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I like Steele, but he's taking a shot at Goldwater here. And without Goldwater, there wouldn't have been a Reagan or what followed. It's so very easy to be passing judgment like this, and so very wrong. Many of our civil rights laws have been perverted, as Goldwater and others predicted. Shutting down girls-only schools, shutting down boys wrestling because there's not an equal girl wrestling program (due to the lack of interest by girls), granting federal contracts based partly on race, granting admission to colleges based partly on race, forcing corporations to adopt affirmative action (i.e., reverse discrimination) policies in hiring and promotion, and the list goes on and on, are some of the abuses. So, these laws have serious weakneses, as well as strengths. The picture is much more mixed that Steele and others suggest.

"Today America supports a racialist value system for minorities while demanding a democratic expansion of the white imagination. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus can embrace "blackness" and demand government preferences exclusively for their race. Remove the double standard and Trent Lott looks perfectly innocent by comparison.

But in the end a man cannot be redeemed by a moral equivalence. That those who ask Sen. Lott to imagine beyond his race do not do so themselves is no consolation. The senator is probably a more moral man and thus a better conservative today than he was two weeks ago, but moral calculus is more forgiving than political calculus. He is now so politically compromised that in his Black Entertainment Television interview he declared "across the board" support for affirmative action, vowed to rethink his support for Judge Charles Pickering, and agreed to a "civil rights tour" with Rep. John Lewis.

A vacuum of white guilt as wide as the Grand Canyon has opened in him, and he will never again see civil rights, welfare, judgeships or education with a clear eye. He will now live in a territory of irony where his redemption will be purchased through support for racialist social reforms that make a virtue of the same segregationist spirit that has now brought him low. "

I like this website because I do feel a good space with people with whom I have a broad general agreement.

I do say the following with the feeling that I am talking to a friend who I see as making a mistake and nothing more hostile than that.

What I have come to detest on the Free Republic are comments like yours, after an extraordinary comment from a poster or article, which offers a thin "things are not as simple as that" quip made from an all-knowing face designed to mask an unwillingness to come to terms with a real challenge and statement of truth, as Steele offers in this article.

Read the article again, especially the quote I excerpted above. You have to had missed its meaning completely, to then go out and dismiss it like you did. If you want to uphold what you identify as Goldwater principles, then you should admit that something more should have been done to show that the Southern strategy was not simply writing off blacks as a lost cause. I think they were written off as a lost cause and I think that the reason was not malice but a practical sense that for the foreseeable elections back then, there was not much of a payoff to be seen in revelaing the incohate compassionate conservatism in our opposition to quotas and setasides and all the rest of the left's misguided policies that served to divide our country.

But what Steele is saying here about the imagination that is needed for true political freedom in a society that goes beyond mere indivdualism [as much as individualism is not unimportant and is indeed a prerequisite] is indeed a wonderful insight that should be deeply considered. It is that insight that is need for the GOP or at least for conservatives tonow speak from their principles without apologizing to anyone about their morality and compassion. Lotts' comments and smallmindedness blur all that and make it too easy for the left to make their false charge against us seem plausible.

Your immediate post after the article should be retracted because you obviously did not have time to understand what he was saying and only felt Goldwater somehow being implicitly attacked unfairly. Please read the excerpt above again. Thank you.

Of course there are abuses of Title IX. Of course racial quotas and reverse discrimination are illegal as hell and unconstitutional. I agree on that point 100%. We need to fix these problems and ASAP.

How, pray tell, did Trent Lott's comments make it easier for us to do so? If anything, they have made it harder for us to do so. And certainly, it makes it easier for the opposition to brand efforts to end the abuses as racist. Which perpetrates the cycle more and more.

By the way, I noticed Trent Lott is caving on the whole damn agenda of Je$$e and the others who want to perpetrate the abuses. He's compromised - I think Shelby Steele is making a point we need to think over ASAP. If we're going to break their hold, we probably will have to think outside the box.

The picture is much more mixed that Steele and others suggest

Mark, I agree 100%. In comparison to 1948 we should ask ourselves if: Our education system is better or worse?: How does the homeless situation compare?: How do our health care systems compare?: Is drug addiction higher or lower?: Also the crime rate, how does that compare?: Etc.

Young hero, I'm going to have to stay with Shelby on this one. The passage that stirred your blood was, I imagine:
But conservatism is not gaining ground because it is somehow truer today than before. Over the past 40 years it might have been a great bulwark against the decline in values and institutions it now bemoans. But this did not happen, because conservatism, for all its commitment to freedom, did not make itself the principled enemy of racism during the civil rights era. Here was a movement grounded in the principles of classic liberalism and, rather than rush to its support, some conservatives bent the principle of states' rights into a tolerance of segregation while others simply sat it out. The gradual comeback of conservative principles in areas like welfare reform and educational accountability has much to do with the moral authority they gain in application to social problems.

And I have to say he was lamenting the lost opportunity for Whiggish Conservatism and not the lost opportunity for purity of Law.

This is also why a suprising two-thirds of this small forum is soundly disappointed in Senator Lott.

Sure there are some that bear a grudge for percieved failures at the time of the Impeachment Trial. There are some who are probably knee jerk afraid of any call of racism by the race pimps as well. But there are plenty, who see the situation for what it is--failure of a politician to lead.

As a young teenager, I was in the YAF and Rallied for Goldwater. I read the books and saw the promise. But I also, over the subsiquent years saw the most strident were sometimes those whose character and motives were not mine.

I heard the black Republican delegate at the Goldwater nominating convention recount the floor rally marchers that extinguished cigarettes on his suit with the elan of poor winners. And hearing it, I knew it for the truth and a sad truth it was.

True conservatism, the Whiggish Conservatism of Burke and John Adams has little to do with the States Rights ascendancy. Never did, and never will.

The conservatives' love of small, local and decentralized government isn't something that simple.

You must remember that you are so involved in the national political arena that you fail to see it for the collection of striving functionaries that most of us in the bulk of the nation know it to be on its normal course. Rightly composed and faced with the critical moment, it is true that statesmanship can arise, but overall, it is a device to be watched rather than pampered and nurtured.

I'm sorry to have seen this happen to Lott. Few deserve such a sorry capstone to a career. But it did and we need to be honest about it in a way that liberals can't be honest about their own. Whatever the Caucus deciedes is fine with me, but in the mean time, I'll not defend poor vision, even if done from too much good cheer.