[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 205 (Wednesday, December 20, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2422-E2424]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       WHAT'S WRONG ON THE RIGHT

                                 ______


                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, December 20, 1995

  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to my colleagues' 
attention the following article from the ``Outlook'' section of the 
December 17 Washington Post. The author, noted Boston University 
economics professor Glenn Loury, has a valuable lesson for both 
conservatives and liberals alike. Though condemning the paternalism of 
the left, which has 

[[Page E2423]]
helped exacerbate the awful conditions of our inner cities, he observes 
that ``a conservatism worthy of majority support would not view with 
cool indifference a circumstance in which so many Americans suffer such 
unspeakable degradation.'' I enter the full article into the 
Congressional Record and urge all my colleagues to read it.

               [From the Washington Post, Dec. 17, 1995]

   What's Wrong on the Right: Second Thoughts of a Black Conservative

                          (By Glenn C. Loury)

       The recently deceased British writer Kingsley Amis, 
     celebrated by conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic, 
     was never comfortable with political movements nor those who 
     champion them. In the poem, ``After Goliath,'' Amis wryly 
     noted that'' * * * even the straightest of issues looks 
     pretty oblique when a movement turns into a clique.'' As a 
     black American who nevertheless came to call himself a 
     conservative, I have recently watched with growing dismay how 
     this ``movement'' has dealt with racial issues, and have 
     thereby gained new appreciation for the wisdom of Kingsley 
     Amis.
       Looking back, three factors seem to have been paramount in 
     my move toward conservatism. The first attraction was that is 
     was not liberalism. By the end of the 1970s I had become 
     disgusted with the patronizing relativism that white liberals 
     seemed inevitably to bring to questions of race. Wearing 
     their guilt on their sleeves, they were all too ready to 
     ``understand'' the shortcomings and inadequacies of blacks. 
     Obsessed with the wrongs inflicted by society on the 
     supposedly hapless victims of discrimination, they were 
     blinded to the desperate need of these ``victims'' to take 
     responsibility for their own lives. They therefore supported 
     and reinforced what I saw as the debilitating tendency among 
     many blacks to avoid facing squarely the real challenges of 
     the post-civil rights era.
       There was hypocrisy in this liberal stance. Though 
     advocating racial equality, liberals did not treat blacks and 
     whites as moral equals: Historic oppression precluded blacks 
     from being held accountable for their actions; whites, 
     suffering no such disability, warranted criticism by liberals 
     because they could choose to stop being racists, or to become 
     more generous and compassionate. In effect, the liberals were 
     saying that whites were powerful moral agents, and 
     blacks were pitiable subjects shaped by forces outside 
     themselves. This smacked of racism, and I hated it.
       The second attraction of conservatism was that, on the 
     range of policy issues with which I was most concerned, it 
     made intellectual sense to me. As a professional economist, I 
     have always been sensitive to the deep incentive problems 
     that plague the liberal social vision. High taxes, heavy-
     handed regulation, bureaucratic service provision and 
     expansive social benefits tend to reduce economic growth and 
     foster dependence. Some social programs would always be 
     necessary, of course, but liberals seemed too little 
     concerned about the costs of their ambitions. Moreover, again 
     in the late 1970s, I watched workers in the auto and steel 
     industries price themselves out of their burgeoning 
     international markets while liberals cheered them on. Public 
     employee unions often seemed to be feathering their own 
     nests, with little apparent concern for the public interest, 
     and with the broad support of the Democratic Party.
       Finally, the cultural assumptions of social conservatism 
     seemed like an appealing alternative to those of liberal 
     secularism. In no small part, my move to the political right 
     has been a move away from the people on the left who seemed 
     unremittingly hostile to any evocation of spiritual 
     commitments in the public square. With the family 
     disintegrating before our very eyes, liberals could only heap 
     ridicule on ``traditional values'' advocates who expressed 
     alarm. In the face of over 1 million abortions per year, 
     liberals could find no place in their political lexicon for a 
     discourse on the morality of this course of action in our 
     society.
       For all of these reasons, I was drawn to embrace 
     conservatism. Yet now, some years later, these same beliefs 
     are provoking my growing discomfort with the conservative 
     ascendancy, particularly on the issue of race.
       It is certainly true that liberals adopted a condescending 
     posture on racial questions. Their methods--such as strong 
     affirmative action leading to racial double standards, or an 
     excessive concern to avoid ``blaming the victim'' that 
     precluded acknowledgment of social patholoy--were definitely 
     flawed. But there was never much doubt that liberals sought 
     to heal the rift in our body politic engendered by the 
     institution of chattel slavery. The liberal goal of 
     securing racial justice in America was, and is, a noble 
     one. I cannot say with confidence that conservatism as a 
     movement is much concerned to pursue that goal.
       This is not the old canard that conservatives are 
     inherently racists because believers in states' rights 
     opposed the civil rights revolution. Rather, my concern is 
     that too many conservatives seem blind to the need to 
     constructively engage the problem of racial division. Yet the 
     success of any governing coalition, whether it is the 
