Archive [November 1998]

I was greatly honored to speak to one of America’s most brilliant scholars. Dr. Steele is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the classic, The Content of Our Character. If you see his name on any book jacket or article, read it: including his new book, A Dream Deferred (HarperCollins).

Rush: I’ve been an admirer of yours for a long time, Dr. Steele. I used to live in Sacramento, where I first became aware of you. I’ve gotten to know Dr. Sowell very well, and he continually speaks highly of you. And so it’s a thrill to be able to talk to you.

Steele: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Rush: The reason I wanted to speak to you, specifically, was because of the column in The Wall Street journal that you wrote, called “Baby Boom Virtue.” You were responding to this specific problem in our culture today that a person’s private morality is irrelevant if his public morality passes muster. Public morality, of course, defined, for better or worse, as whether you’re right — on the left side of the issue.

Steele: Right.

Rush: It’s one of those things that I read and immediately said I wish I’d thought of it. It’s something that has been out there to grasp, but I never did. How long has this trend been percolating before it surfaced to the point that it was noticeable? When did this happen?

Steele: It goes back to the ‘60s. I really do think it is a phenomenon of the baby boom generation and our relationship to our parents, who were hard-working, decent, honorable people. But on the other hand, they got caught with the civil rights movement. They got caught with the war in Vietnam. Their public morality on that level was questionable, and we used that against them.

Rush: In other words, in private, they were decent people. They did the right thing. But publicly, they allowed for situations —

Steele: — they lived with it, right. They were not rebels.

Rush: When they saw racial injustice, they said, “Oh, that’s bad.” But they didn’t do anything about it. And their children did.

Steele: Right. They may have been pained by it. So then the children came along and we sort of held it against them. We said, “This proves that your focus on private morality, in itself, causes you to be irresponsible in public life. It’s a form of hypocrisy.” We, in a sense, demeaned personal responsibility as hypocritical. What relevance could it have had if it allowed you to live with segregation and so forth? I think the split began at that point. And then, given our other problems, our grandiosity and self-importance, it just deepened as the decades passed.

Rush: You said that generation was the first generation that rebelled against its parents and won.

Steele: Right.

Rush: How so?

Steele: Probably every generation goes to some form of rebellion, but usually the parents have the moral authority to tamp that down. To say, “There are other realities. You have to have some humility. You have to have some responsibility. Whatever your politics are or your public face is, it has to be grounded in your private morality.” But our parents’ generation had, by virtue of the civil rights movement and Vietnam, really lost their moral authority. We could just keep throwing it back at them: “Look at what you’ve tolerated. Look at the militarism that you support. Look at the injustice.” So they, in a sense, gave up; they lost. This is something I talk about in my book. I think it’s one of the real unrecognized social phenomena in the last 40 or 50 years, this loss of moral authority. At a moment when the baby boom was coming of age and needed a father figure, a parental figure, to give us a sense of responsibility, at that very moment, we were allowed to be irresponsible, almost as a kind of virtuousness.

Rush: Did that lead the election of Bill Clinton?

Steele: I think it absolutely did. We knew about his problem. And the split was evident right there. We said, “That’s his personal life. His private morality has no connection to his public morality.” And so we ignored it. Of course, at our peril.

Rush: A lot of people are trying to explain his high approval ratings, and they come up with a number of explanations: “The economy is good.” Or, “I don’t want to be mad at anything right now and doing something about Clinton would require me to be mad.” Everybody is skirting the issue. You seem to say that it really is the manifestation of this ‘60s redefinition of morality that looks at Clinton and sees an absolutely fine guy on the things that matter to people. And this other stuff that he does in his so-called private life, even though it wasn’t private, really doesn’t matter to people.

Steele: Right.

Rush: Now, is that going to last? And are these people raising their own kids to look at things that way as well?

Steele: That is what is so frightening about this situation. I think in many ways, this is a kind of referendum over whether or not America is going to make personal responsibility a requirement for virtuousness. And right now, given the polls, we seem to be saying that it may not be necessary. Or certainly, it may not be necessary in any strong sense. In the ‘50s, had it come out that a President was doing this, he’d have been out of office. There would have been a sense that his personal irresponsibility disabled him. I also happen to believe that it has clearly disabled President Clinton, and that if he does survive, as a society, we’re going to pay a terrible price for keeping somebody like him around. He may stay in office, but he’s not really going to get away with it. His moral authority will be shattered. But I’m not sure America knows that yet. People are entertaining this idea that you can have a separation, that you can be virtuous without being personally responsible. And that’s going to catch up with us.

