By Jason L. Riley | The Wall Street Journal
Shelby Steele. Photo: Hoover Institution
Shelby Steele says the election shows that blacks no longer feel beholden to the Democratic Party.
Shelby Steele’s 2007 book about Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, “A Bound Man,” was a provocative examination of identity politics in the first decade of the 21st century. It explained how black Americans grapple with a sort of dual identity—one that is shaped by a history of racial oppression and another that endeavors to transcend that legacy.
“Is America now the kind of society that can allow a black—of whatever pedigree—to become the most powerful human being on earth, the commander of the greatest military in history?” Mr. Steele asked. “Have our democratic principles at last moved us beyond even the tribalism of race? And will the black American identity, still so reflexively focused on victimization, be nullified if a black wins the presidency of this largely white nation?”
Seventeen years later, we know the answers to those questions, but don’t expect them to inform the liberal response to Kamala Harris’s defeat. So far as many Democrats are concerned, Ms. Harris lost not because she was a poor candidate but because the country is irredeemably racist. “Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be absolutely blunt about it,” said Democratic strategist David Axelrod on election night. “There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country.” Does Mr. Axelrod believe that racism and sexism were nonexistent when Mr. Obama was elected?
When I phoned Mr. Steele this week for his reaction to Donald Trump’s victory, he told me it could be evidence that the country had “evolved” politically since the Obama presidency. Ms. Harris couldn’t rely on blind racial loyalty from minority voters or guilt from white voters to the extent that Mr. Obama had in 2008.
“White guilt is a kind of unexamined force in American political life,” Mr. Steele said. “Whites do a lot of things—entertain a lot of things—not because they believe them but because it buys them innocence, political innocence from all the evils of Western civilization.” If fewer whites were shamed into voting for Ms. Harris based on her ethnicity, bravo. Similarly, he said that if the link between skin color and political preference is severing—if more blacks are starting to vote based on something other than racial identity—“I think it’s progress because it’s breaking up this idea that race is in itself meaningful, that it has some truth to deliver in political contests.”
Mr. Steele said that most people were simply looking for a basic level of competence, and the Democratic candidate came up short. “The inarticulateness, the lack of any sort of familiarity with the issues. I mean, wow! She was kind of an insult to minority voters. You can’t do any better than this?”
And he found it “thrilling” to see so many blacks support Mr. Trump, who won a quarter of all black men and a third of black men ages 18 to 44, according to exit polls. “To me, that’s a vote for individualism over group identity. We thought identity was the be-all and end-all, and if we mastered that, everything would be wonderful. It wasn’t. We were worse off. I think this election was a real note of progress for black America politically.”
Mr. Steele is hopeful and optimistic that the trend will persist and that blacks will emerge from what the scholar Yascha Mounk calls the “identity trap.” The political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird have found that social pressure from other blacks is a main driver of black political behavior. Less peer pressure to vote for Democrats could mean less partisan loyalty going forward as more black voters, like other voters, opt to play the major parties against one another to get better political representation. Liberals want minorities to see race as their defining attribute, but significant numbers of blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans ignored that counsel in this year’s election. Even in deep blue states that Mr. Trump lost, such as New York and California, the GOP made big gains and Ms. Harris significantly underperformed Joe Biden in 2020.
“I think it’s definitely something that will continue when Trump leaves the scene,” Mr. Steele told me. “There is this slowly creeping reality that we blacks are in charge of our own fate. And those kinds of ideas—you see more of an openness to that way of thinking. You can go to the deepest pockets of black America, where you would presume that anger defines everything. And you see many blacks now thinking what you and I have been thinking for a long time. That hey, this doesn’t work. I believe in the collective perceptivity of black America, that they are going to absorb this.”
