Robert C. Smith

On his book Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same

Cover Interview of December 05, 2010

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Why Conservatism Fails to Appeal to African Americans.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“The public, politicians and the media are often puzzled by the consistent failure of conservatism to have much appeal to African Americans. This book provides the answer to those puzzles.”

On the second:

“In close, careful study of the biographical and historical records, I found no evidence that Reagan was a racist or white supremacist. It was Reagan’s principled, ideological conservatism that led him to oppose every civil rights bill enacted in the 1960s.”

polemics / america / race / politics / human rights / republican party / reagan ronald / conservatism / african american heritage /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009