Shelby Steele, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has an incisive piece in The Wall Street Journal by that name.
Steele seeks to explain the spitefulness and pathos of present-day liberalism, the “incoherence and downright lunacy” in recent liberal marches as opposed to those of the 1960s, and — ultimately — liberals reflexively choosing moral self-congratulation over actually lifting the poor and minorities. After arguing that liberalism has become exhausted, he identifies the reason: “it has become a corruption.”
I commend the entire piece and hope it inspires change. Here’s a snippet:
This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one. …
Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.
This liberalism came into being not as an ideology but as an identity. It offered Americans moral esteem against the specter of American shame. This made for a liberalism devoted to the idea of American shamefulness. Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism’s unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.
