I first thought Michael Steele had the potential to at least be a credible black spokesman for the GOP. Boy was I wrong! He has been a joke to this point. But not to be outdone, in steps the Cato institute's Shelby Steele (not related to Michael except by ideology). His last article in the Wall St Journal has really gotten the Black Blogosphere up in arms.
See Shelby wrote an essay in response to why the GOP can't win minorities, and decided "it's not me, it's you!" Why the GOP Can't Win With Minorities.
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.
Shelby Steele continues:
Added to this, American minorities of color -- especially blacks -- are often born into grievance-focused identities. The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones. To separate from grievance -- to say simply that one is no longer racially aggrieved -- will surely feel like an act of betrayal that threatens to cut one off from community, family and history. So, paradoxically, a certain chauvinism develops around one's sense of grievance. Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.
See only we black people see ourselves as victims. Unlike conservatives who claim they are victims of the: Mainstream media, coastal elites, Hollywood, a secular school system, and the courts, only we black people claim to be victims!
Furthermore, it's amazing after evil liberal white democrats fooled black people by helping to: elect the nations first black president, a black governor in Massachusetts, and the state senate and house leaders in Colorado, black people can't figure out that the democratic party doesn't care and uses them. Luckily the WSJ post some stale tripe from a black libertarian to set us straight!
Good thing some people in the blogosphere gave them a smack down. First up was The Field Negro:
Shelby Steele's issue with liberalism is a classic one. It is typical of what you hear from conservatives: Liberals give blacks handouts, they promote big government, and liberalism creates dependency. Conservatism, on the other hand, offers nothing but a chance to make it in our great country. But it takes hard work and discipline, and with conservatism, there is no handouts. He argues that Lyndon Johnson, with his Great Society programs, took the moral high ground at a time when A-merry-ca's morality was being questioned for her shameful racial legacy. Republicans never recovered from that, and they are still playing catch up today.
Of course, he argues,that as black people, we are misguided in our loyalties. Liberalism actually takes away our humanity, while with conservatism, on the other hand, we can maintain our dignity as humans, and not get caught up in victim hood and racial identity politics.
"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.... 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."
Right there, Shelby, is the problem with your well written essay. You only saw yourself as a person of color in two ways: "A racial determination of segregation" and the subject of "white" liberal paternalism. You should have said no to both of those choices. It wasn't one or the other. Both were destined to make you the man you became: Someone who chooses a selfish ideology which is predicated on chasing a carrot that you will never be able to grab. By embracing that ideology you have bought into the false premise that your people seek the liberal handout and are not willing to work as hard as the conservative to grab the carrot. It is not true. I submit to you that your people (and poor people of all colors) are willing to work harder. The problem is that their government has never been willing to work as hard for them. Instead, their government has worked only for a special few, and contrary to what you might believe, it didn't neglect you, it used you to achieve its own goals. At least with liberalism, with all its faults, there was a realization that it should make you a promise, and that promise was that never again will you be subjected to second class status, and our government will always work to make it so. Our government will finally give you an even playing field to compete on, after tipping the field against you for so long.
Next over at Jack and Jill Politics two diarist picked up on this thread. Jack and Jill for those who haven't read it before is one of (if not the best) black political blogs. (Hope they rock the house at Net Nation!) First The Christian Progressive Liberal writes:
And maybe the GOP can’t win with minorities is because they’re too used to telling us to GET THE HELL OUT whenever we want to be included.
The GOP can’t win with Minorities because they are home-grown, inbred, bigots, and that disease is generational and TERMINAL as long as they want to hold on to it.
They can’t win with POC because look at how they treat the twos and fews that dare enter their group - Stepin Fetchit was treated better than Michael Steele was the day he got bitch-slapped by Rush Limbaugh, the current HEAD OF THE GOP.
Speaking of Rush, HE’S THE MAIN REASON why the GOP can’t with with POC. HE’S YOUR LEADER. YOU OWN HIM, AND WE WANT NO PART OF A BLOATED BIGOT WHO GOT OUT OF SERVING HIS COUNTRY IN VIETNAM BECAUSE HE HAD A BOIL ON HIS ASS. Rush raises hell on TV and radio because he knows damned well to come down to the ‘hood and talk that noise earns him a cap in his ass.
Second at Jack and Jill POlitics comes DailyKos alumni (where has he been we miss his writing?) dnA:
Steele’s attempts to maximize conservative white innocence got a sprinkle of John Yoo in his op-ed yesterday for the Wall Street Journal. Steele says America "suffered" in the sixties from a loss of moral legitimacy due to its confrontation with its racist past and present. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the laws that finally extended equal protection to black folks — in Steele’s eyes, these are signs of America’s weakness, the results of an "activist liberalism" that Steele summarily dismisses as urban riots and "school busing". Steele is attempting to discredit the achievements of liberal integrationists, but his argument could just as well be applied to the enablers of torture: It is as though moral authority is lost in the confession, rather than the acts that precede it.
OUCH! See it seems Steele comes from the "hush crowd". The hush crowd is the tradition that says you shouldn't speak up about abuse, or you will embarrass yourself and not the perpetrator. But dnA goes on to make a large point:
Steele has little need for history. "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," he writes, as though William F. Buckley never wrote that "the South must prevail" in the fight against integration, as though Strom Thurmond never became a Republican and Trent Lott never wished Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign had succeeded. Finally — and this is Steele’s role in the Republican Party — he assures conservatives that nothing need change, that there is no past to be ashamed of, and thus no past misdeeds to account for:
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.
