Shelby Steele Gets It!

I met Shelby Steele several years ago when he was promoting his award-winning book of essays, The Content of Our Character, in which he urged African-Americans to live up to the ideals put forth by Martin Luther King in his great "I Have A Dream" speech. At the time I was immensely impressed both by the man and by his thought processes, and he has continued to rise in my estimation ever since.

Steele's latest book is White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. William Murchison reviews in in the Washington Times. He states Steele's central argument thusly:

In the context of the civil rights revolution, whites, to expiate their guilt for "centuries of oppression," vacated their moral authority, their power to differentiate right from wrong and act upon the distinction. When it came to race, whites weren't to "judge" any longer. Black "leaders," supported and egged on by the white cultural rebels of the 1960s and '70s, saw their chance and took it. All they had to do to get money, preferment or both was open their mouths and rub in the guilt.

"White guilt," says Shelby Steele, "had inadvertently opened up racism as the single greatest opportunity available to blacks from the mid-sixties on -- this for a people with no other ready source of capital with which to launch itself into greater freedom." It has come about that "We blacks always experience white guilt as an incentive, almost a command, to somehow exhibit racial woundedness and animus."

What Steele describes is a mechanism by which, with frightening rapidity, cultural standards of all kinds [not just those dealing with race] were abandoned -- what some have called the "demoralizing" of America and Pat Moynihan called "defining deviancy down." Outrage, woundedness and animus became the common currency of public discourse. We are living with the results of that process today and trying to recover from them.

And here is where President Bush comes in.

In the more broadly humane policies of the Bush administration, Mr. Steele sees some expiation for the idiocies of the past. Yes, Mr. Bush engages in dissociation. He talks the talk, appoints the blacks. But he gets it.

"His 'bigotry of low expectations' statement was the first and most far-reaching enunication of social policy" since the Great Society, writes Mr. Steele. "It offered a new direction for social reform and, especially, a new theory: dissociation from the racist past through principle and individual responsibility rather than at the expense of those things. Mr. Bush is the first conservative president to openly compete with the left in the arena of ideas around poverty, education, and race. He has attempted to establish conservatism as a philosophy of social reform."

Exactly!!!!!

Steele gets it. He understands that George W. Bush is one of the great ones -- a man of vision who challenges all of us to rise to new levels of endeavor and accomplishment, to take some responsibility for the state of the world and our society as it is and to try to do better. In both domestic and foreign affairs Bush has sketched out a vision of a better world and taken concrete steps to achieve it. This is why he is so much despised by the forces of reaction arrayed against him and this is why he is a far greater man than any of his critics.