That Liberal Guilt

Lots is being said these days about so-called "liberal guilt". Mostly, it's being said in conjunction with voting for/against Obama, but there's an interesting article in Slate that says hey, maybe it's not so bad to have some liberal guilt.

People who point to liberal guilt as a sickness do not really understand what it means. They get caught up in an admittedly murky distinction between Personal Guilt and the less-used Collective Guilt.

When I was in 1st or 2nd grade, I stole something from a classmate. I found it on the ground (I can't even remember what it was now--a pen?) and when she asked for it back I said it was mine. I was eventually reprimanded, and to this day I do not remember why I thought it was such a good idea to insist it was mine. I also feel a little guilty about the entire ordeal (including involving my kindergarten-aged sister! Sorry Kate!).

That is personal guilt. It's what we all feel, unless we are sociopaths, about the things we screw up in our lives. I feel no personal guilt whatsoever for slavery, or for the systemic annihilation of the Native Americans, and so forth.

But here's the thing, folks: the United States is a (representative) democracy. We are the United States, we are the government, we are the elected officials that we put in charge. The mistakes made by America are our mistakes. And just as I still feel personal guilt for idiotic things I did as a 6-year-old, I feel collective guilt for the idiotic (an understatement in many cases) mistakes of our young nation.

What purpose does this collective guilt serve? Obviously, unlike with personal guilt, I was not around when slavery was instituted or abolished. But the entire point of guilt is to learn from your mistakes. When personal, it is a visceral reaction that reminds you, "Hey man, remember this similar situation before? Remember how that worked out?"

There's no reason collective guilt cannot function the same way. "Remember slavery? Remember the casual disenfranchising of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II? Let's not do that again." Will we still, collectively, make mistakes? Without a doubt--and in 50 years when this decade is heralded as one of the nadirs of the American experiment, I will feel my collective guilt.

But hopefully we can use this "liberal guilt" to enact measures to prevent these things from happening again. We can promote things like affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act (way to go, boomers!) not as direct responses to slavery, but as guards against the kind of behavior and attitudes that led to slavery in the first place.