Rush: Maybe the polls don’t tell the whole story. Look at the debate in Congress over whether or not to proceed with an impeachment inquiry. We have as a starting point the polls, which indicate the American people say, “Get this behind us. We don’t want an inquiry. We love the President. Don’t kick him out of office.” The Democrats then accuse the Republicans — who continue the inquiry despite that poll information — of exploiting this for political gain. My question is, if the people, by virtue of polls, don’t want him investigated and don’t want him thrown out of office, and yet the Republicans proceed to do just that, how is there any political gain to exploit? It seems like they would be committing suicide. So, maybe the polls aren’t really that accurate. Do you see any sign that the people really are so enamored of Bill Clinton personally that they do not want this inquiry to proceed?

Steele: I don’t think they’re enamored of Bill Clinton personally. That wouldn’t be my sense of it. And I’m not sure if there’s much political gain in it for the Republicans. My sense is that the people are really voting for a degree of moral latitude. They are in a sense saying, “It’s not so much Bill Clinton, it’s the kind of latitude that I now feel is sophisticated, and is proper, and that I want for myself. And that I can live with. If I throw Bill Clinton out, if I become a Republican and become mean and hard-nosed and blue-nosed, then I’m shrinking that latitude for myself.” The body politic seems to be negotiating that now. And I think the Republicans are, as they tend to be in this, at risk — because they are the blue-noses.

Rush: They’re the parents.

Steele: Right, and they can’t win. They keep finding themselves in that position with Clinton, where everybody is proving their sophistication at the Republicans’ expense. And it’s a tough spot for them to negotiate. I think they simply have to try to make their case. But it’s a difficult case to make with this kind of backdrop and with the Democrats yammering at them.

Rush: We might be in the throes, though, or at the beginning, of what could be a domestic economic problem that could lead to a recession. The market looks like it is on a downward turn. If in the next six to nine months a recession, as technically defined, does set in, what does that do to all of this?

Steele: I think it changes it. Milton Friedman often makes the point that good ideas don’t have a chance until there is a crisis. Then when there is a crisis, hopefully they’re around and we can reach for them. II that begins to happen, if we go into a recession and there is real struggle out there in this society, then there will probably also be a feeling that we need principles; that this latitude we’ve lived with is a kind of corruption; that we need to shrink it; that sophistication is not going to get us through tough times; that we need a firmer hand on things. So if that happens, probably this society would open up, would be more willing. The Republicans’ time would have come.

Rush: Sort of the saving grace, even though it’s a sad way to get there.

Steele: It’s a sad way to get there, but people don’t usually take the difficult road until necessity pushes them to do so.

Rush: Now as I read your Journal piece, I had to infer that you don’t share the baby boom attitudes or the view of morality that you decry.

Steele: That’s true.

Rush: I don’t either. So how did we escape it?

Steele: I’ve raised two kids who are now young adults, and that probably as much as anything helped me. But even apart from that, I don’t think you can build a meaningful life that way. You can build a sophisticated life that way. You can have serial relationships, and you can glibly bend the rules here, bend the rules there, and make alliances. But you can’t build a meaningful life that way.

Rush: Yes, and you write, “His [Clinton’s] credentials are not earned through responsibility, but established by support of feminist policies, willingness to identify himself with an agenda.” Basically, it sounds very shallow. It sounds like these people are self-deceiving, that they’re telling themselves they’re substantive when they’re not.

They don’t have to do anything, in other words — all they have to do is say they care, and that’s the same as accomplishing something.

Steele: Right, absolutely. Identification with virtue is the same thing as being virtuous. There’s so many of Clinton’s programs and ideas and policies that he’s advocated, which we never hear of five minutes after he announces them. They’re iconographic, in the sense that they represent his virtuousness long enough for people to say, “Oh, Bill Clinton cares. Look at that. He really cares. He wants to be able to bring a million college students into the classroom, and teach them.” And that’s it.

But that is what this generation has done. This generation has taken responsibility out of virtuousness. Not only that, but their enormous political power is that if you can have virtuousness by mere identification, then you can demonize the other side.

