Shelby Steele’s White Guilt and the Western Past has garnered quite a reaction. Conservatives hail the justification for the reassumption of the White Man’s Burden…nevermind that all of Europe and most of the USofA has had quite enough of it. Progressives are angry…frankly, because they overlooked the key fallacy that let him align white guilt (which, sadly, all of you including Conservatives, are reacting to) with White Supremacy.

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.

It’s not guilt if you don’t feel guilty.

I went into this at a bit more length at Prometheus 6. I don’t intend to duplicate it all, though I will tweak the nose of Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom for writing this precious bit of nonsense.

As I’ve mentioned here on numerous occasions, the first fight we must win is internally and domestically. And it is a fight for the soul of classical liberalism, which is being undercut (in my estimation) by nearly 40 years of a concerted effort by those whose goal is power and control to relativize meaning and deconstruct, through incoherent linguistic assertions that have unfortunately been widely adopted out of self-satisfied feel-goodism (specifically, an ostensible deference to the Other that allows us to convince ourselves we are “tolerant” and “diverse,” when in fact we have created the conditions to turn those ideas into something approximating their exact opposites).

Talk about “incoherent linguistic assertions.” Really funny, since he’s basing it on a false linguistic assertion Shelby Steele created on the fly.

What does Goldberg do for a living, anyway? He’s not an historian…

Taking back the grounds for meaning—and being willing to fight for those grounds against those who try to shame us out of reasserting them—is the first step toward the recovery of our belief in our strong and generous national character. To that end, we should draw a lesson from the charges of Bill Bennett’s “racism”—cast by those who don’t believe Bennett intended to say anything racist, but who insist, rather, that his words themselves were racist (an idea that grants that public perception is the locus of meaning, and that the utterer can be held accountable for the public perception). Such a dismissal of the importance of intent has led, predictably, to a rhetorical condition wherein those who protest the loudest (and can play to our emotions) will have effectively seized control of “history” as it is constructed and disseminated through language.

…or he’d know the intent test he misses so much was banned from law by Dixicrats and their ilk. He’d know the control of the language lies with the mainstream, not minorities. He’s know he’s talking out of his hat. But he’s not an historian…

Anyway, forget Shelby Steele. This nonsense will have the short life span that 95 out of 100 editorials have.