The question that comes to mind is why Steele "secretly" loved Malcolm more than Martin. When I was growing up, this was not a controversial sentiment. Accepting that Steele does love Malcolm, (and he leaves noticeably absent the fact that Malcolm felt Islam was the path to that racial dignity–that is too real for the WSJ) it must remain secret only because a conservatism that has denigrated and excluded black intellectual and artistic achievement has never been able to accept Malcolm as anything other than a demagogue. For such things Steele has no answer, only a deceptive rewriting of history in which conservatives did not oppose civil rights and equal protection for blacks. "In fact it took both activism and principle, civil war and social movement, to end this oppression," Steele writes. Well, which part were conservatives involved in? Minorities are dominated by a "culture of grievance" not shared by conservatives, according to Steele. But it’s hard to imagine a more aggrieved culture than the one that now dominates the right, marked by its petty "tea parties," incessant whining about the press not actively flacking for conservative ideas, complaints about the decline of the "white male power structure", or the idea that liberals want everyone to "bend over" for Obama "because his father was black."
Steele's op-ed has been so discredited amongst black blogs that it has even begone to creep in the mots "traditional media" of all blogs The Root (which is owned by the Washington Post). Shelby Steele: The GOP Can't Win Either.
Despite the cringe-inducing title of his last book, "A Bound Man: Why We're Excited About Barack Obama and Why He Can’t Win" (out in paperback, y'all!), Shelby Steele is still being afforded the "credibility" of expressing himself on the WALL STREET JOURNAL’s opinion page.
YUP Steele wrote a book on how Obama couldn't win. It explains how Black people will you guessed "feel like victims for his loss", and how liberal will take advantage of this. See it wouldn't have been America's racism, but Obama's "liberal Marxist" beliefs that lead to his defeat. A funny thing happened America looked at both candidates and chose the better one. But See Steele is a conservative. Conservatives whether in foreign policy (Iraq's Weapon of Mass destruction), Finance (deregulation of Wall St.), or politics (pundits who said Hilary was inevitable or McCain was ahead), are never held accountable for being completely wrong! They just never get the expert label taken from them! Once an expert always an expert no matter how wrong you are. But I digress, Dayo Olopade at The Root continues:
Here’s Steele’s valiant attempt to explain to the tastemakers why black people aren’t, on the whole, Republicans:
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.
I believe that by "failed moral activism" he means the entire Democratic governing agenda from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. (What, I wonder, might Steele think of Bill Clinton’s assorted slaps at black folk, or Richard Nixon’s domestic liberalism?) This is, just to point out, a strong divergence of perspective from, say George Packer, who believes, with E.J. Dionne, that the GOP’s shrill, "disciplinary" approach is in fact helping them win the current debates over the Recovery Act, earmarks, and the proper role and nature of government. But Steele continues:
Added to this, American minorities of color -- especially blacks -- are often born into grievance-focused identities. The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones..... Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.
Aah, the old "you're making this up" argument.
Say it plain: It is not racial but economic repression that has been the great scourge of American public life. Slavery, after all, was transactional. And it was not purely racism but the impact of racist legislation from both parties that "redlined" black communities and kept them from acquiring wealth. But today, it is, as Michael Dawson wrote for THE ROOT, conservatives who mock the precocious Ty'Sheoma Bethea for writing to the President—while her Republican governor threatens to reject funds that might improve the lot of students like her. And it is the Republican economic policy that crafted deregulated financial products and made Jamaica, Queens—a historically middle class black neighborhood and the single county in America where median African American income levels were higher than white income levels—still the target for subprime lenders, who pushed the bad mortgages onto 60 percent of its residents.
In my humble opinion if the GOP want's to win minority votes it has a choice to make. Is it serious about reaching out to minorities, or does it just want to reach out to moderates whites who hate bigots? See pushing people like the two Steeles (Michael and Shelby) to the forefront is more about reasoning moderate-conservatives in the Midwest that the GOP doesn't hate black and brown people, then it is about winning black and brown votes. Shelby's whole op-ed is hard to read any other way. I have had a hard time finding any black person (yes even conservative ones) who weren't insulted after reading it. Instead it's more about telling conservatives "it's not that you ideas need retouching, but that the people who you are trying to sell it too aren't smart enough to accept it."
To truly reach out the GOP would need to come down like an iron fist on all the right-wing shock jocks who constantly feed AM talk radio listeners racial hatred. See "Political Correctness" is a what cry baby conservatives say when they are called out for being rude or bigot's. The GOP would need to tell them to cut the crap.
To reach Latinos the GO would need to decided between the jingoistic nativism it's been pushing and a welcome mat. Call for an end to both DWB (driving while black and driving while brown), call for real immigration reform, and call for more federal funding of ELSA classes instead of English only laws. See the GOP has only one one group of Latinos consistently, Cuban Americans. But the dems are starting to make inroads there. Also Castro is getting older, at some point Cuba will open up and Cuban Americans will have to deal with the immigration issue. At that point the GOP's nativism will take center stage. If Cubans become a 50/50 group, the GOP can't gerrymander south Florida no matter how good their computers are. A 50/50 Cuban American vote means the GOP can't win FL in a presidential. Does the GOP really want this?
One of the least celebrated presidents in American history is Lydon Johnson. Johnson new that signing the voting rights act would doom the democrats in the south for a generation (actually it was two) but he did it anyways. Because it was the right thing to do. Until Shelby Steele and his audience come to terms with this they won't improve their showing. Is the GOP willing to lose the vote of their cultural bigots because it is the right thing to do? I doubt it!