In December, just before the presidential primary season, the conservative black writer Shelby Steele published A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. The book proved instructive in ways he didn’t intend: It showed the dangers of trying to shoehorn recent developments into paradigms that may have illuminated circumstances of 15 years ago but obscure the real opportunities and challenges now before us. Academics and some belletrists are especially prone to this danger, perhaps even more so if they’re on the left and have made their careers creating, promoting and defending certain paradigms in conference after conference, as the world rushes by. Yesterday’s liberation becomes tomorrow’s dead hand. Just look at what became of romantic “third worldism” that celebrated “people’s liberation movements” but found itself tongue-tied by 9/11 and has gone to Gaza to die. And look at what’s become of some leftist wisdom about race in America, right alongside Steele’s wisdom about the left. I wrote a couple of books about all this long enough ago for them, too, to bear reassessing. I’ve done that recently on a new website, but the interesting and fruitful discussion here of Obama’s recent speech prompts me to add a few observations now.

Steele was right in the 1990s to note that many racial remedies promoted by anti-racist liberals from cookie-cutter “diversity” in higher education to congressional districting along race lines were exercises in what he called “iconography,” by which he meant feel-good symbolism over substantive gain. Democratic justice in education and elections in a republic requires incredibly heavy lifting in early schooling and in voter registration. It does not gain from racial “rotten boroughs” (whose voter turnouts are notoriously low) or number-fudging in college admissions that embarrasses and thereby segregates too many of its intended beneficiaries. Steele understood this. He noted that upscale white liberals who’ve done well in the corporate capitalist dispensation have no serious intention of tackling its deepening inequities; yet they can’t bring themselves to defend them very wholeheartedly, either. So they grasp at a politics of moral posturing and tokenism that makes them feel better but doesn’t curb inequities that, thanks partly to their dodging, now divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites, and women from women as well as women from men.

As a conservative, Steele wasn’t going to do anything more about these inequities besides urge blacks to burn the midnight oil and vote. Yet the more glaring these inequalities became, even in the 1980s and 1990s, the more that liberals and facile leftists the latter ideologically inclineed yet daunted by the challenges of class more than of race — cut class (as in “economic class”) to wave colorful banners of racial and sexual identity, thereby offering fat targets to tongue-clucking conservatives more partisan than Steele. In gilded liberal precincts such as Michelle Obama’s undergraduate Princeton and Barack Obama’s (and her) Harvard Law School one saw periodic revival meetings where everyone from freshmen to deans swooned gratefully under the rhetorical lash of some iconic black speaker who posed as a tribune for all blacks while tapping vast stores of liberal white guilt and good intentions. Steele had these racial bargainers’ numbers. He showed how they put whites through rituals of racial penitence before granting them absolution for racism, letting them reassure themselves that they once were been blind but now could see. In return, whites, in convulsions of gratitude, granted the blackbargainer absolution for his or her own painfully obvious inferiorities, which were simply not acknowledged.

Steele observed this not gloatingly, but mournfully. He’d drawn his racial wisdom from his innards, not calculation. In The Closest of Strangers I was glad to quote him on the perils of what he called “integration shock,” which. replacing racial stigma with white friendship, frightens some blacks by holding them responsible for personal shortcomings that had been written off as consequences of “racism.” Fright produced flight or fight, not serious reassessments all around. Steele was right to warn that the scam of trading a grant white racial innocence for a cheap certificate of black equality offers no way out of racism. That dishonest bargain openly violates and subtly eviscerates the civic-republican virtues of candor, truth-telling, trust, and tough-minded optimism that true liberation demands but that leftists often rebuff as bourgeois mystifications of oppressive social relationships. No wonder that Steele was obsessed with Obama, who as editor of the Harvard Law Review in those days, had all the lineaments of a cosmopolitan leftist racial bargainer. Not only that; Steele, like Obama, had a white mother and a black father. And not only that: Obama became an organizer in the same Southside of Chicago where Steele had grown up — and the maddening irony is that Obama had actually chosen to go there, as Steele never would have, to claim an African-American identity that was Steele’s at birth.

You can perhaps imagine how Steele thought he had Obama’s number. He would explain his voluntary immersion in Southside Chicago as calculated preparation for racial bargaining with guilt-ridden whites on a national scale. Steele could shoehorn Obama into that paradigm because, truth to tell, it still reigns officially and unofficially at Harvard and Princeton and among some of Obama’s supporters. The problem is that it doesn’t reign among most of them anymore. This phony bargaining strategy, still beloved of brainless and weak deans on privileged campuses, has been shed quietly not only by Obama but also by more Americans in their 20s than Steele’s crusty pride in his hard-won (and well-rewarded) wisdom allows him to notice or acknowledge. What Steele’s “iconography” and “racial bargaining” models obscure is that Obama has liberated himself in certain important ways from the black identity politics he explored in Chicago. He has done it not by running away from it or dancing around it, or by being trapped in it but denying it, as Steele variously imagines. He has outgrown it by going straight through it with some good old fashioned conservative introspection, making a Pilgrim’s Progress that tested his faith in himself and society in the Slough of Despond, the Village of Legality and of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and all the seductions of Vanity Fair.

