redblueamerica.com

Funny what qualifies as "conservative" nowadays. I just finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' profile of Bill Cosby in the latest Atlantic Monthly. I don't endorse the argument, but it's a must-read. Cosby is a fascinating man both for the support he's attracted and the enemies he's made along the way. Americans of all races love him. But only blacks seem to really understand him. Bill Cosby's message of self-reliance, duty to family and individual responsibilty is one that all Americans need to hear, even if that message is directed primarily to blacks. But there is a downside.

Coates is a Cosby critic, though not necessarily a hostile one. Still, he believes Cosby's rhetoric goes too far. "If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at ... a personal and communal creed... there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights.... His historical amnesia -- his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage -- is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations."

Coates describes Cosby's outlook as a "unique brand of conservatism" -- the "conservatism" of black empowerment and even separatism, exemplified by Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and... Barack Obama? Here's part of Coates's rationale:

The strain of black conservatism that Cosby evokes has also surfaced in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Early on, some commentators speculated that Obama’s Cosby-esque appeals to personal responsibility would cost him black votes. But if his admonishments for black kids to turn off the PlayStation and for black fathers to do their jobs did him any damage, it was not reflected at the polls. In fact, this sort of rhetoric amounts to something of a racial double play, allowing Obama and Cosby to cater both to culturally conservative blacks and to whites who are convinced that black America is a bastion of decadence. (Curiously, Cosby is noncommittal verging on prickly when it comes to Obama. When Larry King asked him whether he supported Obama, he bristled: “Do you ask white people this question? … I want to know why this fellow especially is brought up in such a special way. How many Americans in the media really take him seriously, or do they look at him like some prize brown baby?” The exchange ended with Cosby professing admiration for Dennis Kucinich. Months later, he rebuffed my requests for his views on Obama’s candidacy.)

Which is to say, not conservative in the Republican sense, or even the mainstream sense, but in a distinctly cultural sense. It's easy to see how the conservative label might fit, insofar as self-reliance, entrepreneurship, marriage and "family values" have come to be associated -- rightly or wrongly -- with a conservative ideology. But inject race and America's tortured history, and the labels begin to distort and change and become difficult to understand in the red or blue sense. In any event, Cosby's "conservatism" clearly isn't that of Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele or, for that matter, an old school black conservative like George Schuyler.

So if Cosby isn't quite a conservative, what is he? I may be wrong, but I'd suggest he's a great American radical idealist:

“If you looked at me and said, ‘Why is he doing this? Why right now?,’ you could probably say, ‘He’s having a resurgence of his childhood.’ What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that’s a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories -- why can’t we have our own?”