Did Hillary Blunder On Race - Road to the Middle Class

HILLARY CLINTON made a great gift to the nation when her absurd Hillarycare went down in flames in 1994 and helped elect a Republican Congress. Is she trying to do it again?

Shelby Steele thinks that maybe her “plantation” speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day could rank right up there in the blunder department. He writes that pandering is not just a question of going to a black church and playing the race card. It requires a certain finesse, of the kind possessed by Bill Clinton but not by Senator Clinton. Blacks might come away from her speech with the wrong message:

Does she really see us as she projects us--as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist?

Steele has developed an important take on the race question in The Content of Our Character, A Dream Deferred and White Guilt. He presents the race issue as a dance between black shame and white guilt.

Yes, you cannot understand the race question merely as a matter of white guilt and the need for atonement. There is also the question of black shame. First there was the shame of enslavement itself, but after the Civil Rights revolution a new shame emerged, the shame of backwardness. Blacks were propelled into elite institutions by affirmative action and found that they were ashamed by their lack of preparation and savoir faire.

Every immigrant group feels this shame, but blacks felt it more keenly because of the peculiar nature of their entry into the public square. They responded to the experience by self-segregation, staying out of full participation in the middle-class experience, held back by the shame of backwardness.

Democrats have played this situation for all it is worth, but Steele wonders if the game is up. When blacks have got over their shame, then what will be the point of voting Democratic?

The politics of black uplift was once an idealism, but today it has become the work of hacks, tired apparatchiks and petty demagogues looking for power. And there, on TV last week, as if to illustrate this truth, was the specter of Mrs. Clinton and Al Sharpton embracing at the podium, mere captives of power making the tired charge--via an encrusted plantation metaphor--that Republicans are racists. What exhaustion! And what evil, to labor so hard at keeping blacks mired in grievance. Kind of reminds one of a plantation, though here the harvest is surely grievance rather than cotton.

Every immigrant group has arrived, exulting, in the promised land, and then sunk back in shame at their nakedness and lack of competence in the shining city on a hill. But every group has also, after a generation or two of gestation, been reborn into the full American experience of self-governing competence when they finally screwed up the courage to cast their shame aside.

Maybe, with the impetus of Hillary Clinton’s “plantation” speech, blacks will realize that it is time to accept their full citizenship in this great land, as it dawns on them that it been there in plain sight for a generation, waiting for them to summmon the confidence to pick it up.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

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