Isaac Willour has penned a piece for the Acton Institute worth sitting with.
Isaac Willour has penned a piece for the Acton Institute worth sitting with. Titled “The Right’s Racial Suicide,” the report argues that there exists a self-defeating confluence of inadvertent and willful blindness to racial inequality going back decades on the American Right.
Willour writes:
To be conservative,” wrote Michael Oakeshott, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery.” His definition of conservatism, not as a set of policy aspirations but as a deeper sensibility, explains the conservative respect for tradition and view of history as a source of norms — that’s the positive side. The negative side is that there are some issues for which the conservative partiality for history and tradition provides zero comfort.
Race is one of those issues. What does it even mean to be a conservative on race? It’s a profoundly uncomfortable question for those of us who claim the label of conservative: Exactly which part of America’s racial past are we trying to conserve?
Making this question even more troublesome is the fact that the American right and racial minorities do not exactly have a rosy relationship. 85 percent of Republican voters in the 2022 midterms were white — 1% were black. Scholarly research from the early 2000s notes how “racial issues are still the key to understanding” the partisan distributions of black voters: blacks are skeptical at best of conservatives’ ability to actually care about their interests. J.C. Watts Jr., a former U.S. Congressman and Republican Conference chair, described his Democrat father’s outlook on conservatives in incredibly telling form: “A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.”
You can read the rest here.
In the course of the piece, Willour interviews Malcolm Foley (an academic at Baylor and director for Truett Theological), Nicholas Buccola (author of the Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America), and Acton’s Anthony Bradley.
To Buccola’s writing, I will direct my attention; his criticism of Buckley, and, through WFB, all of American conservatism, ought to be contextualized and the record made clear.
When reviewing Buccola’s The Fire Is Upon Us for National Review magazine in 2019, Alvin S. Felzenberg wrote of Buckley’s reevaluation of racial prejudice in relation to state and federal power, diverting from the position that he had so ardently defended just years before (1965) while debating James Baldwin in Cambridge Union:
The first place Buccola might look would be Buckley’s appearance with George Wallace on Firing Line on January 24, 1968. Wallace was about to run for president on a third-party ticket. Buckley’s purpose in getting into the arena with him was to undermine the Alabama governor’s claim to be the true “conservative” in the race. Buckley declared Wallace a “phony conservative” who professed to believe in “states’ rights” when the beneficiaries of federal intervention were African Americans but who otherwise championed increased federal spending and intervention in both the economy and southern affairs, especially when it came to federal funding to Alabama.
“For the first time, I feel like a liberal,” Buckley blurted out as he rattled off instance after instance in which Wallace’s administration provided substandard treatment to African Americans. Buckley saw Wallace as a “welfare populist,” which to Buckley connoted a demagogic politician, who wrested political power away from the old Bourbons by appealing to the prejudices of poor southern whites against African Americans.
Willour’s piece similarly understands Buckley to have only haltingly come to an idea of racial awareness well into the 21st century. Willour writes:
Jay Nordlinger, a senior writer at National Review and a friend of Buckley’s, pointed out an incredibly telling exchange in the early 2000s, when ‘Bill [Buckley] said the Right, including himself, had been wrong on civil rights, and that’s all there was to it. He regretted it keenly.”
As a young conservative, and one who’s read his fair share of Buckley and found it useful, it’s dismaying to learn about the darker parts of conservative pioneers like WFB, although it’d be too much of a stretch to call it surprising. In a sense, the Buckley-Baldwin debate seems to epitomize the conservative struggle on racial issues: a misunderstanding of appearances, an overinflated sense of own-the-libs-ism, and enough actual prejudice to make us nonwhite conservatives completely unwilling to defend what’s been said.
I would caution against overstatement. Brent Bozell’s influence and appeal to conservative principle cannot be underestimated in Buckley’s conversion on the question six decades ago, as Felzenberg clarifies:
Buckley’s colleague (and brother-in-law) Brent Bozell also found Buckley’s stand to be inconsistent with conservative orthodoxy. His dissent was threefold: that an ideology that venerated political institutions should not undermine respect for the courts, let alone condone lawbreaking; that adherents of the “strict constructionist” interpretation of the Constitution should not be cavalier in disregarding the text of the First, 14th, 15th, and other amendments; and that it was unconstitutional to deprive any group of Americans of their constitutional rights on the basis of race.
With greater context now provided, Willour’s primary contention that the Right is poorly situated to speak on racial experience and outcomes is more than valid. While there are conservatives who bemoan the overwhelming support for Democrats from black voters — often chalked up to some enthrallment scheme from the Left, as if black voters are dupes and fools instead of responding to the messaging and social histories of the parties — there appears to be very little effort to change three reasons for black-voter dispassion regarding Republican candidates and the party.
Republicans openly despise cities and, by association, those who call these cities home. A majority of black Americans find the place in which they live to be extremely/very important to how they think about themselves, and a plurality of black Americans live in cities, according to Pew Research. To rally rural and suburban voters, the GOP has used cities as a hate object for all that is wrong with the world. Drugs, degeneracy, and violence come from the cities — never mind that the local bar on Highway 57 has all those and more on a Friday night. (While one is more likely to be shot in the city, one is much more likely to die of preventable illnesses in the country.) Never mind that we all benefit from the concentration of wealth and resources cities provide while subsidizing country life. A black voter who sees every other commercial making a claim about the lawlessness and depravity of his home is less likely to say, “Thanks for noticing” and more likely to see the ad as little more than an accusation against him and his circle. Americans are smart enough to decipher between legitimate concern for personal safety and temporary use as a prop for outside interests. Personally, if there were ads talking about how Sheboygan was the worst, there’s nothing in the world that would get me to vote for that candidate — even if Sheboygan were the worst by every metric except brat production. The GOP has reached for vinegar over honey far too often.
Republican machines are apathetic about minority votes. While conservative writers work ourselves into hysterics about single-digit changes in minority voting patterns, there’s been precious little effort by GOP ground operators to ingratiate themselves with minority voters. Say what you will about Democrats, they show up in cities and knock on doors. They’re around. The best ability is availability, as your high-school football coach would say. That GOP success in the cities is crowing about depressed turnout instead of celebrating increasing votes earned is the language of surrender.
Republicans awkwardly straddle progressive word games and an economic message. Like when a new kid moves in and joins your grade-school class, the Right doesn’t know how to treat black conservatives. Some cons are indifferent, a few are hostile, most are pleased by the company, and some try to make up for the first pair by being excessively friendly. Fundraiser photographers swoop in to snag some shots for the next newsletter: “Aren’t we so conservatively inclusive? Donate today!” Black conservatives who really have no business running for office (David Clarke and Larry Elder) are nonetheless given a chance because conservatives want to show the Left that we have black candidates too.
Stop. It’s similar to conservatives kvetching about Hollywood and then the second a celeb says something even tangentially right-aligned he’s paraded on the networks and radio circuit.
Just a little bit of respect should not be difficult. As Willour summarizes Bradley, “Talking about practical issues means not ignoring the economics conservatives love so much: ‘I don’t think American conservatives are going to make real progress until they properly embrace free markets.'”
Treating a man as a man and a woman as a woman, providing families the ability to send their kids to the best schools regardless of income, and accepting that we let our opposition to the Left’s social agenda in the ’60s get the better of our judgment, but not conservative principles, are all worthy actions.