Time & Perspective Quote by Susan Estrich

“Never meant to be permanent” is the kind of soothing phrase that pretends history has an off switch. Susan Estrich, a liberal legal commentator with real institutional credibility, isn’t just making a policy point; she’s signaling to anxious moderates that the moral debt has been serviced, or at least renegotiated. The line works because it smuggles a deadline into a debate that’s always been about power: who gets access, who sets the terms, and who gets to declare the crisis over.

The subtext is a familiar American move: treat remedies for structural inequality as temporary “special measures,” while treating the inequalities themselves as regrettable but natural background noise. “Move on” is doing a lot of work here. It implies maturity, pragmatism, even national healing. It also politely reframes ongoing racial and gender disparities as evidence that the tool is outdated rather than that the underlying problem persists.

Context matters: Estrich’s career sits at the intersection of Democratic Party triangulation, post-civil-rights legal battles, and the long backlash politics that made “affirmative action” a proxy term for merit, resentment, and demographic change. By calling for “some other approach,” she gestures toward innovation without naming the trade-offs: race-neutral alternatives often shrink the very gains affirmative action produced, then declare the results proof of fairness.

The intent, then, is not to torch affirmative action but to domesticate it: to make equality feel less like a demand and more like a managerial adjustment. That’s precisely why the sentence lands - and why it should trigger suspicion.