Affirmative‑Action as Generational Warfare

When affirmative‑action and diversity regimes scale in a changing demography, their distributional effects can function like intergenerational class warfare: older elites retain positions while younger cohorts—especially white men—face steeper, structural barriers to entry. The result is not merely individual grievance but a durable political constituency built on perceived dispossession. — Framing DEI as an explicit generational redistribution mechanism changes how policy debates about admissions, hiring, and anti‑discrimination are debated and who is mobilized politically.