoting a pro-business and pro-wealthy agenda that tramples on the vast majority of the population, including the very rural white voters who were bit the culture-war bait. Frank‟s bait-and-switch argument has been criticized on numerous fronts, one of which being that the Tea Party turn in the Republican Party especially since Obama became President has proven to be much more authentic in promoting both social and economic conservatism. That is, instead of a bait-and-switch, perhaps the Tea-Party-backed Republicans in Congress are serving as loyal delegates of their conservative base and fulfilling their culture war promises to a much greater extent than Frank acknowledges (admittedly in a book he wrote about big-government conservatives in the Republican Party prior to the advent of the Tea Party).

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Apart from catching right-wing leaders red-handed via audio or video recordings, it is difficult to know the true motivations behind the “invisible hands.” But from the numerous reports on the Koch brothers and other right-wing donors, it appears plausible that the donors in aggregate are driven by a combination of the Thomas Frank bait-and-switch self-interest explanation and a more principled explanation rooted in genuine commitment to free enterprise. Phillips-Fein portrays numerous right-wing donors as being deeply committed to the philosophies of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand.121 Such economic libertarians deeply distrust government intrusions into the affairs of private individuals or organizations, and this extends to mandatory civil rights protections, integration orders, and affirmative action mandates. But economic libertarians generally oppose even voluntary affirmative action and school integration policies, as they view such efforts as liberal efforts at social engineering aimed at artificially eliminating or reducing the natural inequalities that libertarians see as benefiting the market and hence humanity. Of course, not all of the freeenterprise fundamentalists oppose affirmative action and school desegregation. In the 1980s, Lewis Powell wrote a groundbreaking memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling for all-hands-on-deck conservative legal mobilization to defend free enterprise from Ralph Nader and allied liberal forces. Yet as Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, he was the architect of the landmark 1978 decision Regents v. Bakke,122 which gave the green light to universities to employ race-based affirmative action preferences that were justified by the educational value of diversity. As mentioned earlier in the paper, Dick DeVos defended affirmative action and opposed the anti-affirmative action Proposal 2 while campaigning (unsuccessfully) to unseat Democrat Jennifer Granholm as Governor of Michigan in 2006. The Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation is a major funder of social and educational conservative

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causes; it has been a major contributor to organizations supporting school vouchers. Yet the DeVos family has not joined the assault on affirmative action. In part this split is one between pro-market fundamentalists (most of whom view race-based policies as a “social engineering” intrusion into the market) and pro-business conservatives (most of whom accept at least some tenets of the pro-business case for affirmative action and school integration). Of course, to the extent that the “invisible hands” are driven by genuine racial conservatism, this raises the question of how much of this commitment to racial conservatism is a function of racial animus. To the extent that the donors‟ “colorblind” agendas are driven by a coy bait-and-switch game, this raises the question of how much of the conservative voting base‟s biting of this bait is driven by racial animus. A large body of scholarship (much of which has been cited above in this paper) seeks to resolve this question, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, the main aim of this paper has been to call attention to the major role being played by a tight network of right-wing funders and to speculate on the causes and consequences of keeping this funding source little-known as opposed to well-known.

Missed opportunities? Strategies to defeat Connerly’s ballot measures In the aftermath of a slew of victories for Ward Connerly, defenders of affirmative action are regrouping to assess the strategies they have been pursuing to defeat these ballot measures. The Kirwan Institute released a study aimed at recommending the best strategies for defeating Connerly‟s anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives. The main message is to prevent the measures from ever getting on the ballot, and the way to do this is through early organizing. The authors recommend litigation not only because it blocks these measures when the litigation is successful, but because such legal efforts help the cause — even in losing verdicts — by influencing public

