Isolationism

After all these years, I’m still fascinated by one of the most stunning ideological turnarounds in recent American history: Glenn C. Loury’s decision to sever ties with the conservative movement.

A quarter-century ago, Loury was one of the right’s brightest stars: along with Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, Loury courted controversy with his declaration that civil rights progressives had no real solutions for the problems facing urban America. Loury became a fixture on the conservative lecture circuit and found favor with the Reagan administration, which in 1987 offered him a position as William Bennett’s second-in-command at the Department of Education (Loury declined the offer due to personal reasons). It appeared that Loury would become, for want of a better phrase, a conservative civil rights leader.

However, by the close of the 1980s, Loury found himself becoming uncomfortable with the right’s refusal to question the efficacy of the War on Drugs, as well as what he perceived to be the movement’s lack of interest in issues facing urban America. The publication of two highly controversial books, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism (1995), pushed Loury to the breaking point: two years later, in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Cast Out by the Right,” Loury declared, “[I]n the last few years, conservative intellectuals have developed an inflexible, hard-edged dogma when it comes to race….The fact, as chilling as it is unavoidable, is that many among the conservative elite seem tone-deaf on the issue of race. They can't see that our country's moral aspirations – to be ‘a city on a hill,’ a beacon of hope and freedom to all the world – seem impossible when one sees the despair of so many of those Americans who descend from slaves.” (Around this time Loury also attacked Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s brilliant book America in Black and White, suggesting that the Thernstroms had a callous disregard for the problems facing people of color, a suggestion refuted by the actual content of the book.)

I’ve always believed that Loury ultimately abandoned the right because of peer pressure; I felt that Loury simply couldn’t bear the burden of being constantly accused of working against the interests of people of color. A January 2002 New York Times profile of Loury—one that emphasized Loury’s relief over not being viewed as a villain anymore by those who once scorned him—seemed to underscore my belief. However, there may be another angle to the Loury controversy.

A 1995 New Yorker profile of Loury noted that in 1988, “…while Loury was in New York for a Public Interest board meeting, he had a revelation. Touring the Metropolitan Museum with Lisa Schiffren (who later wrote Dan Quayle's ‘Murphy Brown’ speech), he lamented the fact that, despite his prominence, he was completely isolated from his colleagues-that, in short, he had no friends. ‘But, Glenn, we're your friends,’ she reassured him. ‘You're a member of a historically liberal ethnic minority, who through your own intellectual evolution have come to dissent from its convictions pretty much down the line. You voted for Reagan, you're pro-life, for family values--you're one of us.’’’

Evidently, Schriffen failed to grasp the extent to which Loury felt isolated because he was a member of a “historically liberal ethnic minority.” Loury was, in short, an outcast among his own kind—and in his mind, the right wasn’t doing enough to alleviate his isolation.

For all my disagreements with Loury, I can’t help wondering if he still would have washed his hands of the conservative movement if the movement had made more of a proactive effort to reach out to communities of color.  What if conservatives had taken his advice and been a little less aggressive about the drug war and more sensitive to issues facing urban voters? Granted, the right logically could not embrace all of his suggestions, but it can be argued that conservatives would not have lost Loury to the left had they given a little more consideration to his claims.

In that 1997 New York Times op-ed, Loury noted, “We need a morally astute, politically mature conservatism that acknowledges personal responsibility as one part of the social contract but also understands the importance of collective responsibility. ‘Those people’ who now languish in America's central cities are ‘our’ people, and ‘we’ must build relationships with them. We cannot simply abandon them or leave them to their own devices.”

Loury was right on that point, even if he’s wrong on everything else. It’s conventional wisdom on the right that Loury, like his fellow ex-conservatives David Brock and Andrew Sullivan, is now a moonbat. Yet I can’t help wondering if conservatives could have done something to stop Loury from flying off in the first place.