The black conservative is something of an enigma. And Shelby Steele is no different, even if he has a level of self-awareness.
Today conservatism is stigmatized in our culture as an antiminority political philosophy. In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.
John McCain received somewhere between three and four percent of the black vote, which was only a point or two worse than George W. Bush’s performances. Therefore, any black man or woman who is willing to self-identify as a conservative is definitionally something of a novelty. Steele recognizes his position as a ‘fish out of water’ without really contemplating what it means to be starved of oxygen by your own free choice. He elides that whole discussion and focuses on the self-imposed hindrances that prevent Republicans from doing effective outreach to the black and brown communities. For Steele, it is conservatives’ love of principle that creates the chasm.
The recent election revealed a Republican Party — largely white, male and Southern — seemingly on its way to becoming a “regional” party. Still, an appeal targeted just at minorities — reeking as it surely would of identity politics — is anathema to most conservatives. Can’t it be assumed, they would argue, that support of classic principles — individual freedom and equality under the law — constitutes support of minorities?
To appeal to blacks as blacks is to engage in ‘identity politics’ and must be avoided. The conservative’s appeal is to the full humanity of black people, and there is something generous in this refusal to reduce a person to their skin tone and cultural heritage. In treating the black person, not as black, but as human, the conservative is elevating them to full personhood. The white liberal’s pandering, on the other hand, is a sleight of hand that perpetuates a system of second-class citizenship. Or, so Steele sees things.
Yet, even if we can see a glimmer of logic in Steele’s thinking, how easily he ignores the facts staring him straight in the face. If conservatives truly treated blacks as equal under the law and respected their individual freedom, then they wouldn’t seek to disenfranchise them every time election day rolls around. There would be sufficient voting machines in black neighborhoods, and whole campaigns wouldn’t be premised on demonizing groups like ACORN and making false claims of voter fraud. Blacks wouldn’t be disproportionately stricken from the voter rolls, and new requirements for voting would not be created with the sole purpose of depressing black turnout. If conservatives respected black people’s rights, they wouldn’t permit drug war laws that define every petty crime as a felony and then allow felons to be permanently disenfranchised.
For blacks to take conservative principles seriously, they’d have to see a much different record of the principles in action. Steele doesn’t seem to recognize this problem. Instead, he interprets post-civil rights history as a dichotomy between black victimization and white liberal guilt. In his interpretation, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act caused a national trauma by simple acknowledgment of historical oppression. How did conservatives and blacks become so alienated from each other?
I think it began in a very specific cultural circumstance: the dramatic loss of moral authority that America suffered in the 1960s after openly acknowledging its long mistreatment of blacks and other minorities. Societies have moral accountability, and they cannot admit to persecuting a race of people for four centuries without losing considerable moral legitimacy. Such a confession — honorable as it may be — virtually calls out challenges to authority. And in the 1960s challenges emerged from everywhere — middle-class white kids rioted for “Free Speech” at Berkeley, black riots decimated inner cities across the country, and violent antiwar protests were ubiquitous. America suddenly needed a conspicuous display of moral authority in order to defend the legitimacy of its institutions against relentless challenge.
This is an amazing thesis, and it is quite telling. For Steele, America lost moral legitimacy when it gave blacks civil and voting rights. We could have an interesting debate here about epistemology and coherentism because we might grant that the country experienced a feeling of illegitimacy without agreeing that that feeling was legitimately felt. Certainly, the 1960’s saw a general erosion of respect and deference for authority that has yet to be repaired. And, without question, the modern conservative movement was shaped and conceived as an answer to this sudden lack of legitimacy. Conservatives sought to buck up respect for authority (although not in the press or universities), the military, traditional religious teaching, the president. Most people would not see this as a reaction to civil rights, but to the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War, civil disorder, changing sexual mores, and Watergate. The country’s elites discredited themselves and the culture changed, and people began to doubt the truth of the foundational American myths. The one area during the 1960’s where America gained legitimacy was in finally living out the meaning of its creeds by eliminating the Jim Crow laws. And Steele insists on seeing that struggle as de-legitimizing, as if no one noticed Jim Crow until it was gone.
And, having conceived of the civil rights struggle in this upside-down way, Steele creates a mythological subsequent history where white liberals are constantly trying to assuage their guilt and redeem the sins of the past, and blacks are constantly trying to turn their historic grievances into a currency to buy something of value. And, because conservatives refuse to perform on this playing field, they wind up on the sidelines with nothing to contribute to the black community. Steele describes this process:
When redemption became a term of power, “redemptive liberalism” was born — a new activist liberalism that gave itself a “redemptive” profile by focusing on social engineering rather than liberalism’s classic focus on individual freedom. In the ’60s there was no time to allow individual freedom to render up the social good. Redemptive liberalism would proactively engineer the good. Name a good like “integration,” and then engineer it into being through a draconian regimen of school busing. If the busing did profound damage to public education in America, it gave liberals the right to say, “At least we did something!” In other words, we are activists against America’s old sin of segregation. Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.
