The concept of independent human liberty is doomed
Shelby Steele: A cogent observation on how activist, redemptive liberalism exploits weaknesses in the conservative construct.
When redemption became a term of power, “redemptive liberalism” was born — a new activist liberalism that gave itself a “redemptive” profile by focusing on social engineering rather than liberalism’s classic focus on individual freedom. In the ’60s there was no time to allow individual freedom to render up the social good. Redemptive liberalism would proactively engineer the good. Name a good like “integration,” and then engineer it into being through a draconian regimen of school busing. If the busing did profound damage to public education in America, it gave liberals the right to say, “At least we did something” In other words, we are activists against America’s old sin of segregation. Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.
Read more after the jump
But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like “diversity” as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences. Conservatism would enforce the principles that ensure individual freedom, and then allow “the good” to happen by “invisible hand.”
And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.
I don’t think this could have been written more clearly.
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