Shelby Steele is sharp as a whip in his column of today in the WSJ Opinion Journal. Some of you may know Steele as the author of "The Content of Our Character" and other well-thought, and refreshingly honest, writings on the state of race relations in post-civil rights era America.
Today, he absolutely nails the reason why Howard Dean's appeal to guys with Confederate flags on their cars fell so flat: Dean's appeal reflected the limitations of the sort of identity politics that the Left has so long espoused.
A few great quotes:
In effect he was identifying a new race, a new neglected race and, thus, a new wellspring of political power and Democratic votes. He was using identity to seek political power in precisely the same way that Rev. Al Sharpton does.[...]
When Howard Dean brought Confederate-flag whites into identity politics, he implied one terrible thing: that whites, like other racial identity groups, have the right to pursue power in the name of their race. He inadvertently sanctioned one of history's most destructive formulas: race alone justifying power. And yet, had he reached out to angry black separatists, he would have been hailed as a racial healer. Why the difference? And how does it affect our politics?
[...]
Embracing atavistic identities too strongly leads to three great sins: asserting the inherent superiority of one's group over others, excluding others as inferiors, and invoking an enemy to fight in the name of one's superiority. White racism, black separatism, Islamic extremism and Nazism are all atavistic identities gone too far, gone to where one's superiority is confirmed only by the denigration and even annihilation of an enemy. Whenever power is pursued in the name of an atavism--my blackness, your whiteness, his Catholicism, her gender--enemies arise and our democracy of individuals is injured. This is true even when oppressed minorities pursue power in the name of their atavism rather than in the name of freedom.
[...]
White guilt--the need to win enough moral authority around race to prove that one is not a racist--is the price whites today pay for this history. Political correctness is a language that enables whites to show by wildly exaggerated courtesy that they are not racist; diversity does this for institutions. But white guilt's greatest taboo is the one that Howard Dean violated--assigning whites a racial identity out of which they can pursue power as whites.
Yet Mr. Dean did not cross this taboo as a racist; he crossed it as a hard-core liberal, a supporter of race-based affirmative action, who in the name of racial progress has learned to mentally compartmentalize Americans by atavisms. So used was he to acknowledging the atavistic identity of every minority in the country, it was no doubt a small leap to "include" Confederate-flag whites.
The underlying irony here is that white guilt has given America a liberalism that revives as virtue the precise moral formula at the core of fascism: power justified by race alone. Today a wealthy black will be preferred over the son of a white mailman at all of America's best universities. This of course is illiberalism of the same sort that segregation was.
Read the whole thing.
His basic point -- that racialism eventually brings us full-circle to the very problems of past racial supremacy -- should be obvious to anybody but the most willfully obtuse individuals.
Come to think of it, that pretty well describes the Left, these days.
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