On the whole "in praise of liberal guilt" thing, I wish to associate myself with Ross Douthat's critical distinction between shame and guilt.
How is it possible to be guilty over something you had no control over, that happened before you were even born? Certainly I am ashamed of racial segregation, especially as it was carried out in the South, where I'm from. But guilty? How does that work, exactly? Ron Rosenbaum, who raised the issue with his Slate essay, says conservaitves are the ones who should feel guilty. Well, to what extent are black conservatives like Thomas Sowell supposed to be guilty of the sins of other conservatives with whom they no doubt disagreed?
And: If conservatives today are supposed to feel guilt (versus shame) over the historical record of conservative cowardice on segregation, then let us see liberals owning up to their guilt for having been wrong on communism. Shall we? Hello? [crickets chirping]
Actually, I really don't care if liberals admit their actual guilt on this point -- and obviously, there were many anti-communist liberals, but still -- because I don't know any prominent liberals today who are sympathetic to communism. Who, outside of a few academic circles, is? There is no communism to be sympathetic to. Similarly, what would be the point of conservatives admitting that they were on the wrong side of the race question during the civil rights era? It would matter if there were conservatives arguing for segregation or racist policies today. But there aren't. Liberals won that one. They're trying to argue that because conservatives were wrong about race then, they are always and forever tainted from having their views on racial policy and racial justice taken seriously. Which is not so much an argument as an attempt at moral bullying.
I do think it's a little queasy-making how easy it is for conservatives under the age of 50 -- that's me -- to fail to understand how heavily America's racial past weighs on the present. I suspect that at least some of this is a defensive tack taken in the face of the unwillingness of many liberals to allow any dissent from the party line, at the cost of being identified as a racist. That is, it's difficult to say, "Yes, conservatives were badly wrong on civil rights, but that doesn't mean that they're wrong today," because the left, in debate, tends to assume that the original sin of having been wrong in 1964 is ineradicable, and won't give any quarter. You can never win with liberals on racial questions, conservatives may figure, so it's better to adopt a defiant insouciance -- even if that attitude is not morally justified by the record. I dunno, it's a theory.
"Liberal guilt" is made fun of by conservatives only insofar as it's the basis for political correctness. That is, when guilt over the sins of the past prevents people today from seeing things clearly, or allows them to grant unjust privileges to favored victim groups, then it becomes a weakness that ought to be resisted. And made fun of. The people who are so filled with guilt over racism, classism and sexism that they won't take their own side in an argument tend to be white liberals.
But you watch: 25 years from now, my kids will be telling me, "Dad, you are so weighed down by guilt over the Iraq War that your foreign policy views can't be taken seriously."
UPDATE: Steve Sailer, citing someone else's brilliant definition of liberal guilt:
I feel terrible about what those other people did! About what I do, not so much.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Steve
Both sides should take responsibility for the failed war on drugs and its effects.
A-freaking-men. The drug policy has become wedged in place because people on the left and right both like it for insanely stupid reasons.
WRT to the left...there are whole communities that have been ripped apart by the drug war, but left politicians like to pretend they were ripped apart by the drugs themselves. Drugs are not responsible for a huge percentage of all black males having been within the prison system, laws are. Drugs are not responsibly for shootouts between dealers on public streets, the vast amounts of money in any illegal trade are. Drugs are not responsibly for police shaking down and harassing people who live in certain areas, the laws against drugs are.
But there are so many inner cities that have decided it's the drugs to blame, and the only way to solve the problem is to outlaw them 'more' and send more people to prison and get more police and put more money in the drug trade. It's just sheer stupidity at this point.
Meanwhile, the right has decided to treat it as a moral issue. Which means they're the Progressive movement in the 20s and this is prohibition...and they don't seem to grasp how poorly that worked, or that somehow they've ended on the 'Progressive' side of the street. (They end up there a lot, and they never seem to realize it.) They, like most of non-lower-class society, don't see the damage the drug war it to does to low income communities, thus opening them up to charges to racism that they are, this time, completely innocent of.
But what they aren't innocent of is being hypocrites, ignoring drug use in their own communities because it's not hurting anyway, but cracking down on it 'where it is hurting people', totally ignoring the fact it's hurting people there so it can be supplied to them outside the law. They don't know that the joint they're smoking resulted in one drug dealer and one innocent kid dead because there was a shoot-out over territory on the inner city street their dealer's dealer bought it on...but they do read about that shoot-out in the newspaper and shake their heads at those criminals.
So the libertarian conservatives don't care, because they think the laws are stupid (But at least they are smart enough to realize that the laws are stupid) and the progressive conservatives (aka, the social conservatives) are always cracking down where it's a 'moral problem' and ignoring it where it's not. It, of course, is only a 'moral problem' where it causes other crime, and it mostly causes crime where people see the drug trade as the form of advancement, aka, where they're poor, but social conservatives don't seem to grasp that.
Meanwhile, the business conservatives are happily building and operating new prisons, on the taxpayer's dime, to hold all these people. And providing swat gear to the police.
Absolutely no politician has any incentive to fix the problem. All of them are using it to lead non-clear-headed people into supporting them and their policies. The clear-headed people disapprove, but they're split among a dozen groups and can't do anything.
When I hear people use the term "privileged" about somebody else, I always think immediately, "relative to whom?" My God, everyone who is alive is privileged. From a mathematical standpoint, the chance of being born at all is like winning the lottery.
And many of those who identify themselves as "oppressed" are so privileged compared with the majority of human beings alive today (or alive in the past) that it is laughable.
I don't believe in collective guilt for things that happened in the past, and I think liberal handwringing and guilt over our country's past sins (such as slavery) is totally inauthentic and moronic.
What we do have is responsiblity for the consequences of the past. That's where our responsibility lies, and it doesn't require feeling any phony guilt to face up to that responsibility. It does require a great deal of courage, and a willingness to accept a certain degree of undeserved abuse from people who have suffered as a result of our country's past sins. When I say accept I don't mean that we should agree that the abuse is justified, only that we should attempt to understand where it is coming from.
Alicia, very well put. Just one comment: when I use the term "privileged", whether objectively or pejoratively, I always have a ready answer with easily found evidence to answer the question "relative to whom".
Many people do use "privileged" in reference to someone who got their entitlement demands met instead of the person whining about it. They usually imagine a world where those situations are reversed, because after all getting what I want includes being able to ignore (and gloat over) those who think I'm privileged. ;-)
We weren't wrong about communism though, you were. And you still are, in the sense that you equate socialism with communist dictatorship. Let me put it into perspective for you, remember capitalism back in the good old days before the Bush junta? Remember, for every left wing dictatorship, there have been just as many right wing dictatorships.
hehehehe..who cares!
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.