Post-racial conservatism
Shelby Steele in The Wall Street Journal:
"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. This is the left's great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures -- or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism -- he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?"
Read here.
"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. This is the left's great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures -- or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism -- he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?"
Read here.
Don't you just love Shelby Steele? Whatever I understand about liberals and liberalism (I'm referring to the voters, not the politicians) I've learned from Shelby Steele. Having grown up in a very small town where the blacks had very little in common with each other, and whose best friends were white, I'm still something of a racial innocent. I was surprised in college to find the black students eating together in the cafeteria, and a black friend of mine was deeply hurt by the racism he encountered in the Army. He had no defenses, having grown up where he did, and the effect on him was profound. Steele's op-eds in the WSJ and Peter Robinson's interviews of him at NRO have been a real education.
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