"Why the GOP Can't Win With Minorities"

Shelby Steele offers his views in the Wall Street Journal. Steele notes, among other things, "the dramatic loss of moral authority America suffered in the 1960s after openly acknowledging its long mistreatment of blacks and other minorities. Societies have moral accountability, and they cannot admit to persecuting a people for four centuries without losing considerable moral accountability."

More: "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."

Steele argues that conservatism "offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks--one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience."

Reaction: no reference to a history of exclusionary and race-baiting GOP activities (the Southern Strategy, Willie Horton, etc.); a misdescription of Dr. King's call for the recognition of human rights and dignity for all and not just African Americans (and is Steele a fan of the post-Mecca-visit El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz?); a flawed analysis suggesting that persons of color should focus on the promises (and stop looking at the perils) of (Steele's narrativized) conservatism, and stop fixating on things like, say, policies and a politics promoting and protective of minority persons' and communities' own self-interests.