Liberal guilt and its uses

Not one of your more coherent posts, Rod...

Agree w/ Derek Copold. People who flagellate themselves publicly over their "white privilege" tend to be extremely privileged relative to other white people.

I'm not sure your history is accurate, Rod. For example, Barry Goldwater was a strong champion of civil rights in his native Arizona. But he was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed it gave the federal government unprecedented powers through the commerce clause. Congress, of course, could have used its sec. 5 power of the 14th amendment to get it through, but the Southern Democrats would not have gone along with it. So, the commerce clause avenue was the only way to go. Of course, Goldwater won many southern states because it turned out his view of federalism happened to align with the racist interests of many in those states. But Goldwater himself, a staunch conservative, had a very impressive civil rights record. It was just that his conservative principles would not allow him to grant to the federal government powers that could be used in the future for all sorts of mischief.

By and large, southern Dixiecrats were not "conservatives." They were typically progressive on social programs and had no problem applying the federal establishment clause in order prevent "Catlicks" from getting government money for parochial schools. These are not "conservative positions."

Far more Republicans, many of whom were conservatives, than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

My point is this: the past is complicated, and the categories that we apply today don't neatly apply.

In 1970, Wendell Berry published The Hidden Wound, a book which placed front and center an examination of the distortions in the lives of whites and blacks alike effected by America's racial practices, which were deeply entwined in the cultural aspects of American land use. Numerous writers - including, recently, Rick Bass - have declared the book their favorite among Berry's many works.

The editors of MANAS highlight an important aspect of The Hidden Wound:

manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXIII_1970/XXIII-51.pdf

"In The Hidden Wound, Wendell Berry writes
at length of the deprivation suffered by southern
whites in delegating to black men what came to be
called 'nigger work,' which meant that the whites
cut themselves off from essential forms of
experience in relationships with the land. Berry
grew up under the care of two black people. He
learned so much from them as a human being that
he wrote this book to acknowledge his debt and to
penetrate as deeply as he could in understanding
the ill of racism. The wrong done by the whites to
the blacks is well known. Not so well understood
is the mutilation of themselves accomplished by
the whites in adopting the spurious conception of
'nigger work.' Mr. Berry explores the subject:

'Given the great urgency to own and keep his
farm, coupled with the usually wretched economic
predicament of the American farmer, it is easy to see
why the white owner's interest in the land has usually
tended to be abstract, represented in acreages, dollars,
measures, numbers. The mind of the white laborer
has similarly tended to abstraction; he worked with
the idea that his work would lead to ownership, or at
least that, as a white man, the nigger work he was
doing was unworthy of him; in neither case, because
of his sense of racial superiority, did he find it
necessary to come to emotional or philosophical terms
with the work he was doing. Only the black man, the
nigger to whom nigger work was appointed, for
whom there was no escape, was able to face it as a
present and continuing necessity, and to invent the
means of enduring and living with it—and, if I
understand the communal and emotional impetus of
the work song, of building a culture, not beside or in
spite of that necessity, but upon it to triumph over it.
It seems to me that the black people developed the
psychology, the emotional resilience and equilibrium,
the philosophy, and the art necessary to endure and
even enjoy hard manual labor wholly aside from the
dynamics of ambition. And from this stemmed an
ability more complex than that of the white man to
know and bear life. What we should have learned
willingly ourselves we forced the blacks to learn, and
so prevented ourselves from learning it.'

The Hidden Wound is currently listed at Bookfinder, I see, for as little as $4.01.

Rod, you raise good points about the fallacy of assuming that conservatives in 2008 are forever damned by the actions or inactions of conservatives in the early 1960s. However, there's more to it than just an issue of the passage of time. For one thing, until recent years, many of the anti-civil rights conservatives of the early 1960s were still around, and they tended to take positions that were in opposition to what was and is generally considered to be part of the civil rights agenda (affirmative action, funding of Head Start and other programs that disproportionately help minorities, etc.). Given their prior attitudes, liberals and minorities had good reason to suspect their motives. Also, many of those older conservatives helped teach and mentor the later generations of conservatives, who tended to support the same policies as their elders. It's not as though there was a clean break with the past in which the new conservatives came up with their positions (and by that I mean both policy positions, and positions in the form of jobs) without the tutelage of their sometimes racist elders (and how could they, to be fair). This too leads to some suspicion regarding motives. And I'm not even going to talk about younger folks who are actually racist, regardless of the fact that they grew up after the 1960s. The fratboys you hear about on college campuses who have bigot eruptions every now and then don't generally grow up to be Obama or Hillary supporters.

Anyway, like I said, you raised some fair points, but it's not just an issue of a simple rejection of political correctness or insouciant fun.

This too leads to some suspicion regarding motives.

IOW, it's about intentions, not results. It's a mawkish form of ad hominem. This why liberal guilt is perfectly contemptible and should be treated as such.

"IOW, it's about intentions, not results. It's a mawkish form of ad hominem. This why liberal guilt is perfectly contemptible and should be treated as such."

No, it's about how intentions underlie, inform and create certain results. Motives and intentions are always relevant. Ask any judge, prosecutor or defense attorney, or for that matter any moral philosopher, other than those who are extreme consequentialists.

If a large group of people supports a set of policies for racist reasons, the people negatively affected by such policies have good reason to ask whether the policies are themselves racist, and good reason to be generally suspicious of those who support such policies. At the very least, they shouldn't be expected to change their minds and come to support such policies (and the people who promote such policies), without getting some assurance that they aren't handing their support to people who don't have their interests in mind.

they tended to take positions that were in opposition to what was and is generally considered to be part of the civil rights agenda (affirmative action, funding of Head Start and other programs that disproportionately help minorities, etc.).

