The Illusion of Innocence/ Shelby Steele

Reading a book of essays at the moment and one of the finest is the following by Shelby Steele:

Modern liberalism thrives by using America’s past hypocrisies as leverage against the timeless principles of freedom today. It is a lib­eralism of “moral” leverage and muscle, not a discipline of principle. It bullies freedom with the idea of an impossible innocence. Yet it takes its fire from one idea above all others: that it is the answer to America’s characterological evil. But neither evil nor innocence is the whole American truth. The civil rights movement did not suc­ceed because America finally became innocent; it succeeded because America finally became principled.