“Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise. . . . .[T]he larger reality is that white guilt leaves no room for moral choice; it does not depend on the goodwill or the genuine decency of people.” Shelby Steele, White Guilt, 2006.
The moral authority that comes from an absence of moral choice is actually no moral authority. This is a prescription for endless manipulation–by both blacks and whites–which Steele documents at length. He also wrote,
“A great power for today’s left is the power of association. Whether the issue is Social Security, school reform, or even war, the left forces the right to do battle with associations drawn from an imagery of America’s past evils. The Iraq war is the rebirth of American imperialism. Private retirement accounts privilege the rich. Accountability in school reform blames the victims of underfunded schools. Reasoning against an association is like punching a shadow.”
“[Bush] sits atop a historical, cultural, and even political correction. . . .[an] historical pressure to correct for the many excesses of the age of white guilt [that] harshly judges people on the dissociational left. It tells them that they were wrong–one of the most unsettling things anyone can be told. It tells them that they failed the country out of a self-congratulating moral elitism–that they refused to enforce demanding principles or to ask for more responsibility from those they claimed to feel compassion for, and that they flattered themselves with a “progressivism” of mere moral relativism even as the culture declined all around them. What is more, there is an utter confidence at the center of this corrective. It has spawned an entire alternative media that scolds, belittles, and even scorns the dissociational left twenty-four hours a day. And whenever people feel shamed, there is a blowback.”
Now comes the blowback administration, an oligarchy in its 100th day of transforming American financial instutions, our largest corporations and smoke-stack industries, health care insurance, hospitals and doctors, into government-controlled bureaucracies incapable of functioning half as well as their free predecessors.
So much for revenge.
Gaia responded today to globally-warming blowback emissions of hot air from new government bureaucrats with 8 inches of Spring snow. Bless her heart.
