Shelby Steele on race and Obama as President
By LisaB on December 31, 2009 at 9:30 PM in Current Affairs
I’ve been wondering what Shelby Steele, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, would say next about President Obama. A conservative, Steele has written several good books about race in America. As a man of mixed race in the same way as Obama, Steele has a unique vantage point from which to talk about Obama’s promise and how he does his job.
Steele has an article out in the WSJ. And, as usual, it is worth reading in its entirety. I’ll include a few bits here. Steele begins by reminding readers of the children’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
The lie of seeing clothes where there were none [as in the story of the Emperor and his new clothes] amounted to a sophistication—joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees—in this case the emperor’s flagrant nakedness.
America’s primary race problem today is our new “sophistication” around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods (“diversity”) and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development).
I would argue further that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.
Steele clearly does not believe the US elected Obama on the strength of his policies or achievements, but he also goes on to talk about what makes someone a leader.
I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.
The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.
He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.
Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle.
To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past.
He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.
———-
A greater problem for our nation today is that we have a president whose benign—and therefore desirable—blackness exempted him from the political individuation process that makes for strong, clear-headed leaders.
[Obama] has not had to gamble his popularity on his principles, and it is impossible to know one’s true beliefs without this.. In the future he may stumble now and then into a right action, but there is no hard-earned center to the man out of which he might truly lead.
Steele’s point, and it is an excellent one, is that Reagan honed his ideas and positions over time with experience and based on his principles. Agree with him or not (and many of us didn’t), Reagan had a core and he acted from a belief system. Obama? Who the hell knows?
There’s no “there” there. I think that was evident to anyone willing to look – as far back as 2007. Steele has also been consistent in his opinion of Obama. Here are some other NQ posts about Steele:
Steele: Obama was the Real Problem in the Gates Affair
Obama as a Cultural Leader Rather than a Political One
Excellent video (37 minutes, but well worth your time) interview with Steele.
When What You See Ain’t Always What You Get
Shelby Steele on CNN’s Lou Dobbs
Shelby Steele: Obama the Bargainer
More video of Steele.
by Ronald Scott
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