I try to avoid lazy blogging – posting a huge excerpt of an article and adding a sentence or two of my own opinion – but today I’ll be lazy because Shelby Steele’s recent article is a must-read, and long-time readers are familiar with my view on Republicans “reaching out” to blacks. I vote for Republicans based on shared values, and I will never understand why that’s not a good-enough way to attract anybody, regardless of race. However, I don’t think the GOP will ever attract a significant number of minorities (which is not a bad thing, by the way). Why? Here’s my theory.
Steele offers his theory in “Why the GOP Can’t Win With Minorities.” He writes:
“[C]onservatism 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.’
…
“What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other — two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior.
“The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks — one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.
“Liberalism’s glamour follows from its promise of a new American innocence. But the appeal of conservatism is relief from this supercilious idea. Innocence is not possible for America. This nation did what it did. And conservatism’s appeal is that it does not bank on the recovery of lost innocence. It seeks the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people. The challenge for conservatives today is simply self-acceptance, and even a little pride in the way we flail away at problems with an invisible hand.”
