Affirmative action is a failure; it's nothing but a form of welfare.
Failure from what vantage point? If you want to keep society stable and peaceful, some degree of welfare is probably necessary, for otherwise, those that imagine themselves to be wronged might just band together and violently take what they think has been denied to them.
That's true, but it might be parts of the reason why those who accept it, accept it.
If you think about the invention of the welfare state by (to simplify matters greatly) Bismarck, then this was quite explicitly to defang the socialist movements that were threating the established social order of his time, and did manage to set the world aflame with the Russian Revolution.
