White Guilt and the Western Past
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its
wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything
approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option
aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the
relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the
Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite
our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq
against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem
unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents
themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this
insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the
scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a
little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of
minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy,
which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and
rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the
world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide
collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political
legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire
world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across
the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into
servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the
globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil
rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy,
if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was
left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after
the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the
slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is
now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned
authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but
because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and
imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel
guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past
sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the
memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not
relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the
greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq,
it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin
of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an
insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to
win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white
guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world:
stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this
stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for
Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is
fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in
war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military
victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and
raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean
less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn.
Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing
dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary
sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of
internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied
to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war
can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social
work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus
dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort
in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy
is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new
institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of
individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of
overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to
bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't
ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the
United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a
dangerous enemy.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people
whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the
historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must
"understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though
Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil
opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it
with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the
passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of
the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by
the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the
imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that
America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization
campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American
in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy
and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as
President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers
of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is
the most dependable source of power for today's international left.
Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more
appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or
effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western
sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter
them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by
the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in
reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat
of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic
extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is
impolitic to say so.
America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era,
a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral
accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast
stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.
Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in
their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem
for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our
government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral
authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the
abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing
proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the
authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated
minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor
whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war,
white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst
problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double
bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war,
fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes
problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from
stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to
truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are
slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in
America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you
retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit
whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact
that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a
truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus,
but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy
in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If
there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time,
there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed
as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority
to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go
to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, is author, most recently, of "White Guilt: How Blacks and
Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,"
published this week by HarperCollins.
Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
BY SHELBY STEELE
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its
wars since World War II.
For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything
approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option
aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the
relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the
Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite
our vast power, we are only slogging along--if admirably--in Iraq
against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem
unable to stop it. Yet no one--including, very likely, the insurgents
themselves--believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this
insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the
scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a
little room for an insurgency.
Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of
minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy,
which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and
rather passionless war against a weak enemy.
Why this new minimalism in war?
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the
world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide
collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political
legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire
world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across
the globe, and delivered the majority of the world's population into
servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the
globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil
rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy,
if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was
left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West--like Germany after
the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the
slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is
now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned
authority.
I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but
because people stigmatized with moral crimes--here racism and
imperialism--lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel
guilt or not.
They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past
sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the
memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not
relapsed into their group's former sinfulness. So when America--the
greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq,
it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin
of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an
insurgency and another against the past--two fronts, two victories to
win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.
The collapse of white supremacy--and the resulting white
guilt--introduced a new mechanism of power into the world:
stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this
stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for
Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is
fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in
war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military
victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and
raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean
less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn.
Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing
dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary
sacrifice made to restore our nation's legitimacy. Europe's halls of
internationalism would suddenly open to us.
Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied
to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America's act of going to war
can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social
work--something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus
dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort
in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy
is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new
institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of
individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of
overcoming poverty--war as the Great Society.
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to
bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't
ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the
United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a
dangerous enemy.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people
whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the
historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must
"understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though
Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil
opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it
with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the
passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of
the white supremacist past.
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by
the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the
imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that
America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization
campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American
in order to be "good," in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy
and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as
President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers
of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is
the most dependable source of power for today's international left.
Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more
appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or
effort--only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.
Today words like "power" and "victory" are so stigmatized with Western
sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter
them. For the West, "might" can never be right. And victory, when won by
the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in
reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat
of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic
extremism. But in today's atmosphere of Western contrition, it is
impolitic to say so.
America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era,
a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral
accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast
stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.
Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in
their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem
for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our
government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral
authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the
abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing
proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the
authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated
minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor
whites who lack all these things. Just can't do it.
Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war,
white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst
problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double
bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem--win a war,
fix immigration--they lose legitimacy.
To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes
problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from
stigmatization as a "unilateralist cowboy"? And where is the will to
truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are
slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in
America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you
retreat into minimalism.
Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit
whites--and nonwhites--to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact
that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a
truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus,
but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy
in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If
there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time,
there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.
This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life--absorbed
as new history--so that America can once again feel the moral authority
to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go
to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, is author, most recently, of "White Guilt: How Blacks and
Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era,"
published this week by HarperCollins.
