I think this legislator represents a common American corruption that contributed greatly to the left-liberal-Democratic denouement of Nov. 8: the use of social policy on race and poverty more to display virtue than to solve social problems.
Since the late ’60s the left – which has generated most of America’s policies on race and poverty – has followed a simple paradigm. First it offered a structural explanation for the problems of minorities and the poor. They were seen as victims of institutional racism, corporate greed and bad educational systems, and the left created a social policy that tried to atone for their victimization with compassion. This policy of compensatory deference was driven more by the needs of those who devised it than by those it was supposed to help. It did not train or educate the poor, or end the discrimination that minorities faced. It simply showed deference to them in compensation for their suffering – a maneuver that made deference synonymous with social virtue. Thus countless Americans – like the legislator – could be utterly ignorant about affirmative action, yet still support it. Once deference is socially virtuous in itself, affirmative action is virtuous by definition.
Social reform was reduced to a seriesof expedient devices – group preferences, quotas, set-asides, redistricting, race and gender norming. After these devices came a vernacular of social virtue – diversity, multiculturalism, pluralism, role models, self-esteem and the endless stream of euphemisms associated with political correctness. It is a deferential language that enables us to signal our social virtue through talk alone. Compensatory deference is what defines political correctness, just as its absence defines incorrectness.
But a group preference is nota virtue, and a word like “diversity” is so vacuous that insome places it connotes integration, and in others (many college campuses) it justifies segregation. We don’t know whether multiculturalism blends or separates cultures. The American left doesn’t know either, doesn’t understand its own jerry-built nomenclatures or its imprecise ideas.
On Nov. 8 Americans voted, not against social virtue, but against the peculiar idea of virtue that emerged from the 1960s. This idea formed in reaction to a little-acknowledged yet extremely powerful effect of the civil-rights movement: the shame that marked America as it finally came to terms with its racial history. No nation can openly admit to three centuries of dehumanizing racial oppression without going through an era of crippling shame.
This sense of national disgrace – quickly compounded in the ’60s by a misguided war, a women’s movement, a youth rebellion and even an environmental movement – sank the nation into a conundrum. Shame put America in great need of social redemption, but it also robbed the country of the moral authority to pursue that redemption in a principled way. How could a society that had been living by white entitlements suddenly seek redemptive social justice by asking its former victims to pursue difficult democratic principles – advancement by merit and equal and colorblind opportunity?
Social policymaking over the last 30 years was made by people and institutions lacking in moral authority to make principled decisions. Policy was made defensively to protect institutions from shame and the threat of legal action. Institutions that had discriminated now offered minorities the same group entitlements whites had long enjoyed. Racial quotas came in during the Nixon administration, not because Republicans believed in them, but because they lacked the moral authority to resist them.
American liberalism had a chance back in, say, 1968 to help the nation reclaim an honest sense of social virtue. Suppose liberals had rolled up their sleeves and insisted that minorities achieve academically at the same level as others, and then helped them to do so? Suppose they had said to those who had been oppressed that now – through a commitment to rigor and principle – you will develop an excellence that makes your equality manifest? What if liberalism had made minority schools as academically rigorous as the best suburban schools? And suppose it was an article of the liberal faith that making excuses for minority underachievement only extended their oppression? Instead, liberalism gave short shrift to achievement among minority students until they were 18, and then gave them a preferential admission to college – a tactic that makes universities seem virtuous but leaves blacks with a college dropout rate of more than 72 percent.
Today America appears to be emerging from its era of shame and to be searching for a new and more pragmatic idea of virtue. Although it is not yet apparent whether American conservatism (of the populist, downsizing, tax-cutting and decentralizing variety) offers such an idea, it clearly has been much enhanced by the nation’s exhaustion with virtue-driven social engineering. With the recent elections, there was the feeling that we were witnessing the rejection of old ideas as much as embracing new ones, so it is hard to say whether a new notion of virtue has emerged. And certainly conservatism comes to power with a stunning lack of moral authority over the issues of poverty and race. Conservatives can pick apart liberals for their tiresome excesses, but there is no denying that conservatives had to be dragged into an acceptance of racial tolerance. What’s more, free-market conservatism seems inherently to “blame the victim,” to see a failure to thrive as a failure of character. Against this image, a reference to “orphanages” (an idea worth considering under a different name) plays as a sneer, a bullying remark by those who would be cruel to the poor.
But I think there is anhonesty in conservatism about how people actually get ahead in society that can be extremely helpful to minorities and the poor. Why should the underprivileged be encouraged to depend on American idealism rather than to participate in its pragmatism? Under liberalism, little was asked of minorities and the poor except that they linger in an identity of victimization and grievance. Today’s conservatives – Democrat or Republican – can win converts among these groups if they compassionately teach the values that the vast majority of Americans endorse: hard work, entrepreneurialism, strong education and family stability. Whether there is an effort to teach and bring people along will be the ultimate test of whether the election represented a shift to conservative meanness or a return to Jeffersonian democracy and the classic liberalism of individual freedom and responsibility. My hope is that today’s conservative will turn out to be a classic liberal.
64% would be upset if cuts in government benefits for illegal immigrants lead to discrimination against legal immigrants who work and pay taxes
