Normally, we feature a quote from an AEI scholar at the end of this email, but this week we are leading with an observation Charles Murray made in 1984.
 
“The only happy aspect of the new racism is that the corrective—to get rid of the policies encouraging preferential treatment—is so natural. Deliberate preferential treatment by race has sat as uneasily with America’s equal-opportunity ideal during the post-1965 period as it did during the days of legalized segregation. We had to construct tortuous rationalizations when we permitted blacks to be kept on the back of the bus—and the rationalizations to justify sending blacks to the head of the line have been just as tortuous. Both kinds of rationalization say that sometimes it is all right to treat people of different races in different ways. For years, we have instinctively sensed this was wrong in principle but intellectualized our support for it as an expedient. I submit that our instincts were right. There is no such thing as good racial discrimination.”

—Charles Murray, “Affirmative Racism,” New Republic, December 31, 1984

The Claudine Gay scandal and her resignation as Harvard president have exposed the bankruptcy of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology. Ruy Teixeira suggests that, instead of defending Gay, Democrats should recommit to the fundamentally American—and popular—ideals of merit, free speech, and universalism that DEI rejects.
 
The decisions of the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state to disqualify Donald Trump from the presidential ballot using the 14th Amendment have sparked widespread debate. Do Trump’s actions on January 6 constitute a constitutionally disqualifying insurrection, and is it wise for courts and election officials to disqualify candidates on these grounds? Yuval Levin argues that these decisions are legally dubious, but more importantly, they undermine the fundamentally political character and ends of our Constitution.
 
Peter J. Wallison, in contrast, defends the Colorado Supreme Court’s conclusion. Writing for AEIdeas, he explains both the legal case for disqualification and the broader purpose of nominally undemocratic constitutional clauses like Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
 
Despite Western sanctions and export controls, Russian and Chinese companies have managed to continue procuring cutting-edge American machinery for semiconductor and weapons manufacturing. Writing in the New York Times, Chris Miller and Jordan Schneider lay out what the US needs to do to tighten enforcement.
 
Daniel Bell’s 1973 book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, anticipated the displacement of labor and manufacturing by knowledge and services in our contemporary economy. For its 50th anniversary, M. Anthony Mills in National Affairs explores the enduring relevance of Bell’s classic book as we wrestle with the challenges of populism and technocracy that Bell anticipated.