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In Praise of Liberal GuiltIt's not wrong to favor Obama because of race.

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Thursday, May 22, 2008, at 5:34 PM ET

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Or could it be that conservatives disdain liberal guilt about race because they have historically more guilt to bear for the perpetuation of racism and segregation?

I'm not talking about Republicans per se. The fact that the GOP was the party of Lincoln and most strongly supported anti-lynching and anti-Jim Crow legislation in the first half of the 20^th century is to its eternal credit, just as the "Southern strategy" was much to its discredit in the second half of the century. And, needless to say, liberal Democrats collaborated with a stone-cold racist wing of their party when they needed electoral votes for most of the century.

No, it's not a Democrat or Republican issue; it's a liberal and conservative issue. And there are those on the conservative side who understand that the first step to justice is an acknowledgment of guilt. Just not many and not very vocal.

This is what I don't understand about the conservative attacks on "the '60s." They willfully ignore, in their rote denunciations of the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll aspect of that decade, the great movement of moralists known as the civil rights movement. The movement that brought deserved honor and pride to America. The movement that may well have been motivated (among whites participating) by liberal guilt. But so what! The guilt was justified. The truly guilty were the ones who didn't feel guilt. Such as the conservative movement of the day that largely stood on the sidelines making carping arguments about states' rights that were a shamelessly transparent defense of institutionalized racism. Where's the conservative guilt about that? No wonder they ignore the civil rights movement, one of the great epochs in American history, when they demonize "the '60s."

The question of liberal guilt and guilty liberals often comes up in discussions of reactions to "black anger," unfortunately expressed most loudly and bitterly in this campaign by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But it's all too easy to dismiss the legitimacy of black anger merely on the basis of the Rev. Wright's sadly twisted version of it.

Do the people who dismiss black anger think there's nothing to be angry about? As a Jew, I think I have a right to be angry, still, about the Holocaust, even though it happened before I was born. It would be hard for me to understand an African-American not being angry about 400 years of murder, rape, and enslavement on the basis of race. Anger, like guilt, shouldn't be the endpoint, but anger at injustice is not illegitimate and can be a starting point, a spur to moral action. Where you end up is, alas, often a different matter.

But it seems to me that some people use the Rev. Wright's ugly expression of anger as a fig leaf to discredit Obama, who has clearly ended up at a different place from the Rev. Wright (largely due, one imagines, to the civil rights movement). Yes, Obama may well have an understanding of the Rev. Wright's anger, but if you can't see the difference between the two men historically, culturally, generationally, and temperamentally, then I'd say you just don't want to: It's a kind of willful blindness that seeks to find ways of discrediting Obama and his "guilty liberal" supporters by holding up the Rev. Wright as the true face of black anger. I think intelligent people are able to make these distinctions.

But I wonder whether there's something deeper going on here in the delegitimization of guilt and anger. I wonder whether it's a misbegotten legacy of the long-discredited but still-lingering influence of Freudian theory. Which alas too many otherwise intelligent people still take seriously, despite the pseudoscience of his method, his misogyny, his malpractice, and his coke-addled arrogance. (If you're unaware of the extent of Freud's fabrication of evidence to support his pseudoscience, I strongly recommend you read Frederick Crews' anthology, Unauthorized Freud.)

Nonetheless, the popularized version of Freud that has embedded itself into culture sees guilt more as a symptom, a mental disorder rather than a virtue or a legitimate reaction to a crime that one is, in this case—by enjoying the privilege of being American—implicated in. To pop Freudians, guilt is "neurotic," the product of the "oedipal struggle" fairy tale Freudians take as gospel or, worse, "science." (It's amazing to me how many forthright opponents of creationism still buy into the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis.)

And the medicalization of guilt by psychoanalysis is echoed in the psychobabble of this era's pseudoscientists, the "new-age healers" who demonize guilt as the source of disease, blame you for your illness if you don't exorcise it.

People who lack guilt also lack humility, which is another one of those virtues conservatives are always flogging (although not with a lot of humility).

I'm always amused, listening to the Sean Hannity radio show, how the host and caller frequently salute each other with the phrase: "You're a great American." (There's humility for you!) What's so great about being "great" if it depends on historical ignorance or denial? Again, to love America truly, one has to love the America that is and was, not a fantasy America free from flaws.

To be a truly "great American," one doesn't have to be a guilty liberal, but one has to know guilt.