Conservatism Inc.’s Ceaseless Quest for the Great Black Hope

Call it poetic justice. In November 2023, with a war in Gaza going on, black conservative media star Candace Owens was disowned by the very organization that launched her celebrityhood seven years earlier, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Prompting the rebuke were her bizarre comments about Jews and her sharing a platform with “manosphere” activist Andrew Tate, a Muslim convert, who believes “ISIS are the real Muslims because ISIS do exactly what the book says.”

The center’s namesake, founder, and president, the late David Horowitz (no relation), a man of great courage but erratic political wisdom, had harsh words for Owens. “Her comments about Israel and her promotion of people like Andrew Tate are part of a pattern,” he said. “Candace tackles a subject she knows nothing about, never bothers to learn anything about it, and then rides the backlash by playing the victim to generate more fame and money.”

Very true. So why didn’t Horowitz recognize this in 2016? I think it’s because, given his reverence for Martin Luther King Jr. as a supposedly great conservative, he saw blackness and conservatism as an irresistible combination in a drive for a reinvigorated right.

Owens is one of several flameouts in the Official Right’s ceaseless quest for a Great Black Hope. Other disappointing would-be black icons include politicians Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, Mia Love, John James, Herschel Walker, and Tim Scott, and borderline nutcases like rapper-businessman Kanye West.

Advocates for broadening the right’s base reflexively take their frustration out on white liberals as “the real racists.” A black podcaster, Stephen Davis, issued this taunt several years ago: “The white liberal who has long shown their racism in a myriad of ways has once again showcased their racial bigotry towards the black man.”

This is preposterous. The problem with white liberals is that they accommodate black grievances, not dismiss them. If blacks demand something, liberals will oblige them. It’s fellow whites whom they brush off. During his tenure as president, Joe Biden appointed at least 40 black females to lifetime federal judgeships, more than any of his predecessors. If the record of black Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is any guide, none of them should have been appointed.

White conservatives, with a somewhat lighter touch, have followed this same path since the black urban riots that occurred from 1964 to 1968. Indeed, black outreach is a prerequisite to being in good odor with establishment conservatism. I can recall back in 1990, while interviewing for a position at The Heritage Foundation, my amazement over the foundation’s celebration of Black History Month (also known as February).

There is also an insidious, less visible motive for this “outreach.” Mainstream conservatives crave opportunities to demonstrate that they, too, are “compassionate.” By going all out for blacks, they can pull off a political triple play: immunize themselves from charges of racism; “expose” liberal bigotry; and, best of all, sideline troublesome “racist” white conservatives who obstruct the establishment’s manufactured consensus.

This explains the seeming contradiction of anti-liberal rightists mimicking their leftist accusers. It’s hard to imagine anyone hating liberals, for example, more than the late Andrew Breitbart. Yet in 2011, with a presidential campaign looming, the king of right-wing bloggers issued this declaration during an interview with the left-leaning Daily Beast:

The idea of an Allen West/Herman Cain all-black conservative ticket would titillate me to the point of secretions coming out of every orifice. It would so upset the politically correct, culturally Marxist paradigm in academia, and they’d have to start attacking… And I think it would cause the American people to see how unserious the left is when it comes to the issue of claiming to represent the best interests of minorities.

Breitbart was quite serious (save, possibly, for the “secretions”). It seems he hadn’t noticed that Alan Keyes had run for president as a Republican in 1996, 2000, and 2008 (in all fairness, almost nobody else noticed either!). Nor did he realize that “minorities” include Asians and Hispanics, neither of which are enamored of blacks. Breitbart was trying to outdo the left, unaware that he was joining them.

Such delusions on the right are now conspiratorial shibboleths. Not only do liberals harm blacks, as the reigning wisdom goes, they harm them deliberately. There are no unintended consequences.

How did the right go off the rails? Let’s go back to early 2008, a pivotal moment in time. Jonah Goldberg, then a senior editor with National Review, had just come out with a book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, that soon would be a bestseller. Though well-written and sourced, it was highly dishonest.

