What's the Story?

If I were a Republican strategist, which I’m pleased to say I’m not, I would pay especial attention to Shelby Steele’s op-ed “Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism” in the August 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Toward the close of his article, Steele writes that “the great problem for conservatives is that they lack the moral glibness to compete with liberalism’s ‘innocence’ ”—innocence, in this case, from the evil of racism and social injustice generally. Steele then goes on briefly to suggest that “reality” should be the “informing vision” of conservatism.” By “reality” I take him to mean more than arguments countering the unreality of the empty utopianism of much liberalism.

What Shelby Steele holds in his op-ed is that liberals have a story and conservatives do not. The liberal story is an old one, in many ways a false one, but it works for them, and, as he points out, they are adamantly sticking to it. Their story—nowadays the approved word is “narrative”—is one of impressive simplicity: They hate social injustice in any form, despise capitalism for its selfishness and blame it for the despoiling of the environment and the planet generally, and cannot find an ethnic or sexual minority they don’t wish to help. Through this program, they have, or at least feel they have, cornered the market on virtue. To put the liberal story in two words: They care. This has left conservatives in the unattractive position of not caring.

Like most simple stories about the motorforce of human behavior—the class struggle, the Oedipus complex—the side-effects of the liberal story, which go unmentioned, are sometimes as pernicious as the disease. Liberals, in recent years, have a lot for which to apologize. Thus, owing to the successful attempts at implementing an essentially liberal program of diversity and giving way to every possible strain of multiculturalism, the contemporary university controlled by liberal ideas has been so badly watered down in its humanities and social sciences divisions as to dilute the quality of higher education itself, with political correctness, trigger-warnings, and microaggressions putting on the finishing touches. Thus, in their relentlessly reassuring African Americans of their continuing victim status—ignoring the more deadly tragedy of black-on-black gang murders in the inner city—the liberal program on race has ensured bad feeling all round and brought on the worst in black leadership. As Shelby Steele himself remarked some years ago, if racial progress in the country is ever admitted, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be out of business.

A liberal in good standing through my late 20s, the liberal story lost credence for me when I began to teach at a Middle Western university. There I discovered young professors, good liberals all, sleeping with their students, older professors backing down before radicals who openly proclaimed they had no use for free speech—never have I witnessed such cowardliness when there was so little to fear—and behavior so grasping (and for such very low stakes) that it made the Robber Barons look like an order of Dominicans. Liberals, as is well known, are much better at proclaiming than living up to their ideals.

If liberals frequently turn out disappointing, conservatives are uninspiring. Conservatives don’t have a story, or at least an impressive one. They are left only with their insistence on the unreality of contemporary liberalism, which when proclaimed is usually turned against them by charges of racism, blindness to the beauty of idealism and the larger project of the good of eminently improvable humankind, and insensitivity generally. Conservatives need a story of their own. But what might it be?