     conservative ``revolution'' or something else, will 
     ultimately depend largely on how well it deals with a problem 
     that cannot be wished away.
       It is now fashionable for conservatives to attribute the 
     catastrophe unfolding in the urban ghettos to some 
     combination of mistaken liberal policies and the deficiencies 
     of inner-city residents themselves. Yet a conservatism worthy 
     of majority support in this country would not view with cool 
     indifference a circumstance in which so many Americans suffer 
     such unspeakable degradation, from lack of shelter, health 
     care, education, nutrition or any hope for a better life. The 
     efforts of various conservative writers to attribute this 
     deep-seated, complex problem to the disincentives of federal 
     assistance programs, the so-called pathologies of black 
     culture, or the cognitive disabilities of certain group of 
     Americans, seem designed mainly to rationalize their 
     disengagement from it.
       Where is their passion? Where is their moral outrage? In 
     light of the scale of the tragedy unfolding in cities across 
     the land, the narrowly academic and highly ideological 
     posture of conservative intellectuals--who are in effect 
     saying, ``Too bad about what's happening, but we told you 
     liberals so''--is simply breathtaking. Is it paranoia for a 
     black to wonder whether this posture toward urban problems 
     would be embraced with such confidence among conservatives if 
     those inner-city hell holes were populated by whites?
       Conservatives should view with skepticism the notion that 
     economic or biological factors ultimately underlie behavioral 
     problems like those involving sexuality and parenting. After 
     all, behaviors of this sort reflect people's basic 
     understandings of what gives meaning to their lives. The idea 
     that the mysteries of human motivation within the family are 
     susceptible to calculated intervention by the state would 
     have been rejected out of hand by a classical conservative 
     like Edmund Burke, to whom the phrase ``conservative 
     revolution'' would have seemed an oxymoron. Yet, today's 
     conservative revolutionaries would have us believe that only 
     by dismantling the federal establishment can the deepest 
     social problems of American society be solved.
       I doubt that the most clever of economists (and I know some 
     smart ones) could design an incentive scheme to insure 
     responsible parenting that would work as effectively as the 
     broad acceptance among parents of the idea that they are 
     God's stewards in the lives of their children. The best 
     pregnancy deterrent may be to inculcate in the heart of each 
     adolescent the belief that, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, 
     ``Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit . . . Therefore, 
     honor God with your body.
       There is also wisdom in the New Testament for those 
     conservatives who see in America's black communities another 
     country, separate from and unrelated to the one in which they 
     live, inhabited by a different kind of man. In Acts 10:34-35 
     one finds Simon Peter saying, ``Of a truth I perceive that 
     God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that 
     feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with 
     him.'' The point here is that the problems observed in the 
     darkest corners of our society are human problems, not racial 
     ones. The fault-line between civilization and barbarism runs 
     down the middle of every human heart, and the grace of God 
     remains available to provide a way out for all who would 
     seek it. While we reject moral relativism, and so stand 
     ready to judge between better and worse ways of living, we 
     should strive to avoid self-righteousness. We certainly 
     should eschew completely any notions of collective, racial 
     condemnation or virtue.
       Unfortunately, some conservatives now write about ``the 
     problem of black crime,'' about ``the crisis of black 
     illegitimacy,'' about ``the threat of black social 
     pathology.'' But what has race to do with these problems, per 
     se? I am, of course, keenly aware that the rates of crime and 
     illegitimacy among blacks are substantially higher than among 
     whites. I am merely observing that neither the causes nor the 
     cures of such maladies depend on one's skin color. Which 
     group of Americans are innocent and which are the culprits in 
     these affairs? These are problems of sin, not of skin. I 
     would have thought that religious conservatives would be the 
     ones objecting most strenuously and insistently to this lapse 
     of social virtue on the right. Sadly, they have not been.
       It is true that, in the recent history of American social 
     policy, it was liberals who ``played the race card'' by 
     arguing that the disadvantages of blacks justified race-based 
     remedies. Some liberals even claimed that the self-esteem of 
     black youngsters could not be secured without rewriting 
     history so as to provide minorities with equal time. But, 
     while these liberal efforts are largely discredited, we now 
     find conservatives, with the political initiative in hand, 
     acting to maintain and reinforce this inordinate focus on 
     race.
       Thus, when conservatives talk of the ``culture of poverty'' 
     in reference to urban black communities they miss the deeper 
     truth--that America's real problem is its reluctance to 
     affirm those common moral standards that could guide the 
     behavior of blacks and whites alike. Similarly, one 
     conservative critic now declares victory over Afrocentrists 
     by noting that the latter's search for a black Shakespeare 
     has ended in failure. But surely the larger point is that 
     such a search was unnecessary all along, because Shakespeare 
     belongs every bit as much to the ghetto-dwelling black 
     youngster as he does to the offspring of middle-class whites. 
     Why are conservatives, who make so much of the importance of 
     being ``color-blind'' in public policy, not the first to 
     stress this point?
       There is hypocrisy in this conservative stance. Though 
     advocating race neutrality, 