Goldberg’s guiding premise was that modern liberalism, and its primary vehicle, the Democratic Party, is fascism with a friendly face. While admitting that fascism never achieved liftoff in the United States, Goldberg constructed the fiction that it did under an assumed name.

To prove America has been in the grip of fascism since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, Goldberg routinely fit the facts to the conclusion. His examples of “liberal racism,” a manifestation of fascism—the Ku Klux Klan-Democratic Party alliance, the genocidal motives of Margaret Sanger, the “fascist” tendencies of the far-left Black Panthers and the Weathermen—were strained, if not wrongheaded.

The trauma and aftermath of World War I explain why fascism, and its more sinister relative, Nazism, took root “over there.” In Europe, the liberal tradition was shallower, the war’s devastation far greater, and the popular pleas for restoration of order more desperate. American liberalism, despite straying from its classical roots, still allowed for skepticism, debate, and transparency. Fascism and Nazism rejected such practices as unmanly and decadent. Goldberg never quite got this.

Equally important, fascism was bound to fail in a racially heterogeneous country like ours. Even if America’s white nationalists and black nationalists show some affinity for fascist controls, those factions have opposite goals. This is fascism that cannot achieve national unity—it is failed fascism.

Goldberg’s “liberal fascism” is an oxymoron, like “promiscuous virginity.” That doesn’t matter to the establishment right or those news sites, social media channels, and talk radio shows run by its minions. The liberal fascism meme became dogma, amplified by a couple of bad books by Dinesh D’Souza. Regarding race, it became chic to shower sympathy on blacks—poor darlings, enslaved for so long by “fascist” Democrats! If only their black victims realized their perilous condition, they’d become Republicans overnight.

The choir still sings that tune. Conservatism Inc. propagandists lately have been ecstatic over Donald Trump winning 15 percent of the black vote in the 2024 presidential election, roughly twice the usual Republican share. But doesn’t this mean that 85 percent of blacks voted against Trump? Hey, don’t ask inconvenient questions! We’re making progress.

To foster black support, the Official Right discourages mention of high incidences of black crime, illiteracy, and drug dependency, and all other pathologies that reflect badly on blacks generally. Skewer their leaders, yes, but lay off the regular folks. By exempting blacks from moral responsibility, preferring to condemn “liberal racism,” Conservatism Inc. created a political model by which it could deflect charges of racism while supposedly winning black votes.

The strategy looked great on paper. Missing were elementary logic and realism.

Imagine this syllogism: “I love fish. Cats love fish. Therefore, I am a cat.” Ridiculous, right? Ordering flounder at a restaurant no more makes me a cat than eating a carrot makes me a rabbit. The fact that cats and humans enjoy fish doesn’t mean the two species are the same. The differences matter more than the similarities. A coincidental overlap is not a pattern.

Yet for Conservatism Inc., a selective overlap is a pattern if it can win elections. For them, “Democrat” and “liberal” are identical, not simply overlapping, and have been so from the very beginning. What these pundits ignore is that until the mid-1960s most Southern Democrats, unlike Northern Democrats, opposed federally forced racial integration. This was an intraparty civil war decisively won by the Northern faction; the Southern faction would become northernized. Yet Conservative Inc. bloggers write as if Charles Schumer and Gavin Newsom are the reincarnation of John Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke. They’re all Democrats, after all! What difference does it make that 150 years separate these villains?

Today’s liberals are anti-racists, meaning that they are instinctively hostile to white interests. For decades, moving steadily leftward, these white leftists have sided with blacks and other ostensibly marginalized groups, granting them special moral allowances. Social equality, not liberty, is their goal. Far from oppressing blacks, managers of the redistributionist State, pressured by interest groups, work on the assumption that blacks and other “people of color” should receive preferential treatment for grants, loans, jobs, contracts, university admissions, and other benefits.

This represents the affirmative-action mentality. By intent and result, Democratic Party policies harm whites while claiming to benefit blacks. That’s why blacks support them! They’re not fools. They know where their interests lie. Why would anyone this side of Candace Owens expect blacks to exit the Democratic Party? They just about own it. Their grievances, rallies, sermons, lobbies, votes, and riots drive the Democrats’ domestic platform. Woe unto those who oppose them!

