HOW IT ALL WENT WRONG? Shelby Steele had time on a long drive to meditate on how President Eisenhower might have been able to use what we so delicately call "a racial slur" among his golfing buddies without anybody influential making a fuss, and President Clinton some years later being able to take what we used to call "indecent liberties" with the college help and get away with it. The result of his meditation is White Guilt, Book Review No. 24. Much of this meditation is familiar to people my age: Fifties conformism, state-sponsored segregation at odds with the plain language of the Declaration of Independence, and a war to contain communism that appeared to be going noplace offered young people the opportunity to bundle their expected boundary-testing with what they understood as a more thoroughgoing and internally consistent re-evaluation of established ways of doing things. As is often the case, James Michener's Kent State sums up what was emerging (p. 137): "Vietnam, and our treatment of minorities. Corruption, and our indifference to ecology." (In those days we were still close enough to "Chicks say yes to guys who say no" that Mr Michener's source did not include sexism and homophobia, but those came along in due course.)

Professor Steele was able to experience those days with the zeal of a black man recently empowered by the new dispensation, and with the cleverness of a smart man who saw the points of advantage: thus he was able to act "authentic" without being brought up short by his Chicago Transit supervisor at his summer job, or by his university's president when he and his fellow militants submitted their "non-negotiable" demands. (Yes, younger readers, we did talk that way once.) But he later discovers that something has gone wrong. Turn to page 174.

By the mid-eighties the schizophrenia imposed on me as a black who was identified with the left had become unbearable. I had no interest in becoming a conservative. I just instinctively disliked the left's disregard of principles that had always been important to me. Worse, I had been terrified of the Faustian bargain waiting for me at the doorway to the left: we'll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you'll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for "helping" you.

He's not becoming conservative, but he is being mugged by reality. Along the way, he encounters the Silent Generation relic from Hell. You know the type: Don't judge the Great Society by what happened. Give us credit for our good intentions. Bleah. And here's where he sees us (p. 176).

The left abandoned its compassionate Jeffersonian liberalism of the early civil rights era in favor of the dissociation that enabled it to respond to the crisis of white guilt (broadened by the sins of sexism, Vietnam, and environmental indifference.) In this crisis, if you could win moral authority for a society threatened with revolution, you would be given real political power. So, in trading in principles for dissociation, the left stumbled onto the formula for power that would see it through the next several decades.

But this was a deal with the devil. In choosing dissociation over principles the left became impotent; without demanding principles it could not solve the very social problems that justified its existence.

The contemporary right, Professor Steele notes (if "right" is even the right descriptive) has renounced its intentions to restore the segregationist order, and it is in a position to judge the dissociational left by the fruits of its policies. It's not so much Professor Steele left the left as it is the left left him. Page 180: "And if I've learned anything in all of this, it is that if you want to be free, you have to make yourself that way and pay whatever price the world extracts."

So for all that, why nearly 200 pages of meditation? At the end, we're left with Professor Steele's original puzzle, but no insights on what might have been done differently? Was it necessary that delegitimizing white supremacy necessarily meant the end of constraints on people in power taking liberties with interns? Was there any way to implement, say, a more consistent civil rights policy in which the power of the state could neither be used to prohibit people from associating or doing business with each other, nor to compel them to do either? And what other policies might have helped Black America deal with the reality Professor Steele notes that the end of institutionalized racism brought with it both freedom and responsibility, which are scary in their own way.

And in some places the book stretches to make a point. Sure, the O. J. Simpson criminal trial might have been a consequence of white guilt, but mightn't the prosecution's witness confessing that cops planted evidence, and the prosecutor's request that the defendant attempt to put an Isotoner driving glove over a plastic protective glove had something to do with it?