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opinion and bogging down the anti-affirmative action cause with delays.123 The report also supports the strategy of exposing the carpetbagger and fraudulent elements. Missing from the report is any mention of a strategy of exposing the right-wing funders and their controversial agendas. This paper has suggested that Connerly‟s forces gain by withholding information about the highly conservative foundations and patrons backing the anti-affirmative action cause. It follows then that a strategy of exposing these conservative funders should be part of the strategy of the pro-affirmative action forces. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center has recently pursued this strategy, but it — like other strident voices on the pro-affirmative action side — has done so in dubious ways that include misleading accusations that Connerly is closely tied to far-right white supremacist leaders. More than anything else, the limitation of this strategy appears to be that it focuses on Connerly himself as the enemy rather than taking the long view and exposing the broader right-wing movement that has been developing for decades. Some suggestions for the “colorblind” side also follow from the findings of this paper. In particular, Connerly‟s forces seem to be opening themselves up to damaging criticisms (of extremism, profiteering, carpetbagging, hypocrisy, and unethical lobbying) far more than the Center for Individual Rights in its litigation strategy. Just because Connerly‟s organizations didn‟t form broad grassroots coalitions to back their efforts in each state doesn‟t mean that they couldn‟t do so. The opportunity to follow the very grassroots organizing strategy rooted in churches and other institutions of rural and suburban America that returned congressional Republicans to power in 1995 and that contributed to Republican George W. Bush winning two terms as President could be used to grow the “colorblind” movement from the ground up. Connerly is particularly well-suited to do exactly this, as his multiracial background combined

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with his support for creative, class-based and disadvantage-based alternatives to race-based and gender-based affirmative action give him leverage to project compassion and to build coalitions. If Connerly and the colorblind cause opt to engage in political learning by following Barack Obama‟s model of projecting a compassionate tone, engaging in community organizing, and furthering a moderate agenda through building coalitions, then Connerly‟s cause could see much success in the future. On the other hand, if the decision made is to continue with the current model of mobilization, then Connerly may see more defeats along the lines of Colorado in 2008. Of course, this is not necessarily the case, and the passage of Connerly‟s initiative in Arizona in 2010 is evidence. Perhaps the initiative was defeated in 2008 largely as a result of the coattails of an historic presidential candidacy by Barack Obama. If so, then perhaps Connerly‟s defeat in Colorado will be seen as the pro-affirmative action exception that proves the anti-affirmative action rule: namely, that voters pass Connerly‟s anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives pass when given the chance. On the surface, one lesson has been that it is crucial for activists and scholars to “follow the money” because powerful interests have incentives to hide the campaign finance records. However, as Teles has articulated, it is premature to conclude that entrepreneurs necessarily act as pawns of moneyed interests merely because they take the money. That said, a growing body of research lends support to the view that the “invisible hands” have been remarkably successful in their bold and controversial plan to build a comprehensive political strategy to steer the U.S. further to the right. In this light, the right-wing funders of anti-affirmative action organizations such as the American Civil Rights Institute must feel very proud of their accomplishments. This paper reaffirms the importance of empirically studying the resources that entrepreneurs mobilize in order to understand on a case-by-case basis how well the interests of

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the donors intersect with the interests of the entrepreneurs. In short, empirical research by social scientists is needed not only to learn what causal stories are being projected by competing forces but also to “fact check” these causal stories through empirical research to more accurately educate other scholars, lawmakers, journalists, and citizens about the problems, policies, and politics being articulated by powerful forces on competing sides of controversial issues such as affirmative action.

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19

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38

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27

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28

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30

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31

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33

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36

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37

Dudas, “In the name of equal rights.”

38

Goldberg-Hiller and Milner, “Rights as excess.”

39

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40

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41

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Keepers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 42

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Connerly‟s slush fund draws scrutiny,” Ward Connerly: The

color of money, 2011, http://www.bigmoneyconnerly.org/node/1391; David Brancaccio, “Attacking affirmative action,” NOW (Public Broadcasting Corporation, August 29, 2008), http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/434/transcript.html; Cokorinos, Assault on diversity; Lee Cokorinos, “The big money behind Ward Connerly,” Equal Justice Society e-Newsletter, no. 4 (Summer 2005), http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/newsletter4/story7.html; Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of rage,” Harper’s Magazine 309, no. 1852 (September 2004): 31-41; Jane Mayer, “The billionaire Koch brothers‟ war against Obama,” The New Yorker, August 30, 2010; Frank Rich, “The billionaires bankrolling the Tea Party,” The New York Times, August 28, 2010, sec. Opinion. 43

for example, see Michael Brendan Dougherty, “Connerly cashes in: The anti-preferences

activist gets rich off of affirmative action.,” The American Conservative, September 22, 2008. 44

Cokorinos, Assault on diversity, 4.

45

Teles, “Conservative mobilization”; Teles, Rise of the conservative legal movement.

46

What’s the matter with Kansas? How conservatives won the heart of America, 1st ed. (New

York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 47

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) 41

48

Chavez, Color bind.

