Shelby Steele wants you to believe the rift between the GOP and minorities is an accident of history

Shelby Steele takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal today to diagnose the causes of the rift between conservatives and minorities, and concludes that the problem is one of narrative and symbolism. Simply put, Democrats offered a better feel-good narrative about their attempts to help the country rise up from Jim Crow racism.

If you could at least seem to redeem America of its past sins, you could win enough moral authority to claim real political power. Lyndon Johnson devastated Barry Goldwater because — among other reasons — he seemed bent on redeeming America of its shameful racist past, while Goldwater’s puritanical libertarianism precluded his even supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s Great Society grandly advertised a new American racial innocence. If it utterly failed to “end poverty in our time,” it succeeded — through a great display of generosity toward minorities and the poor — in recovering enough moral authority to see the government through the inexorable challenges of the ’60s.

Democrats, Steele says, succeeded with African Americans not so much because they helped African Americans, but because they were seen as at least trying to do something. And there’s probably something to that. But Steele goes wrong when he looks at the other half of the equation. Conservatives, he suggests, have been undone by their noble devotion to the timeless principles of individual freedom. And that simply couldn’t compete with the showy activism of the left:

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.

Well, there’s a reason for that.

Let’s take affirmative action as an example. Conservatives are correct that, all things being equal, no university or corporation should have to set aside positions for minorities — it unfairly works against the merit system. But all things aren‘t equal, though they’re much closer now than ever. Conservatives don’t seem to realize (or simply want to forget) that a sort of affirmative action existed for hundreds of years, giving wealth, jobs and education to white people — no matter how more qualified a black person might have been for those opportunities. When the civil rights movement swept away Jim Crow in the 1960s, conservatives suggested that affirmative action amounted to a kind of racism. But without programs aimed at rectifying the past by diversifying student ranks and corporate rosters, entire communities that started out left behind would’ve stayed behind. Perhaps conservatives didn’t intend for their opposition to affirmative action to be seen as an attempt to consolidate the gains of white people, but that’s how it was perceived. You can’t blame African Americans for thinking that that conservatism wasn’t allied with their interests.

Beyond that, though, Steele is greatly mistaken to suggest that liberals were active and that conservatives (by implication) were passive. During the civil rights era, it was liberals like LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr. who lead the way while leading conservative publications like National Review sneered and fretted about the breakdown in societal order. And conservatives were very active — in the 1970s, 80s and 90s — at using the racial grievances of whites to attract votes to the Republican Party. Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms were former segregationists who switched to the GOP in the years following the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s. And the GOP adopted a “Southern strategy” of appealing to racist whites — albeit in coded terms. How do we know? Because the GOP just apologized for that strategy a few years ago! Why apologize for something you haven’t done? Under the circumstances, even people who might’ve bought the “reverse racism” angle of conservatism’s opposition to affirmative action spent decades understanding it was entirely rational for African Americans to flee to the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party.

And you know what? Even as a liberal, I think that sucks. It sucks for the Republican Party, sure, which finds itself on the short end of the demographic stick in a diversifying nation. But it mostly sucks for African Americans, who by and large haven’t had access to a full political marketplace.

Steele is wrong, however. Conservatives were not fated to an existence largely free of minority support. They made their own destiny.

UPDATE: Because I have conservative friends, I want to make clear I don’t think that all or even most conservatives are racist. But the Republican Party — which is the main political/institutional expression of conservatism — has acted in ways that sought to capitalize on racism. Some conservatives — like Steele — are so in love with the sterling purity of conservative ideas that they don’t seem to realize that most people will be inclined to judge the acts and their results.