But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like “diversity” as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences. Conservatism would enforce the principles that ensure individual freedom, and then allow “the good” to happen by “invisible hand.”
And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.
Set aside that conservatives need to stop singing songs like ‘Barack the Magic Negro’ if they want to solve their ‘great problem’ with minorities. People in need, and black community is still relatively needy, are not interested in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. The invisible hand didn’t issue the Emancipation Proclamation or sign the Voting Rights Act into law. The invisible hand is a tautological argument that things are as they must be, and for good reason, and that any change will come deterministically and as a matter of course. Martin Luther King Jr. rejected that logic, as we can see from his post-Selma speech on March 25, 1965.
I know there is a cry today in Alabama, (Uh huh) we see it in numerous editorials: “When will Martin Luther King, SCLC, SNCC, and all of these civil rights agitators and all of the white clergymen and labor leaders and students and others get out of our community and let Alabama return to normalcy?”
But I have a message that I would like to leave with Alabama this evening. (Tell it) That is exactly what we don’t want, and we will not allow it to happen, (Yes, sir) for we know that it was normalcy in Marion (Yes, sir) that led to the brutal murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson. (Speak) It was normalcy in Birmingham (Yes) that led to the murder on Sunday morning of four beautiful, unoffending, innocent girls. It was normalcy on Highway 80 (Yes, sir) that led state troopers to use tear gas and horses and billy clubs against unarmed human beings who were simply marching for justice. (Speak, sir) It was normalcy by a cafe in Selma, Alabama, that led to the brutal beating of Reverend James Reeb.
It is normalcy all over our country (Yes, sir) which leaves the Negro perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of vast ocean of material prosperity. It is normalcy all over Alabama (Yeah) that prevents the Negro from becoming a registered voter. (Yes) No, we will not allow Alabama (Go ahead) to return to normalcy. [Applause]
The only normalcy that we will settle for (Yes, sir) is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgment to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. (Yes, sir) The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice.
And so as we go away this afternoon, let us go away more than ever before committed to this struggle and committed to nonviolence. I must admit to you that there are still some difficult days ahead. We are still in for a season of suffering in many of the black belt counties of Alabama, many areas of Mississippi, many areas of Louisiana. I must admit to you that there are still jail cells waiting for us, and dark and difficult moments. But if we will go on with the faith that nonviolence and its power can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, we will be able to change all of these conditions.
And so I plead with you this afternoon as we go ahead: remain committed to nonviolence. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man. (Yes)
I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” (Speak, sir) Somebody’s asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?” Somebody’s asking, “When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?” Somebody’s asking, “When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, (Speak, speak, speak) plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, (Speak) and truth bear it?” (Yes, sir)
I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, (Yes, sir) however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, (No sir) because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” (Yes, sir)
How long? Not long, (Yes, sir) because “no lie can live forever.” (Yes, sir)
How long? Not long, (All right. How long) because “you shall reap what you sow.” (Yes, sir)
How long? (How long?) Not long: (Not long)
Truth forever on the scaffold, (Speak)
Wrong forever on the throne, (Yes, sir)
Yet that scaffold sways the future, (Yes, sir)
And, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above his own.
How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. (Yes, sir)
How long? Not long, (Not long) because:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; (Yes, sir)
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; (Yes)
He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword; (Yes, sir)
His truth is marching on. (Yes, sir)
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; (Speak, sir)
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat. (That’s right)
O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant my feet!
Our God is marching on. (Yeah)
Glory, hallelujah! (Yes, sir) Glory, hallelujah! (All right)
Glory, hallelujah! Glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on. [Applause]
For Steele, the grinding poverty of which King spoke could only be addressed by the invisible hand. Once legal obstacles were removed that denied blacks their full personhood, all subsequent efforts to help blacks were some combination of white guilt and white effort at restoring the legitimacy of America’s founding myths. This is a truncated understanding of the progressive mind. And Steele’s understanding of the black mind is no more generous.
Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.
And this identity calls minorities to an anticonservative orientation to American politics. It makes for an almost ancestral resistance to conservatism. One’s identity of grievance is flattered by the moral activism of the left and offended by the invisible hand of the right. Minorities feel they were saved from oppression by the left’s activism, not by the right’s discipline…
So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures — with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation. Today’s liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. It remains competitive with — even ascendant over — conservatism because it addresses America’s moral accountability to its past with moral activism.
In this telling, blacks cannot be a part of the liberal project, but only its beneficiaries or its unintended victims. Blacks are only attracted to the liberal program because liberals are seen as trying to right historical wrongs. But even in this twisted vision of Steele’s, he never can articulate what conservatism has to offer black people aside from a promise to treat them as people with full rights. But conservatives do not, and never have, treated blacks as people with full rights. And that is why people look at people like Shelby Steele and say, “N—–, please.”