49

Daniel N. Lipson, “Affirmative action as we don‟t know it: The rise of individual assessment

in undergraduate admissions at UC-Berkeley and UT-Austin,” in Studies in law, politics, and society, ed. Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick, vol. 23 (New York: Elsevier Science Ltd., 2001), 137-84; Robert Post and Michael Paul Rogin, eds., Race and representation: Affirmative action (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Brian Pusser, Burning down the house: Politics, governance, and affirmative action at the University of California, S.U.N.Y. series, frontiers in education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). 50

HoSang, Racial Propositions, 213.

51

Angela D. Dillard, Guess who’s coming to dinner now? Multicultural conservatism in

America, American history and culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 52

Ward Connerly, Creating equal: My fight against race preferences (San Francisco: Encounter

Books, 2000). 53

Keck, “From Bakke to Grutter”; Keck, Most activist Supreme Court; Teles, Rise of the

conservative legal movement. 54

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of

racial inequality in the United States, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006); Cokorinos, Assault on diversity; Dudas, “In the name of equal rights”; John Fobanjong, Understanding the backlash against affirmative action (Huntington, N.Y: Nova Science Publishers, 2001); Goldberg-Hiller and Milner, “Rights as excess”; HoSang, Racial Propositions; Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by color: Racial politics and democratic ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith, “Strange bedfellows? Polarized politics? The quest for racial equity in contemporary 42

America,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (December 1, 2008): 686-703; Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The unsteady march: The rise and decline of racial equality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Reva B. Siegel, “Equality talk: Antisubordination and anticlassification values in constitutional struggles over Brown,” Harvard Law Review 117, no. 5 (2004): 1470; Julie Novkov, “The conservative attack on affirmative action: Toward a legal genealogy of color blindness,” in The politics of inclusion and exclusion: Identity politics in Twenty-First century America, ed. David F. Ericson, 1st ed. (Routledge, 2010), 177-206. 55

Dennis Epple, Richard Romano, and Holger Sieg, “Diversity and affirmative action in higher

education,” Journal of Public Economic Theory 10 (August 2008): 475-501; Eric Grodsky and Demetra Kalogrides, “The declining significance of race in college admissions decisions,” American Journal of Education 115, no. 1 (November 1, 2008): 1-33; Gary Orfield and Edward Miller, Chilling admissions: the affirmative action crisis and the search for alternatives (Cambridge, MA: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University :;Harvard Education Pub. Group,, 1998); Marta Tienda et al., Closing the gap? Admissions & enrollments at the Texas public flagships before and after affirmative action, January 21, 2003; Lipson, “Affirmative action as we don‟t know it.” 56

Larson and Menendian, Anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

57

Kelly and Dobbin, “How affirmative action became diversity management”; Lipson, “Where‟s

the justice?”; Wilkins, “From „separate is inherently unequal‟ to „diversity is good for business‟”; Edelman, Fuller, and Mara-Drita, “Diversity rhetoric and the managerialization of the law.” 58

Lipson, “Where‟s the justice?”; Stohr, Black and white case. 43

59

Connerly, Creating equal.

60

Deborah A. Stone, “Causal stories and the formation of policy agendas,” Political Science

Quarterly 104, no. 1 (1989): 281-300; Deborah A. Stone, Policy paradox: The art of political decision making, Rev. (New York: Norton, 2002). 61

Connerly, Creating equal.

62

Larson and Menendian, Anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

63

Shiao, Identifying talent, institutionalizing diversity; Callahan, Fortunes of Change.

64

Cokorinos, Assault on diversity; Teles, Rise of the conservative legal movement; Hardisty,

Mobilizing resentment. 65

Callahan, Fortunes of Change.

66

Proposition 209 added Section 31 to Article I of the California Constitution. Section 31 states

that “The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” 67

Reeves Wiedeman, “Analysis: How Colorado became the first state to reject a ban on

affirmative action,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 10, 2008, http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/11/7031n.htm. 68

Wiedeman, “Analysis.”

69

“Conservative attack on affirmative action,” 177.

70

“Conservative attack on affirmative action,” 178.

71

Racial Propositions.

72

Chavez, Color bind.

