Trading Places

Here is the meat of Joseph Epstein’s WSJ review of Shelby Steele’s book, Shame:

“Liberalism in the twenty-first century,” Mr. Steele writes, “is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.” This liberalism, which is not your Aunt Bessie’s liberalism but the liberalism that came into play at the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern, “is invested in an overstatement of America’s present sinfulness based on the nation’s past sins.” Mr. Steele argues that liberalism’s efforts to alleviate the past injustices done to blacks in America have amounted to another botched project of that famously failed political construction firm, the Good Intentions Paving Co. “Liberalism,” Mr. Steele writes, “expresses its inborn racism in the way it overlooks the full human complexity of blacks—the fact that they are more than mere victims—in order to distill and harden the idea of their victimization into a currency of liberal power.”

Liberals, Mr. Steele holds, deal in what he calls “poetic truth.” This is a kind of truth “conceived in reaction to the great shames of America’s past—racism, sexism, territorial conquest (manifest destiny), corporate greed, militarism, and so on.” In poetic truth, the world is reduced to victims and victimizers, with liberals alone innocent of evil and thus excluded, by self-dissociation, from the role of victimizers. Under the realm of poetic truth, Mr. Steele explains, the race riots of the late 1960s could find justification and the feminist slogan “woman as nigger” could be taken seriously, while “fifty years of real moral evolution in America” can be entirely ignored.

After the 1960s, in Mr. Steele’s reading, authority was undermined and “authenticity” put in its place. Authenticity, he writes, “meant the embrace of new idealisms and new identities that explicitly untethered you from America’s notorious hypocrisies.” Through rebellion, antiwar activity, dissent, civil and uncivil disobedience, and dropping out before selling out, authenticity rendered one innocent of all the old evils associated with American power, domestic and international; authenticity also gave one the right to view “traditional America as a fundamentally hypocritical society.”

Mr. Steele does not use the word, but authenticity also conferred virtue on those who chose it. Self-virtue is the ultimate consolation to be found in the poetic truth of the new politics that came into being in the 1960s, and millions of Americans, rich white liberals prominent among them—recall Leonard Bernstein’s famous party for the Black Panthers—gloried in it. These politics changed the nature of liberalism from a reform-minded, character-forming set of political ideas into “a broad, guilt-driven, moralistic liberalism in which at least a vague anti-Americanism was decency itself.” America, in this interpretation, is essentially evil, and those who oppose it from within are thereby good. Hence the claim to moral superiority of the protest groups—blacks, women, gays et al.—of our day. For black Americans, the claim to moral superiority took the form of grievance, boisterous, unrelenting and willfully blind to any evidence of progress.

The new liberalism, eager to bring about The Good (Mr. Steele’s capital letters), went in for social engineering to accomplish its missionary work. For Mr. Steele not The Good but true good “would include an incentive to minorities to in fact become equal with all others by talent and merit . . . [and] would ask minorities to assimilate into modernity even if that felt like self-betrayal. . . . And it would discourage them from building a group identity singularly focused on protest. . . . Instead, all would be focused on their becoming competitive.” Blacks, Mr. Steele argues, ran into serious discrimination in sports and music, and yet in these competitive fields “their excellence and merit ultimately prevailed over all else.”

As things now stand in American political life, the desire for equality has trumped freedom; self-virtue, honesty; and preferential programs, the development of character. The effect of these liberal victories has been to lessen the quality of American life. Consider the contemporary university, where the goal of diversity, enforced by the whiphand of political correctness, has brought in various minority studies, women’s and gay studies, and other intellectual vulgarities in the name of redressing old injustices and mollifying grievances. The humanities and the social sciences have become hopelessly tendentious, the ideal of truth besmirched and higher education itself turned sadly comic.

IMO the politics, particularly the party politics, of race relations in the United States is more complicated than that passage might lead you to believe. It is a matter of record that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted into law by a bipartisan vote in which three-fifths of Democrats voted “Yea” while just about 70% of Republicans voted “Yea”. In other words its passage required the supermajority of Republican votes. However, my judgment is that many of the Democrats who voted “Nay” would become Republicans within a few years while the Republicans who voted “Yea” would be considered RINOs by today’s standards and would probably be independents.

I also think that it’s true that the Democratic Party has not done right by its black constituents. For one coarse measurement about one in five Democrats is black. In the present Senate there’s only one black senator and he’s a Republican. It would be reasonable for ten of the Democrats to be black. Why are there no black Democratic senators?

There has been a robust dialogue in the black community over the last century or more over how that community should be advancing. A century ago the exemplars of two of the competing views were Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. A half century ago the contrasting views were exemplified by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Today I don’t think it’s completely out of line to point to Mr. Steele’s taking one side with most of the black intelligentsia arrayed against him.

Today we’re hearing calls for dialogue about race relations but it’s not clear to me what that means. “Dialogue” generally means a conversation in which both parties participate rather than a lecture, an airing of grievances, or a shouting match. I’m all for dialogue. Lectures or airing of grievances, not so much.

I wish I had some solutions. I don’t.