My Enemies

In conversation with Russ Roberts

I don’t need to re-narrate the the pendulum-like swings of my political affiliations for you here. If you’re a regular reader of the newsletter, you already know: I was on the right, then I was on the left, then I was on the right. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s basically correct. I’ve talked about why I moved to the left in the 1990s. There were many reasons. One was my feeling of alienation from other African Americans—I wanted to “come home” and feel the embrace of my people again. Another, related reason was my creeping sense that some on the right were trying to use me as a fig leaf to cover up some of the movement’s uglier racial sentiments, relatively rare though they were.

But just as important was my view that too many conservatives had given up on struggling black communities. They were happy to criticize the latest failed liberal racial equity initiative, but they had no solutions of their own, and they seemed less and less interested in finding any. All too often, their attitude seemed to be, “The problems of black America are insoluble. We’ll let liberals deal with it and score political points when they fail.” I couldn’t stomach that. These were our people, our fellow Americans, we were talking about. The suffering and the wasted human potential was too vast simply to write off. I wasn’t going to give up on the problem, so I started talking to the people who would be receptive to my ideas: liberals.

In this clip from my conversation with Russ Roberts at the EconTalk podcast, I talk about two “enemies within”—one within the black community and another within myself—and how my struggles to defeat both enemies led me into and out of a culturally conservative, Christian orientation. If my political orientation has swung back and forth like a pendulum, perhaps that’s because a common enemy confronts me and my community. As long as that enemy still menaces me and us, I may never come to rest.  

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RUSS ROBERTS: One of your original titles was “The Enemy Within.” And that's a play on words. The enemy within was within the black community. Despite the Civil Rights Act and efforts of affirmative action, there still remained a cultural challenge that the black community had to take its own responsibility for. And at the same time, the enemy within is the demons that are haunting you, your imperfect behavior, which you write about.

So here's the arc of Glenn Loury's policy prescriptions. He starts off talking about the enemy within, saying to the black community, it's not enough to say that there's racism in America. We have to bear some responsibility for our own actions. You then—I'm not going to get the dates right, but at some point, you're called a conservative. You're talking to Bill Kristol. You were going to work in the Reagan administration, and many people on the left call you a traitor to your people.

At some point, the conservative movement—and you highlight Charles Murray's book [The Bell Curve] and the Thernstroms' book [America in Black and White]. We won't go into it here. But your reaction to that conservative thought makes you uncomfortable, and you become much more focused on the role of incarceration, the failures of both government and American society to help blacks lift themselves up.

And now we come to something like the present. You've come full-circle. You self-identify as some kind of conservative, not the kind that ... we won't even try to describe what it means to be a conservative in America in 2024. I even have trouble with that myself. But the point I want to make, which you write about quite eloquently and poignantly, is that in your first round as a “conservative,” you're railing publicly with indignation about the self-failures of the black community. But you're living a life that is part of that failure. You reveal your imperfection as a husband, you reveal your imperfection as a father, and at one point, Richard John Neuhaus says to you, you're a hypocrite.

He doesn't say it literally, but that's the sin he's laying at your door. You're leading an inconsistent life. You're demanding a level of conduct for the black community that you cannot sustain yourself. And your answer, which is very reasonable, is "What's my personal behavior have to do with whether my views are correct?” And yet this struggle internally between your social critique of American society, both from the left and the right, is constantly struggling with your own personal behavior. I think it's part of your brokenness, your inability to reconcile those, certainly in the years that we're talking about when you were at the beginning of your role as a conservative critic. Reflect on that.

GLENN LOURY: That was very well-said on your part. That's right, I was calling the book “The Enemy Within.” That was my title. And that was my idea, the idea that you just encapsulated. There was an enemy within Glenn Loury, there was an enemy within the black community, and I wanted to play on the relationships between those things.

