The meaning of the term "affirmative action" has changed dramatically over the last six decades. Although it first showed up in the Wagner Act in 1935, it was John F. Kennedy who started it on its modern trajectory in 1961 when he issued an executive order holding that the federal government had an affirmative duty to treat its employees "without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin." With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these protected characteristics were extended to cover sex, religion and, thanks to the Supreme Court, gender identity.

Once in place, these protections were expanded to state governments and the private sector. They gradually evolved from ensuring that people in the protected categories were not discriminated against on the job to becoming a vehicle for engineered diversity through hiring and promotion preferences towards individuals exhibiting the protected characteristics, which led to so-called "reverse discrimination" against those who did not exhibit them. The American concept of meritocracy was tossed aside in favor of "diversity, inclusion and equity" (DIE)-which probably would have appalled past Democrats like Kennedy, and which is detrimental to prosperity and individual freedom of the American society.

One of the worst results of the current iteration of affirmative action is the emergence of the so-called "inept-ocracy" that the Urban Dictionary provocatively defines as a "system of [governance] where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers."

Almost all American universities have committed themselves to affirmative action (interpreted as favoritism towards the so-called "underrepresented" and "undeserved") and forced (as opposed to naturally occurring) diversity. To that end, they've lowered their admission, passing, and graduation standards, often selectively so, to ensure proportional "representation" of favored groups in their graduating cohorts. The result is that graduates often lack the knowledge, skills, and abilities that one could expect from those holding degrees, especially from once-prestigious institutions. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who holds a B.A. and J.D. from Harvard and is currently in the news for indicting President Donald Trump, serves as an important example of this undesirable phenomenon.

Given the appalling quality of his indictment, it's not unreasonable to believe that Bragg's Ivy League resume is the product of affirmative action. Indeed, one of the inevitable downsides of affirmative action is that, whenever a member of one of the Democrat party's favored classes has an impressive resume, the default thought is that he or she achieved it thanks to affirmative action. As Clarence Thomas learned, it stigmatizes minorities rather than raising them up.