Con Inc. warriors, viewing blacks as natural converts, relish the thought of rescuing them. This August, Town Hall columnist Derek Hunter wrote:

In the United States, Democrats were the slave owners. While very few Americans actually owned slaves, about 2 percent (at the most), all of them were Democrats. When the Civil War ended slavery, it was Democrats who obstructed and ended Reconstruction that sought to remove obstacles for black Americans to be fully integrated into American society.

It was Democrats who founded the Ku Klux Klan, created Jim Crow laws, lynched, and enforced segregation. They blocked every attempt at civil rights legislation for a century, including Lyndon Johnson as Senate Majority Leader watering down the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to the point that it was essentially worthless to deny President Eisenhower and Republicans the victory.

Space precludes a full rebuttal. But it is worth asking that if at most 2 percent of all Americans owned slaves, why would the country bother going to war over the issue? A better measure would be the percentage of families engaged in slave ownership in states where it was legal. Leading historians estimate this figure at around 25 percent. As for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson brokering that deal over the 1957 civil rights legislation, he knew that his party’s schism on race, if unbridged, would have killed the bill. This doesn’t prove that he was against the Civil Rights Act per se.

The Con Inc. blogosphere is rife with such willful ignorance. Take Jeffrey Lord, a frequent contributor to The American Spectator (and a Trump supporter!), who wrote last year:

Biden’s party set up the ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now it has moved from support for segregation to supporting what can easily be called today’s ‘son of segregation’—identity politics.

Talk about guilt by association with the dead! And what is new about people voting their group interests? Americans have been doing this for over 200 years.

Perpetually aggrieved Breitbart columnist John Nolte posed this question in 2021:

Why is it that Democrats and the Establishment media refuse to forgive the United States of America but have forgiven and even joined the same Democrat party that launched the Civil War (to hold on to their slaves) and then went on to create the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow South?

It never occurred to him that political parties by their very nature evolve and often embrace positions that conflict with earlier ones they’ve taken.

The claim that “Democrat racism” defined slavery in America is self-righteous hokum that doesn’t survive even superficial scrutiny. Never mind that in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, when America consisted of colonies under British royal charter, no political parties existed. Never mind that white indentured servants were treated at least as badly as black slaves. What Con Inc. button pushers ignore every time is motive. Slavery here, like everywhere else, was a manifestation of a neo-feudal system of forced agricultural labor. Profit was the motive. Race and party were effects, not causes.

The ignoramuses who equate Democrats with slavery also seem unaware that party leaders in Northern and Southern states by 1860 were irrevocably split over the issue. Northern Democrats, though far from enraged over slavery, were not ready to fight for it. Pro-slavery Southern Democrats, however, were ready to fight against it. This prompted the latter’s convention walkout, resulting in two Democratic candidates for president, Stephen Douglas (Northern) and John Breckinridge (Southern). Had the Southern bloc been willing to negotiate, Lincoln’s election, Southern secession, and war might not have happened.

Conservatism Inc. writers effectively say: “Slaveholders were Democrats. Democrats are liberals. Therefore, slaveholders were liberals.” With this fraudulent syllogism, they can advance the claim that blacks are still captives on the “Democrat plantation.” Ironically, these altruistic firebrands have created their own version of the New York Times’ historically revisionist “1619 Project.”

How off-kilter can things get? Derek Hunter in 2014 penned an editorial in which he called upon blacks, without enlisting government, to forcibly extract reparations from the Democratic Party. His proposal, at once predatory, unconstitutional, politically naive, and historically obtuse, was a variation on what black revolutionaries had been advocating for decades. Why not simply tell blacks to rob Democrat-owned convenience stores?

Such propagandists also apply “Therefore, I am a cat” logic to the Ku Klux Klan—what’s left of it. Founded after the Civil War, the original Klan grew rapidly as the vigilante wing of white Southern resistance to Reconstruction. Nominally, Klan members voted Democrat. But so did virtually everyone else in the lowland South, and for a full century! That didn’t necessarily mean they joined or even liked the Klan.

