Honest opinion about government from Allan Bloom:
Affirmative action now institutionalizes the worst aspects of separatism. The fact is…that the university degree of a black student is…tainted, and employers look on it with suspicion, or become guilty accomplices in the toleration of incompetence. The worst part of all this is that the black students, most of whom avidly support this system, hate its consequences. A disposition composed of equal parts of shame and resentment has settled on many black students who are beneficiaries of preferential treatment. They do not like the notion that whites are in the position to do them favors. They believe that everyone doubts their merit, their capacity for equal achievement. Their successes become questionable in their own eyes. Those who are good students fear that they are equated with those who are not, that their hard-won credentials are not credible. They are the victims of a stereotype, but one that has been chosen by black leadership. Those who are not good students, but have the same advantages as those who are, want to protect their position but are haunted by the sense of not deserving it….
The Closing of the American Mind, 1987
Allan Bloom was co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago, where he was also a professor on the Committee of Social Thought. He taught at Yale, Cornell, the University of Toronto, and other universities and translated and edited Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile. Although he wrote numerous articles as well as Shakespeare's Politics (1964) and Confronting the Constitution (1990), he is best known for The Closing of the American Mind (1987), a sweeping analysis and critique of contemporary thought.
Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.