The elephant in the room which Steele’s paradigm obscures is that Barack Obama is running for the most trans-racial job in the country while Steele, by contrast, has written, is writing, and always will write essays about race. It is Steele who has become the racial bargainer, offering whites racial innocence at the conservative Hoover Institution, where he is a fellow and iconic black conservative, and at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, where, the day after Obama’s Philadelphia speech on race, he published a churlish musing about Obama as the archetypal racial bargainer– an essay that, he acknowledges, was written and locked into print before he’d read or heard Obama’s speech. As Don Wycliff, a black Chicagoan older than Steele, observed in reviewing A Bounded Man for Commonweal a week before the speech, “Steele sounds likke a man whose head is full of music that he alone can hear . [I]f anyone is bound, it is SSteele himself to a set of ideas and theories that he formulated in reactiion to his experiences in the 1960s. They once sounded like wisdom, but today they tinkle suspiciously like the bells on a fool’s cap.” I’m sorry to have to add that the same civic-republican standards of candor, truth-telling, trust, and tough-minded optimism that are discrediting both guilt-ridden racial bargaining and Steele’s critique of it are also discrediting certain leftist, racialist critiques of Obama.

Here I’ll just say that the left, instead of mirroring Steele by criticizing Obama for bargaining too readily with whites to assure them of their innocence, would be wiser to acknowledge Obama’s constraints as a candidate. One way to do that is to recognize that even the New Deal and even some elements of LBJ’s Great Society were borne of political compromises with racists reminiscent of the U.S. Constitution’s original compromise with slavery. To argue, as leftists do, that racism endures and remains ubiquitous and deep is to acknowledge, as some leftists don’t, that it’s not enough to mount barricades — or, more likely, a conference podium — or to rush to court uttering denunciations of racism. Times have changed, of course, and so can strategies. But it’s important to be realistic rather than self-righteous. At the Constitutional Convention and in the bargaining for the New Deal and Great Society, powerful Southerners had to be placated for a Constitutional provision or statute to pass. FDR had to play ball with "the solid [Democratic] South," whose representatives chaired important congressional committees. Well into the 1950s, Senator Jack Kennedy courted and compromised with segregationists; it was Richard Nixon, a member of the "Party of Lincoln," who was a card-carrying member of the NAACP.

The hope behind the compromises of the 1930s was that some New Deal programs would at least draw into public solidarity the nation’s still fractious, often warring, white-ethnic camps (then still called "races," as in the Slavic race, the Hebrew race, etc.). In that way, even the “racist” New Deal was arguably a step toward legitimizing civil rights for blacks, especially after the war against Nazi racism. To understand better the compromises the political situation required of politicians who hoped to deflect it somewhat toward better ends — in other words, to distinguish wise strategies from a futile politics of moral or ideological posturing — some American historians might benefit from the perspectives of the British historian Anthony J. Badger, a lifelong student of the American New Deal and civil-rights movement who comes to both without the hang-ups I’ve been sketching, Badger doesn’t succumb to the simplifications of the strangely apolitical Marxism or the leftist identity politics that have doomed much anti-racism to defeat after defeat, as in the over-racialization of mandated busing, congressional districting, and heavily subsidized neighborhood “integration,” blunders I chronicled in Liberal Racism.

Stilted academic calls to "deconstruct" even-handed analyses like Badger’s and mine don’t acknowledge that ideologically and self-righteously motivated people wind up helping opportunists who fan racist fears for short-term gain. The market forces that trap innocent whites as well as blacks are amoral, and the social currents they generate, are so swift and deep that it’s folly to challenge them by shouting about racism. Capitalism is proving more subtle, protean and absorptive of race and sex than even its conservative defenders ever expected in the days when leftists were assuring us that capitalism depended on racism and sexism. On the contrary, it is shuffling the our racial and sexual decks and shifting the burdens of oppression elsewhere, a frightening subject for another time. The constraints Obama faces as he struggles to position himself amid these crosscurrents should be appreciated against the backdrop of past progressive blunders. Moral witness, organized protest, and court fiats are indispensable elements of a broad strategy, but if they are brandished in a campaign like this one, they will fail. For Obama, de-politicizing race is not only a necessity but a big tactical step forward toward racial justice. Whether Shelby Steele calls that "racial bargaining" or leftists call it opportunism, I hope he’ll go right on doing it through November.

Originally published in Talking Points Memo