Multiculti Conservatives?

Angela Dillard admits that the term "multicultural conservatism" will sound like an oxymoron to some people. But as the Republican Party is at some pains to demonstrate lately, black conservatives, gay conservatives, Latino and Asian and women conservatives are playing more visible roles in mainstream American politics and cultural discourse lately.

Dillard's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? (NYU Press, 248 pages, $26.95) is a clear and sensitive overview. Dillard's an assistant professor of history and politics at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a small, interdisciplinary college of NYU. It's her first book.

I ask her how a nice, young, black, liberal, female academic in New York City got the idea of writing a book about conservatives that wasn't just another polemical attack on them.

"It was really around black conservatives that the whole thing started," she tells me. "Especially with how people talked about Clarence Thomas. People had good and valid arguments, but I mean, calling someone an 'Uncle Tom.' It's just outrageous. Just outrageous. I thought, hey, that's a really tacky thing to do."

We discuss the paradox that in the voting booth blacks overwhelmingly pull the lever for liberal Democrats, but regarding many social and religious issues there's a lot of conservatism in the black community.

"Culturally I would argue that African-Americans are some of the most conservative people in the country," Dillard says. "Historically there's been that kind of religious and social conservatism." And while "blacks are certainly not politically conservative by any stretch of the imagination," she goes on, "they could be on certain issues, like school choice. That's an issue that's going to come down to a party vote at some point. I think in local elections you could start to see a real shift in behavior related to that piece of public policy."

In the book Dillard distinguishes between two basic styles of black conservative thought. One group is "[l]ibertarians and conservative integrationists," who "tend to view racial consciousness and racial practices as barriers to assimilation for African American individuals. This version of black conservatism privileges a universal (and 'American') vision over a more parochial and particular one... Focusing explicitly on the lives of 'black middle Americans' and implicitly appealing to older patterns of ethnic assimilation and progress, black conservatives seek to replicate the successes of other ethnic groups that have become more fully integrated into the public life of the nation. Such progress, many black conservatives suggest, was possible only at the expense of group identity and ethnic cohesion."

Then there are black nationalists and separatists, from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Louis Farrakhan, who have "incorporated a generally conservative focus on the necessity of male-headed households, strong families, religious devotion, a rigid moral code of behavior, and black capitalism."

Dillard posits a similar split among women conservatives. Socially conservative women are "close to the orientation of the Religious Right. In general, their worldview is deeply rooted in religious, primarily Christian, beliefs, an understanding of the heterosexual two-parent family as the sacred unit of society, and a perspective that celebrates the role of women as wives and mothers," she writes. "Laissez-faire conservative women, on the other hand, tend to view the world in terms of the political and economic liberty of the individual and are, therefore, closer to neoconservatives and the libertarian branch of the conservative movement. They are also more likely than socially conservative women to embrace some of the basic tenets of feminism?or at least those that facilitate the full assimilation of women into mainstream society."

Dillard says she sees that dichotomy "with conservatism in general. One side is much more oriented toward a free market, is more secular. The libertarians are certainly over on that side. On the other side you have religious conservatives, the religious right, cultural conservatives like Paul Weyrich, those sorts of folks. And that's the big divide between these groups. I'm always amazed that these two groups have managed to be in the same political party for so long without killing each other. I mean, why isn't this more unstable? How have they managed to keep this thing together?"

One way the movement has kept from flying apart is by identifying areas of consensus. One such area is the idea that the original civil rights movement has been betrayed and become a "Civil Rights Establishment." "Among conservatives in general, the 1954-1965 phase of the [civil rights] movement is generally characterized as a heroic attempt to reform American democracy and to secure the civil and political rights of all Americans regardless of race," she writes. "Unfortunately, according to conservatives, as civil rights leaders and organizations became part of the establishment, they turned away from the shared American consensus on race and race relations. At the moment of their greatest success, civil rights advocates embraced race-conscious policies and initiatives as well as divisive language emphasizing the intractability of racism and structural discrimination. This gross overpoliticization of race, conservatives charge, has led left and liberal civil rights advocates to reject the movement toward color blindness as well as the doctrine of individual equality of opportunity in favor of group-based equality of results."

In the words of one black conservative, "the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results." Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued (as Dillard writes) that "equality of opportunity almost always ensures inequality of results, [and] chastised black activists and politicians for not realizing and assenting to this basic liberal truth."

Does Dillard agree or disagree?