Rush: That’s why, I have to tell you, when I read this piece, I got a chill up and down my back. Because I consider you brilliant. And when you agreed with something I have said, I thought — My, I must have had a stroke of brilliance myself once. And it’s precisely about that. It’s not that these people disagree with those who have a different view, they construe them as evil. It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s good versus evil. And they’re the good. As good fighting evil, they have license to do anything to overcome it.

Steele: That’s right. And I think one of the frustrations when dealing with them is that even though you’re making a reasonable case, and even though your positions are plainly true, the other side doesn’t have to respond to reason, because they’ve demonized you.

Rush: So how do the demonized respond?

Steele: That’s the big dilemma. That’s the problem that the culture now faces. I don’t think there’s an easy way. My sense is that the case has to be made. You know, when you’re in a double bind, the only way to survive is to name it. And it has to continue to be named and pointed out and the case has to be made: “You are demonizing us so that you can avoid reason, and avoid truth.” When the process begins to be constantly named, that’s helpful. And beyond that, we have to stand up for the principles, and in a fair way articulate them.

Rush: There are a lot of dispirited people out there because of this very question. They don’t know how to respond. They’re not mean. They’re not mean-spirited or evil, and they don’t desire that people hurt. For example, they don’t desire that Medicare patients not get medicine or that children starve or that people get dirty air and water. And yet this is said about them. It’s like the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Steele: Exactly. You have to prove a negative.

Rush: And when you start to respond, you are always on the defensive. There is an aggression against you all the time. You’re always out to prove, first and foremost, that you’re a nice guy. I tell you, whoever can come up with the response to this is A, going to save the country, and B, become enriched in any number of ways.

Steele: I agree, because this lets the other side win by default. If they can destroy your legitimacy, then whatever you have to offer is illegitimate, and they win by default.

Rush: This dominates most major college campuses today.

Steele: Oh, totally.

Rush: Even among faculty.

Steele: Absolutely. At Stanford University, where I’m at the Hoover Institution, the faculties, I think, are 98 percent liberal Democratic. You know, liberalism becomes the truth itself. In the book I explain that liberal ideology is the same thing as good manners, as propriety. So if you are not being liberal, it constitutes an impropriety, a breach of manners. They have built such a perfect formula for power.

Rush: Well, if you’re right, if this is generational in origin, maybe its passing will be generational as well. Which is why I asked you how these boomers are raising their kids. Are they raising a generation of kids that look at life the same way? I’ve got two stepkids, 19 and 17, and they’re very conservative. Personal responsibility is all that counts, both in making friendships and in the way they live their lives. They don’t seem to be affected by the aura around Clinton. They haven’t been around me all their lives, so it’s not that I’ve influenced them. I’ve run into a lot of young people, children of boomers, who are mad at what their parents have done with the family budget, and the credit card, and they’re worried about what’s being left them in terms of the federal fiscal situation. So I see some hope there.

Steele: I do too. My own kids are like that. Their friends are like that. I think you’re right. They cherish a kind of focus on personal responsibility because they, I think, have been injured by and threatened by the lack of it.

I think that the children of the boomers are probably going to return us again. I mean, every generation tries to compensate. We compensated as boomers for the lack of public virtue on the part of our own parents. And I think that’s going to happen again. There’s got to be a correction. Maybe they’ll find the right balance — one hopes. Note their reluctance to marry. Their reluctance to have the same kind of entanglements that our generation just leapt into. All of that, I think, points to a certain reserve, a certain care, that they’re taking because they sense that personal responsibility has to be the basis of arrangements. I’m not sure if there’s a Utopia coming, but maybe there will be a correction.

Rush: It will get there just in time to pay our Social Security benefits.

Steele: Maybe so!

Rush: I can’t let you go without asking you to comment on Toni Morrison and what she wrote in The New Yorker.

Steele: It’s pretty amazing.

Rush: You have spoken out on racial matters, and in a way that has not made you popular with the civil rights leadership in America. And you’ve been extremely courageous in that regard. Morrison called Bill Clinton “the first black President” — blacker than any black that’s out there, by the way — because he’s from a single-parent home, eats fast food, plays the saxophone, and Buford T. Justice is chasing him down, a black guy driving a nice car — he’s got The Man after him, Kenneth Starr. That description has to be profoundly insulting.

Steele: Absolutely.

Rush: Now who is Toni Morrison?

