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Notes -
It's not novel to De Boer.
It's not novel to education.
Ditto for discipline caps in schooling, which is the same logic again.
Ditto for affirmative action and other diversity quotas.
This is absolutely a thing people on the Left do. It's absolutely a thing people on the Right do, probably in the same way, though no examples leap readily to mind. It's a very human and highly recognizable tendency in contentious politics. If you squint and tilt your head, you can see something of the same pattern in Trump supporters' current and continued support for Trump, or in debt ceiling brinksmanship, or in dozens of other patterns of behavior. It does seem to me that leftists do it more with actual institutions, though, possibly because they run more institutions.
Because they believe that unwilling majority is ultimately to blame for the problem, and they are tired of waiting for a solution. Re-read that Kline article, it's all there in black and white. People see a problem, and they get angry at the people causing the problem. But then those people and their defenders say it's not them, it's actually a systemic thing. Spokespersons for the system blame individuals, and after a while the people worried about the problem get sick of the buck-passing, and insist on a solution now, even if the solution is lossy or dire. They reason that even if they can't identify exactly where the problem is, they can narrow it down to a general area and carpet-bomb, writing off the collateral damage as a cost of doing business. It's a reasonable strategy if you're correct about the general location and severity of the problem. If you aren't, it's just a disaster.
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