Anyone who missed, as I did, the impressive column by Shelby Steele in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal should drop everything and rush over there to read it. (A thoughtful reader, seeing no comment on it here, brought it to my attention.) For those of you without a subscription, here are some highlights.
I do not like the Confederate flag. It excludes me, profoundly….
But when Howard Dean spoke of those “guys with Confederate flags in their pick-up trucks,” I don’t think he was letting slip a long repressed affection for white supremacy and the lost Confederacy. He was playing identity politics, the new “progressive” and “inclusive” politics of our age. 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.
….
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.
….
For at least a minute, Howard Dean … wanted to be Al Sharpton, and use race to carve out a territory of votes that would be atavistically loyal, locked up for him by identity itself. These voters would look at him and see a white man not afraid to be proud, a “brother” as it were.
But if Mr. Dean shouldn’t act this way, why does modern liberalism encourage minorities to? Today, only the strictures against a white racial identity keep us at all civilized around race. Only whites are asked to put their race aside and behave as citizens. Our best hope is the fact that there are many minorities who want to live as citizens too.
You really should read the whole thing if you can. I do have one very small quibble with one of Steele’s formulations, more a preference for a different wording than a disagreement. Steele writes that “[w]hen 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.” But it was not Dean who brought the good ole boys into identity politics. As the totality of Steele’s column demonstrates, all Dean did was to recognize, for a moment, that the logic of identity politics entitled them to recognition.
Some pre-war Southern nationalists (don’t even ask which war) came to view white Southerners as a separate and distinct race of “Southrons.” Now the idea of race has been largely discredited, but in its place we’ve decided to treat ethnic groups (think Hispanics/Latinos) as though they were races, because of their “culture.” One can argue about whether white Southerners share a culture or whether redneck culture is only a subculture, but most people, especially most Dean-leaning liberals, would readily agree that something is different down there.
As Carol Swain argued so eloquently in a new book I discussed here, if you play the race card, others will, too.