And one dimension of that is the hypocrisy point that you call attention to by reciting what Father Richard John Neuhaus had to say to me. You're either a moral leader or you're not, and you have a responsibility to live decently if you're going to exhort your people to live decently. In that conversation, I called to his attention the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had not been faithful to his wife, and nobody said that made him any less of a figure of national importance for moral leadership in the country. And that made him very angry. He said King's inconsistency in that regard was a terrible flaw that hurt the movement. He would know what he was talking about, because he marched with Martin Luther King in the 1960s.

Father John Richard Neuhaus, then pastor—he was a Lutheran and converted or reverted, depending on how you look at it, to Catholicism later in his life. And you started this interview, Russ, by asking me, why was I so candid and honest? As you remind me of the enemy within and the double meaning of that phrase it stimulates me to think that you can't tell people how to live. Today, I want to say, we black people, especially those of us who are at the margins of society, have a responsibility to take control of our lives and raise our children, to build up our communities, to develop our social capital, to affirm the ways of living that are most consistent with realizing the potential of opportunity in this society. I feel like I can't lie about my own life and have that be my message at the same time.

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There was a lot packed into your question. I was a conservative in the Reagan era. I became a culturally conservative, religious Christian in the period of my life when, thank God, I was able to put things back together. When Linda and I started our family—we had two sons, ultimately, my late wife, Linda Datcher Loury professor of economics at Tufts University, colleague of mine from graduate school days, mother of Glenn II and Nehemiah—I became more culturally conservative. I befriended Charles Colson, the notorious Nixon-era figure who became a Christian evangelist and activist, founded the Prison Fellowship Ministries, Charles Colson did, which I served on the board of for years at his invitation. We were broken men and women. Some of us knew the inside of a prison cell—I never went to jail, but I had public humiliation and legal problems—who were now devoted to serving the families and individuals who found themselves on the wrong side of the law in a spirit of Christian love. This was Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries.

And I was a part of that. So I was conservative. I listened to Christian radio, I went to Colorado Springs to Focus on the Family's headquarters and gave my testimony, that is my account of how I had been brought from literal death—I was robbed twice at gunpoint in the streets of Boston out there at 1 a.m. in the morning trying to buy drugs or whatever, I could have easily lost my life there—back to life.

But I found it uncomfortable, in a way, being the black mascot of the neoconservative/conservative social policy world. And there were these books. Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, Abigail and Steven Thernstrom’s America in Black and White, Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism, books promoted by the American Enterprise Institute, where I was an advisor to Christopher DeMuth, who was president of the AEI in those years, by the Manhattan Institute, where I am a fellow even to this day in New York City. Relatively conservative think tanks.

I was a part of that world. I wrote in Commentary, I wrote in First Things, I wrote in the Public Interest, I wrote in the New Republic, and I wrote from a heterodox, relatively conservative point of view. But I wasn't comfortable. I came not to be fully comfortable there. I came not to be satisfied with, as I put it in a long review that I wrote of the Thernstroms' book which was published in 1997 in the Atlantic—I said, it's just not good enough to be right about liberals being wrong. Don't you care about these people? The reason that I became a neoconservative—I said this to Norman Podhoretz at Harvard on the occasion of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Commentary magazine, over which he was a publisher and editor-in-chief—and he said, “We're all conservatives now. There are no more neoconservatives.”

And I objected. I said, look, neoconservatives are liberals who've been mugged by reality. That was a famous definition of the neocons. But we still want solutions. It's just that we want to stay in touch with reality. We don't want to write these people off. We're not prepared to just give up the search for how to solve social problems. These are our people in these ghettos. We have to help them somehow. That's not an idle or a fanciful or idealistic thought. That's decency. And I felt that conservatives were quite happy to write off my people.

I speak now of struggling African Americans and urban American. So I found myself breaking ranks a little bit with the conservatives and losing friends like Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom and trying to go home again, which is another one of my themes of the book, to mend the fences that I had broken with other blacks through my apostasy.

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