"I'm not sure I actually agree with this argument as an historical and contemporary fact," she replies. "I actually think it's kind of odd. Rhetorically, though, I think it's a great argument. It's a way of linking back to other conservative arguments overall about the liberal establishment. Conservatism really grew out of this oppositional thing. You had the 'liberal establishment,' the 'Eastern establishment.' I think the 'civil rights establishment' is just a variant of that, dressed up for a more contemporary set of circumstances." She argues that the conservative vision of this evil, left-orthodox establishment "vastly overestimates the power of the NAACP, for instance. I mean," she laughs, "they can barely stay solvent."

More difficult than race, Dillard argues, is conservatives' need to reconcile a gay right wing with the inherent homophobia in the religious right and in black and minority communities, where homosexuality is seen as "a white thing." She writes that "there is a much greater consensus around race in the New Right than around homosexuality," and that "political gay and lesbian bashing have proved to be a more flexible strategy for coalition building than either racism or anti-Semitism... Organizations such as the Christian Coalition and the Traditional Values Coalition have been especially diligent in using homosexuality to recruit within African American Baptist churches and among Latino Catholics... [T]he Religious Right has sought to mobilize minorities around fears of gay-friendly school curricula and openly gay and lesbian teachers..."

On college campuses, anti-p.c. scholars have formed organizations like the National Association of Scholars (NAS), which "opposes 'trendy methodologies,' gender and ethnic studies devoid of 'genuinely scholarly content' and courses that serve as little more than 'vehicles of political harangue or recruitment.'" A former dean of the Gallatin School, Herbert London, was a cofounder of the NAS.

Are they not right to oppose the leftist group-think at p.c.-dominated universities?

"Where are these places at?" Dillard pshaws me. "And why can't I get a job there?"

Asked if she's dealt with the NAS, she replies, "When I was at Minnesota there were two NAS guys, who I thought were great. I thought they were just a riot." On how influential the group's been, she says, "Nationally, they're easy to ignore?academics are easy to ignore anyway. But in California I think they've had a real impact. Two NAS guys started the drive to end affirmative action [Proposition 209]. So yeah, here and there they have been kind of a force."

Speaking of California, Dillard writes that "Throughout the twentieth century, California has played a seminal role in Republican politics and demonstrates the Party's relative successes and failures with minority voters. Under Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan, Republicans routinely won 30 to 40 percent of the Latino vote and roughly half of the Asian-American vote. More recently, in 1990, Pete Wilson's first gubernatorial campaign garnered almost 45 percent of ballots cast by Latinos and a majority of Asian-American ones. Yet, after California Republicans, following Wilson's lead, began to adopt anti-immigration policies, typically expressed in inflammatory rhetoric, this level of support dropped dramatically."

Now Republicans are playing catch-up, with a president who speaks Spanish and is making gestures toward being more inclusive and multicultural. How does Dillard see that playing out in the near term?

"A couple of things are interesting about that," she says. "One is that the Republican Party has continuously shot itself in the foot. It was going down the road it needed to go down in terms of attracting immigrant groups, and then, in '92, it got into really nasty anti-immigrant stuff. So now I think George W. Bush is left trying to repair the damage. That's an uphill battle. Because the damage was deep, really significant... [P]eople still remember '92, and that lingers in the stories that people tell in their communities. So that they simply do not trust the Republican Party. They don't care how many phrases George W. has in Spanish. But I do think if the party keeps at it, demonstrates a sustained commitment over time to these issues?you know, one election cycle is not gonna do it."

At the same time, Dillard predicts that if the Republican Party does continue to make overtures toward minorities and gays, the real hard-righters like Paul Weyrich may pull a separatist move of their own.

"I think that what's really interesting about Weyrich is that he's saying, 'Politics is not going to get us what we want. We have to go through culture, institutions, social networks.' There are so many avenues that you could pursue in terms of cultural separatism from a religious point of view?home schooling, Christian music, social networks, the whole 'What would Jesus Do?' movement. It's pervasive, this other culture that's out there. And that's where, Weyrich is saying, we need to work through this growing phenomenon, not through politics and legislation, because that's never going to work."

Given this broad base of conservatism in the land, why are multiculti conservatives struggling so for acceptance?

"I don't know that they're struggling," Dillard scoffs. "How are they struggling? They're getting high-level appointments inside the Bush administration. They're well taken care of at think tanks. They're just whining. 'Oh, the NAACP doesn't like us!'"

So, after four-plus years of studying conservatives, what does the nice, young, black, liberal, female academic think of them now?

"I like them," she says, then gives me a sly smile. "Some of my best friends are conservatives."