Differential enthusiasm for a policy does not preclude forging a tolerable consensus

Evidence

If one can trust survey data, then, it seems possible to develop a workable political consensus around some “soft” affirmative action policies. African Americans and Latinos will always support these policies more strongly than will whites, and women will support them somewhat more strongly than will men. But that is no different from the pattern of support for any policy measure that benefits some citizens more than or at the expense of others. The likelihood of different levels of enthusiasm does not stop politicians and policy planners from initiating new laws and regulations, so long as they can forge a set of rules that some people strongly endorse and most can tolerate. There might be such a set of rules to be found within the wide range of possibilities for affirmative action policy, if the troops would declare a truce in the culture war long enough to move warily toward a no-man’s-land in the center. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1990

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Well-designed republican institutions can generate norms of policy-making through games of acceptability. — Adelin-Costin Dumitru, Forging the Resistive Republic: Social…, 19; Latent public opinion rarely diverges from expressed collective policy preferences — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 22; Reducing partisan animosity will not suppress policy activism if policy disagreement remains legitimate. — Rachel Hartman et al., Interventions to Reduce Partisan…, 18