Of the two great societal goals—freedom and "the good"—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.Steele's massively cynical theory that Obama is only doing this to live up to the equally cynical expectations that our first black president must have thrust upon his shoulders by an equally cynical populace. It only works if you believe that government exists only to enrich politicians and is not capable of producing anything other than disaster...in short, you don't see a need for government at all and prefer rule by corporate plutocrat, and that the American people are equally both unable to see Obama scamming them all and yet are too stupid to see how all of politics exists only to placate the masses.
This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson's Great Society was grasping for moral authority after the civil rights movement. I doubt any white president could use it effectively today, and even ObamaCare passed by only a three vote margin in the House and with no Republican support at all. Worse, in the end, it passed not to bring the nation better health care but to pull a flailing Democratic presidency back from the brink.
There has always been a narcissistic charge around Mr. Obama, the sense that in embracing him one was embracing something special in oneself—and possibly even a larger idea of human perfectibility. Every politician wants this capacity to attract identification. But it is also a trap. What happens when people are embarrassed for having seen themselves in you?
The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory—a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him.
Mr. Obama's success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us.
Many presidents have been historically significant in retrospect, but Mr. Obama had historic significance on his inauguration day. His inauguration told a transcendent American story. Other presidents work forward into their legacy. Mr. Obama is working backwards into his.
In other words, your standard Glibertarian douchebaggery.
Imagine finding that particular viewpoint in the Wall Street Journal. He's our First Black President(tm) so he has to write his name in the moon with a huge laser or something, or he won't stand up to history's other First Black Anythings(tm). Pretty depressing world Steele lives in.
[UPDATE 2:50 PM] And Adam Serwer does a masterful job of relating Shelby Steele's long history of douchebaggery and then dismantling him with such utter completeness and pure skill usually reserved for the Mythbusters.
If you're Shelby Steele, though, you can't actually abandon your thesis, no matter how much harm you're doing the cause of conservatism or your party, because you offer a specific product -- reassurance to whites that anti-black racism is a thing of the past and that they've fulfilled their ethical obligations to blacks. Therefore, any substantive expansion of the social safety net isn't about social responsibility but exploitation. So to respond to Ezra Klein, Steele is bound to a vision of a world where black people's existence is defined by exploiting white guilt for personal advantage. So it doesn't occur to Steele that extending health-care coverage to 32 million people is a good in and of itself worth fighting for, because he likely sees it as merely a crude redistribution of resources from one race to another under terms he sees as unfair.Nice. Very nice.
If conservatives figure out Steele's product is useless -- nay harmful -- then he doesn't get paid for it, and his irrelevance as an intellectual becomes apparent. Steele accuses Obama of being a "bound man," but he finds himself bound to propping up a thesis that one tsunami after another leaves in ruins.
This is what is truly sad. Not only is Steele offering the same kind of reassurance to white conservatives that he accuses Obama of offering to whites in general, he doesn't even have the freedom to admit that he's wrong.
Shorter Shelby Steele:
ReplyDeleteWe warned you about this when you won the War of Northern Aggression.
But you elected one of them President anyway.
Now feel our wrath.
"And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering."
ReplyDelete"Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time."
Wow, this guy is dead on with those statements.
Also
"It only works if you believe that government exists only to enrich politicians and is not capable of producing anything other than disaster..."
What have they done right? Medicaid? Nope. Medicare? Nope. Social Security? Nope.
But lets turn a blind eye to those facts and give them another chance. Would you want to continually give your money to a stock broker if you've had several instances of pure failure in the past? No.
Well you might.
"in short, you don't see a need for government at all and prefer rule by corporate plutocrat"
That is how you picture everything, mean evil money grubbing bastards. You ignore the fact that the private market has gotten us so far. Yes there are assholes out there that would sell their own mother for $50, it's inevitable with life that with good comes bad, with right comes wrong.
It was a historic moment for this country when a black man was elected President. People are now only holding him to his word on the campaign trails of hope and change, transparency, etc.
Now I don't think it's far that a little more than a year in and people are calling his Presidency "failed." But it's not a stretch to say that if he stays on the path he's on that it will go down as such. There aren't enough liberal bloggers in the world to fix that.
Lastly for some it may be about race, you have Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton out there waiting in the wings to pounce on their next photo op coming to the rescue of someone else, but to most it really isn't. It's more about race to people that are black than it is to people who are white.
How many people voted for him just because he was black? If you say none you're a damned fool.
Now are there racists out there, yes most definitely. But why is it every time someone says something negative about him in the end one way or another it comes to "they're racist!"
I could care less if he was black or white, what I care about is what he does and what he says. He is definitely not what he says he is. He is just another politician.