(FORTUNE Magazine) – Easily the most fascinating social-policy news in the papers on June 25 was an item about affirmative action that the New York Times elected to bury on page A20, possibly because its editors did not descry the deeper significance and larger outlines and anyway would suffer a certain amount of cognitive dissonance if somebody whispered in their collective ear that employment quotas are beginning to look like a Republican plot. You didn't know about the plot either? You always assumed it was the Democrats who gave us quotas? You maybe thought Lyndon Johnson had something to do with it? Friends, your error is understandable. For years now, you've been seeing this media message in which liberal Democrats are true blue when it comes to civil rights while the conservative Republicans are slashing, gutting, and disemboweling all these programs that would wipe out bias one two three if only somebody gave them a chance. This story line has been fortified over the years by the above-average propensity of GOP presidents like Dick and Ron to groan loudly about quotas. In fact, Ron is still inveighing against ''the discrimination of quotas.'' Yes, Dick and Ron are great inveighers. But if you happen to be a Jamesian pragmatist who skips the rhetoric and instead focuses on experiential realities, you could wonder what is going on in those fellows' noggins. The first reality you come to is that we basically got our quotas under Nixon, whose Labor Secretaries gave us Order No. 4, not to mention Revised Order No. & 4, and these are the foundation stones on which goals and timetables for Mr. and Ms. Personnel Director have been erected. The second reality is that Reagan keeps not acting on the free advice proffered by Keeping Up, which is to wipe out those orders with a stroke of the pen. The third reality is that the Republicans are suddenly saying quotas are forever. Which is big news. The traditional party line has been that goals and timetables are a temporary measure. ''I sure hope they're not permanent,'' the present writer was told a decade ago by J. Stanley Pottinger, who was then running the Justice Department's Civil Rights division and later gained fame by going around with Gloria Steinem. The Times story on the 25th signals a change in the party line. The story says that our present Labor Secretary, Bill Brock, appeared before the NAACP and then told a news conference we would have ''some form of affirmative action for the foreseeable future.'' Quotas being the only form of a.a. the Labor Department knows about, and the foreseeable future meaning eternity, we would have played the story on page A1.