73

Larson and Menendian, Anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, 13. 44

74

Media Transparency, “Washington Post story on Ward Connerly ballot initiative ignores $3.2

million in conservative philanthropy underwriting,” Media Transparency, July 5, 2003, http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipientprofile.php?recipientID=14. 75

Peter Slevin, “Court battle likely on affirmative action,” The Washington Post, November 18,

2006. 76

Peter Schmidt, “College leaders reach into their wallets to help defeat Michigan‟s proposed

ban on preferences,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2006. 77

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Connerly‟s slush fund draws scrutiny.”

78

“Connerly‟s slush fund draws scrutiny.”

79

Dougherty, “Connerly cashes in.”

80

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Connerly‟s slush fund draws scrutiny”; Jim Sanders,

“Connerly‟s crusading is paying off,” Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, CA, June 26, 2003). 81

Cokorinos, Assault on diversity.

82

Media Matters Action Network, “American Civil Rights Institute: Funders,” Conservative

Transparency, 2011, http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/American_Civil_Rights_Institute. 83

quoted in Mayer, “Billionaire Koch brothers‟ war against Obama.”

84

The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life, 1st ed. (New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1996). 85

Media Matters Action Network, “The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation: Grants,”

Conservative Transparency, 2011, http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/organization/The_Lynde_and_Harry_Bradley_Found ation/grants. 45

86

Brancaccio, “Attacking affirmative action.”

87

Brancaccio, “Attacking affirmative action.”

88

quoted in Brancaccio, “Attacking affirmative action.”

89

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Connerly‟s slush fund draws scrutiny”; Jim Sanders,

“Connerly‟s crusading is paying off.” 90

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Just who is Johnny Zamrzla?,” Ward Connerly: The color of

money, 2011, http://www.bigmoneyconnerly.org/node/1398. 91

Cokorinos, “Big money behind Ward Connerly.”

92

Cokorinos, “Big money behind Ward Connerly.”

93

Jennifer Millman, “Who is paying to end affirmative action? High-ranking Bush officials,

Rupert Murdoch,” DiversityInc.com, October 30, 2006. 94

Cokorinos, “Big money behind Ward Connerly”; Connerly, Creating equal.

95

Proposition 54, popularly known as the Racial Privacy Initiative, was defeated handily by the

California voters in 2003; 64% of voters rejected it. It would have prohibited the state and local governments from collecting racial data in most business operations. 96

Brancaccio, “Attacking affirmative action.”

97

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Percentage of out of state money,” Ward Connerly: The

color of money, 2011, http://www.bigmoneyconnerly.org/node/1390. 98

HoSang, Racial Propositions, 225.

99

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Connerly the extremist,” Ward Connerly: The color of

money, 2011, http://www.bigmoneyconnerly.org/node/1405. 100

John Valadez and Firelight Media, Arise: The battle over affirmative action (distributed by

Firelight Media, 2006). 46

101

Valadez and Firelight Media, Arise.

102

Edward G Carmines and James A Stimson, Issue evolution: Race and the transformation of

American politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). 103

Cokorinos, “Big money behind Ward Connerly.”

104

Matthew Hansen, “Connerly group refuses to name donors,” Omaha World-Herald, August

15, 2008. 105

Matthew Hansen, “Connerly group refuses to name donors.”

106

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Carpetbagging through 2008: Status of the campaigns,”

Ward Connerly: The color of money, 2011, http://www.bigmoneyconnerly.org/node/1403. 107

Operation King’s Dream v. Connerly, 2006 WL 2514115 (E. D. Mich. 2006)

108

Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, “Carpetbagging through 2008.”

109

Connerly, Creating equal.

110

quoted in Barry Bearak, “Questions of race run deep for foe of preferences,” The New York

Times, July 27, 1997; Cokorinos, Assault on diversity, 31. 111

John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, The dynamics of social movements: Resource

mobilization, social control, and tactics (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1979). 112

Jack L. Walker, Mobilizing interest groups in America: Patrons, professions, and social

movements (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Jack L. Walker, “The origins and maintenance of interest groups in America,” The American Political Science Review 77, no. 2 (June 1, 1983): 390-406. 113

Teles, Rise of the conservative legal movement.

114

Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands.

115

Invisible Hands, 58. 47

116

Invisible Hands, 111.

117

Invisible Hands, 253.

118

Mayer, “Billionaire Koch brothers‟ war against Obama.”

119

Colleen J. Shogan, “Anti-intellectualism in the modern presidency: A Republican populism,”

Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 2 (2007): 295-303. 120

What’s the matter with Kansas?.

121

Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands.

122

Regents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)

123

Larson and Menendian, Anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives.

48