These pugilists also sidestep the fact that the KKK enjoyed a brief resurgence during the 1920s, promoting a white, small-town Protestant sensibility. It was also a far more bigoted Klan than the earlier one, which had included both Jewish and Catholic members. The Klan by then had gone national, waving the stars and stripes. The time was ripe for such a development. Urban populations were exploding, largely due to internal black migration and European Catholic and Jewish immigration. Communist subversion was a real threat. Prohibition needed moral enforcers. Northern Klan chapters viewed WASPs as the guardians of American republicanism and drew from that association. Outside the South, it is doubtful their members had much use for Democrats, the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”

By conflating the Democratic Party with the Klan, Conservatism Inc. functionaries are referring to a long-extinct Southern regional subset of a subset of Democrats. The KKK isn’t simply different from today’s ferociously egalitarian, anti-white Democratic Party. It is 180 degrees the opposite!

To “prove” that the left and the Klan are joined at the hip thus takes real effort. But Conservatism Inc. has a secret weapon: Robert Byrd. When all else fails, they remind us to numbing effect that the late West Virginia senator—a Democrat!—was a prominent local Klansman in the 1940s.

There is far less to this “revelation” than meets the eye. Not only has it met with indifference from both major parties, it has also ignored the guilt-ridden Byrd’s pro-black voting record. In 1991, for example, he joined Senate colleagues in passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act, widening the basis for workplace affirmative action lawsuits that had been narrowed by the Supreme Court a couple years earlier. Black lawmakers appreciated such efforts. At Byrd’s eulogy in 2010, Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights veteran and a very left-leaning black politician, lauded Byrd as “a true statesman.”

Pro-black “conservatives” also recklessly project motive regarding the welfare state. White Democrat liberals in the mid-’60s, they argue, spurred by President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, purposively initiated the destruction of black America. These programs were created and expanded at the behest of black civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr. Large-scale enforced altruism created large-scale unintended consequences. By rewarding people unwilling to commit themselves to a full-time job and/or to marriage before having children, the welfare state produced more problems than it solved. It never has been, however, an anti-black conspiracy.

Black conservatives such as Star Parker, herself a self-confessed former welfare hustler, allow themselves leeway in calling out bad black behavior; white conservatives usually hesitate to tell us the obvious about this problem. Where the races unite is in their yearning for a new Great Emancipator, preferably black, who will lead his people into the Promised Land of the Republican Party. Although Black Moses has yet to materialize, Con Inc. never stops trying to locate him.

There are several plausible explanations behind conservatism’s interracial altruism—a need for moral self-congratulation and a Stockholm Syndrome-style bond with black shakedown artists. Unfortunately, these self-styled conservatives aren’t conserving much of anything. They exemplify James Burnham’s definition of a liberal: a person who won’t take his own side in an argument.

Black conservatives have been around for a long time, but they are few in number. To obsess over creating a conservative majority among blacks, all the while downplaying conservative principles and legitimate white grievances, is a ticket to disaster. Blacks don’t want to be rescued by white conservatives any more than they do by white liberals. To them, blackness is not a divisive, superficial construct (“skin color”). It is life itself. Why can’t whites understand this attitude?

Five centuries ago, Machiavelli recognized that a political ruler must distinguish between friends and enemies. A leader acts wisely, Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, when “without reservation, he takes his stand with one side or another. This is always wiser than trying to be neutral.” Otherwise, he puts his life and those of his people in jeopardy. Would-be conservatives who believe that blacks are political soulmates, aching to be rescued, are on a fool’s errand. Blacks are not the friends of the American right, and, to their credit, they’ve made their feelings fully known.

There is no “magic black” who can or will propel the right to permanent glory. To believe otherwise is delusional. If white conservatives want to conduct a rescue mission, they should rescue themselves from the black identity politics that America has encouraged for at least 60 years.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/conservatism-inc-s-ceaseless-quest-for-the-great-black-hope