Steele: She once was a very talented writer — a long time ago. Probably her last good novel was Song of Solomon. But since then she has fallen into what I see really as almost a kind of racial sickness, where she tries to make a meaning, a romance, a religion, a truth, out of race. And it leads her, I think, into these wild hysterical kinds of statements. If a white person were to say, “Bill Clinton is black because he fits this ghetto stereotype,” that person would be roundly condemned by everyone. But she lives in this sort of mother-of-the-race kind of dream world. And it’s sick. It’s sad to see her embrace this stereotype as though it were true and virtuous and wonderful.

Rush: But she’s not condemned for it. The people whom she’s insulted here refuse to recognize it.

Steele: I think one of the reasons for that is what we’re talking about. Toni Morrison is an icon of racial virtuousness for many liberals. Therefore, because she is an icon of racial virtuousness, what she says is irrelevant. Her purpose is that she functions as an icon. Whatever she says doesn’t abridge that. People like myself, like Tom Sowell, like Clarence Thomas, are demons — and so what we say doesn’t matter, either. It’s an iconography that determines everything, and that’s the tragedy.

Rush: Exactly. Now, this is unrelated, but since I have the opportunity to ask you this and to make note of this, I’ve got to, because you’ve written so much about multiculturalism that I have stood up and cheered. Because I think it’s destructive to American kids, regardless of color. It takes American kids and conditions them to fail, by teaching them that there is an intrinsic bias against them that they cannot overcome — unless of course they subscribe to the prescriptions put forth by the civil rights community. And you’ve written that the primary goal of racial identity politics and multiculturalism is to remove excellence as a standard. Now merit, excellence and individualism are considered the “instruments of racism.” Now, that’s destructive as it can be.

Steele: Right.

Rush: How do you counter that?

Steele: Again it’s not easy, because of this iconography. The civil rights leadership — I call them the “grievance elite” — is perfectly happy with this arrangement, because it brings to them all of the patronage of preferences. And Bill Clinton is the perfect patronage President. They are quite happy to sacrifice excellence and merit in their own group in order to keep this patronage coming. It’s a case of black America being run like a banana republic, We’ve got unelected people who are speaking for us and representing us to the public, who are selling us out at every turn, who have no faith in us, no faith that we can compete when excellence is the measure, when merit is the measure.

This elite doesn’t want us to compete. It wants this preference system to go forward because it represents a kind of patronage, and the elite benefits — I mean, Clinton has appointed half of middle-class black America to some public office or other. So that’s what it’s all about.

Rush: Are you, throughout all of this, on balance optimistic? And if so, how? I ask that because my readers desperately want to be. I think most of them are, overall, but they’d like to hear from people who arrive at that optimism through scholarship and intellectual analysis as you do. Are you optimistic and how do you stay that way?

Steele: I am optimistic. In a sense, I feel as though I represent a kind of idealism, a new sort of racial idealism, at least in terms of what the outline of black America is today. I see more and more young people, as I go to campuses and so forth, who really respond to that and see the logic in it.

Rush: So you’re reaching people.

Steele: Absolutely. I feel as though I’m reaching more and more. I mean, they are at such risk of being demonized, it doesn’t mean that they’re always going to come out publicly in support, but my books are selling to somebody. And I’m being invited all these places to be heard by somebody. And when I get there, I find open minds, very often. I find a lot of closed minds, a lot of people who are quite happy with the status quo, but a lot who are not. And that’s heartening. I put my faith in the younger generation. Chris Rock says, “Every black man over 45 is angry.” And he may be right. But there are a lot of them who are under 45 and who are much more open than their seniors.

Rush: Well, as I say, I’ve gotten goose bumps reading some of the things that you’ve written and I’m thrilled to finally be able to talk to you about some of them. Because I did not attend, except for one year, a college, and in my life fortunately, I’ve been exposed to learned people and I have the ability to absorb much of what they’re trying to say and write. And you, especially, make what you believe extremely compelling; you take the complex and make it understandable, and that’s beneficial to people like me. And I thank you so much for what you do.

Steele: I’ve often said the same about you. I’m a regular listener, and very often I am confused by things. And I absolutely enjoy your monologues and in moments of being down, have used them to keep the faith. And so you have meant a lot to me over the years.

Rush: Well, thank you. That makes my day. I’m sitting behind the microphone, and most times I don’t know who is out there.

Steele: I’m certainly out there, as is my family. And you’re the best thing that’s happened to radio since I can certainly remember. And what you do for the country is just unimaginable.

Rush: I wish you could see my face. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Steele, more than you know.