One problem with this theory is the whole raft of conservatives who started out life as pro-civil rights liberals but who moved right precisely when "civil rights" came to be equated with misguided programs like affirmative action and head start. These are the folks like Bill Bennett, Irving Kristol, Richard John Neuhaus etc. who used to be called "neoconservatives" (as some of them still are) before the Iraq War changed the meaning of that term.

Mark:

You're engaging in slander, I'm afraid to say. Here's my story, and I'm sticking to it. It is from my forthcoming book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press, forthcoming November 2008):

My parents exposed me to the importance of politics and citizenship at an early age. In the mid-1960s, they had my brother James and me watch important political events and speeches. In 1968, when I was 7-years old, I distinctly remember watching and listening to Senator Robert F. Kennedy on the evening he was assassinated in Los Angeles, and seeing my parents cry when his death was announced on our television hours later. Only months earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered in Memphis. My parents sup-ported the Civil Rights Movement and were diligent in making sure that my brother and I knew of Dr. King and the tragedy of his death. Although I was too young to remember the presidency of John F. Kennedy, my father made sure we listened to the late president’s 1961 inaugural address, one of the great political speeches in American history. On sev-eral occasions, my father played the recording of Kennedy’s speech on our old family turntable. As in other matters, my father also had a sense of humor about politics. When I was 8 years old I asked him to explain to me the difference between communism and capitalism. He answered, “Well, son, in America, a capitalist country, some people own Cadillacs and some people don’t. But in communist countries like the Soviet Union, eve-ryone is treated equally, and no one owns a Cadillac.”

During several months in my middle school years I would return home every afternoon to see my mother watching the Watergate Hearings, chaired by one of her heroes, Senator Sam Ervin. She always invited me to join her, which I usually did. I was fascinated by the hearings, the issues surrounding it, and the historical importance of all the figures that were participating. As I grew older and began to develop my own political opinions, my parents exhibited a level of tolerance and openness that was exemplary. While my father and I became more conservative in our views over the years, my mother remained a moderate Democrat (as she is today). However, my conservatism, ironically, developed out of my liberalism. I was taught by my parents that one of the roles of government was to protect the “little guy” and to make sure that those not well off should be given a chance to succeed and make a decent living. But in my early twenties I began to notice that self-described liberals had no interest in protecting the littlest guy of all, the unborn, and that they often advanced policies that inhibited economic growth, and thus harmed those who most needed the wealth produced by free markets, the poor and the under-privileged. So, for me, true liberalism is conservative, for it strives to protect and nurture, indeed conserve, those people, institutions, and practices that advance the common good and thus provide a framework for human flourishing.

Many of us who are conservatives--born after 1960 (like me)--tell similar stories. We are people who have thought through these issues with care and concern for the common good. Please do not depict our stories in such a one-dimensional defamatory manner.

Francis, I made it very clear in my comments that Rod made good points and that it was a fallacy to assume that the sins of conservatives in the early 1960s with regard to race should be put on the heads of conservatives in the early 21st century, but that there are issues of motives and the continued involvement of certain persons in the conservative movement worth considering. Also, I specifically went after you on the issues of (i) Republican support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [you said such Republicans were conservatives and presumably support for civil rights was the conservative position of the day, and I refuted that]; (ii) the fact that self-described Southern conservatives of that era supported some New Deal programs and were opposed to supporting parochial schools (for bigoted reasons, as you yourself point out) doesn't mean they weren't conservatives, as what constitutes conservatism changes from time to time and place to place (Didn't Russell Kirk say something like that? Or maybe it was just Austin Bramwell.); and (iii) the fact is that much if not most of the opposition among self-described conservatives to civil rights legislation in the early 1960s came from racism, not a love of federalism. There's no shortage of evidence to support my comments on that point, and you can look them up yourself (hints - read National Review's comments on the civil rights movement during that era, look up where some conservatives of that era went in their politics (like Revilo Oliver), and see if people like Bull Connor or George Wallace said they were progressives or liberals, or good conservative Southerners protecting traditional Southern culture.

In other words, I went after you on a specific set of historically unsupported comments you made. Your later comments don't refute my points, and in fact they don't even address them. I haven't depicted conservatism in a one-dimensional manner and unlike you I've been responsive to points brought up by others. So don't start throwing around terms like defamation and slander (which are terms that have specific legal meaning, by the way, you might want to look them up) with regard to my comments in this thread. Hey, but nice work finding an opportunity to plug your upcoming book. Maybe you'll get a sale from someone reading the thread.

If you were a true american Christian you would admit the failures of the church,

Yes, that's me, famously unwilling to admit the failures of the church. Heh.

If a large group of people supports a set of policies for racist reasons, the people negatively affected by such policies have good reason to ask whether the policies are themselves racist, and good reason to be generally suspicious of those who support such policies.

Of course, and then all you have to do is term what you hate "racist", and that's the end of the argument. "Oh, don't like affirmative action, must be a racist, unconsciously if not in intention." Or if you can't do that, then you look for some incident in the past or some tenuous link to someone's cousin's sister's roommate so you can concoct guilt by association.

It's a mug's game. And it is based clearly on ad hominem. It's not based on sound argument.

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.

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. ;-)

hehehehe..who cares!