[[Page E2424]]
     conservatives do not treat blacks and whites as moral equals. Critics 
     of affirmative action often invoke Dr. Martin Luther King 
     Jr., who in 1963 said famously, ``I have a dream that my four 
     little children will one day live in a nation where they will 
     not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content 
     of their character.'' It is a corollary of this principle 
     that, when gazing upon Americans who are welfare mothers, 
     juvenile felons or the cognitively deficient, we should see 
     human beings with problems, not races of people plagued by 
     pathology. Yet, as I have argued, conservatives do not always 
     do so.
       Perhaps more significantly, this selective remembrance of 
     Dr. King's moral leadership diminishes the challenge which 
     his life, and death, should pose for all Americans. Two years 
     before his most famous speech, in a commencement address at 
     Lincoln University, Dr. King made a less well known reference 
     to his dream for our nation:
       ``One of the first things we notice in this dream is an 
     amazing universalism. It does not say some men [are created 
     equal], but it says all men. It does not say all white men, 
     but it says all men, which includes black men. . . . And 
     there is another thing we see in this dream that ultimately 
     distinguishes democracy and our form of government from all 
     of the totalitarian regimes that emerge in history. It says 
     that each individual has certain basic rights that are 
     neither conferred by nor derived from the state. To discover 
     where they come from, it is necessary to move back behind the 
     dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given. Very seldom, if 
     ever, in the history of the world has a socio-political 
     document expressed in such profoundly eloquent and 
     unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of the human 
     personality. The American dream reminds us that every man is 
     heir to the legacy of worthiness.''
       This too would be a worthy dream for conservatism: to 
     insure that every American can lay claim to his most precious 
     civic inheritance--a legacy of worthiness. To secure it, 
     conservatives must learn not to look upon poor urban blacks 
     as the Others--aliens apart from and a threat to our 
     civilization. Instead, these Americans should be seen as 
     inseparably interwoven constituents of the larger social 
     fabric.

                          ____________________