If you have any friends, relatives, or co-workers who have a strong affinity for, shall we say, left-leaning politics, one of the things you'll quickly discover is that they'll tell you they're interested and concerned about the plight of the disadvantaged.

In general, I don't believe that anymore.

(Not that there can't be exceptions, of course.)

I'm linking to this write-up in the right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial pages because it makes two important points.

The first concerns an effect Thomas Sowell pointed to years ago, now called the "mismatch hypothesis". Back then, Sowell cited the disproportionate drop-out rate of minorities at schools (like UC Berkeley) with wide disparities in affirmative action admission standards as evidence that affirmative action was harmful.

Now, unsurprisingly, there seems to be a significant resulting disparity in law school graduates:

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review. Most of his findings were grim, and they caused dismay among many of the champions of affirmative action--and indeed, among those who were not.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions--about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

But the interesting new development here are the lengths to which critics are now going to prevent researchers from gathering more evidence:

Although so far his work has held up to scrutiny at least as well as that of his critics, all fair-minded scholars agree that more research is necessary before the "mismatch thesis" can be definitively accepted or rejected.

Unfortunately, fair-minded scholars are hard to come by when the issue is affirmative action. Some of the same people who argue Mr. Sander's data are inconclusive are now actively trying to prevent him from conducting follow-up research that might yield definitive answers. If racial preferences really are causing more harm than good, they apparently don't want you--or anyone else--to know.

Take William Kidder, a University of California staff advisor and co-author of a frequently cited attack of Sander's study. When Mr. Sander and his co-investigators sought bar passage data from the State Bar of California that would allow analysis by race, Mr. Kidder passionately argued that access should be denied, because disclosure "risks stigmatizing African American attorneys." At the same time, the Society of American Law Teachers, which leans so heavily to the left it risks falling over sideways, gleefully warned that the state bar would be sued if it cooperated with Mr. Sander.

Sadly, the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners caved under the pressure. The committee members didn't formally explain their decision to deny Mr. Sander's request for these data (in which no names would be disclosed), but the root cause is clear: Over the last 40 years, many distinguished citizens--university presidents, judges, philanthropists and other leaders--have built their reputations on their support for race-based admissions. Ordinary citizens have found secure jobs as part of the resulting diversity bureaucracy.

If the policy is not working, they, too, don't want anyone to know.

In short, they'd rather continue run the risk of destroying many talented black students' lives than risk ruining their extended feel-good moment.

This is far from a fluke, in my experience. I run this test whenever I get the chance: When someone who is coming across as an ardent or angry leftist, I'll offer potential evidence that their policy might be doing the opposite of what they think. Almost without exception, they will be utterly uninterested in pursuing the matter further.

The rare few who are open usually begin to move in a conservative direction.

The point here isn't whether they'll agree with me. I'm not trying to convince them in one sitting: I understand that we all take time to change views and might not be swayed by one set of articles. But usually, they won't even let me e-mail them the evidence, or otherwise won't pursue the topic further. The test is whether they open to contrary evidence, not whether they'll change their views on someone's say so.

Time and time again, they'll show they aren't: they don't really want to do good, above all other things -- instead, it's more important they feel good about themselves. If that means creating more victims among the "little guys" they say they care about, well, screw them, apparently.

My larger point here is that our minds are communities of different thinking centers, each operating on a parallel track. Often, I suspect, we are not aware of our actual motivations: our conscious mind constructs a narrative about what we're doing, and why, but that narrative doesn't necessarily correspond to what's actually happening, and our real underlying motivations.

As the prophet Jeremiah lamented: "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9) Jeremiah recognized that he himself was often deceived about his own motivations, and the difficulties such internal deception posed, in the long term, for our ability to understand ourselves. He also recognized that the deception often centered on moral issues, and that we were often worse than we imagined.

This is, sadly, a huge driving force in the political arena today, one which has the real effect of mobilizing a huge chunk of our population to ardently support various policies which will destroy careers and lives -- and increase crime, poverty, and even death among our most vulnerable citizens.

Such people are called, today, "progressive."

I empathize with, and pity them more than blame them: Who of us hasn't been, at times, proud and self-deceived? But I deeply lament the damage they're doing, and wish I could think of a way to snap them out of it.