There was nothing King could have done to prevent any of this, but his shift from "freedom" to social democracy probably made a bad business even worse. By taking up the charge of "white racism," he antagonized working-class and lower-middle-class whites without appeasing the black militants. When he identified civil rights agitation with a revolt against "middle-class values," he lost any chance to forge a biracial coalition based on the ideals of responsibility, self-help, and the defense of threatened neighborhoods and communities. Instead of appealing to the nation's sense of justice, he now had to appeal to the mixture of pity and fear that came to be known, inappropriately (since it was activated less by conscience than by nerves), as "white liberal guilt."

To the end, King upheld nonviolence both as a tactic and as a principle (though with growing emphasis on the former). But the definition of black people primarily as victims could only encourage a politics of resentment, with or without violence. Whether blacks rioted in the streets or merely demanded compensatory treatment in the courts—and the two strategies proved quite compatible—they now claimed a privileged moral position as the victims of "four hundred years of oppression." Their history of victimization, they argued, entitled them to revenge, although they indicated a willingness to settle for reparations. For obvious reasons, liberals could agree to reparations in order to escape reprisals; but their sponsorship of busing and affirmative action carried no moral weight as gestures of "compassion." Those who supported busing and affirmative action—comfortable members of the professional and managerial classes, for the most part—did not have to live with the consequences of their actions. The burden of busing notoriously fell on ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, not on suburban liberals whose schools remained effectively segregated or on wealthy practitioners of "compassion" whose children did not attend public schools at all.

The suspicion that much of their "caring" was morally fraudulent had a damaging effect, I believe, on liberal morale. But compensatory justice had an equally damaging effect on black morale. Not only did it not solve the problem of black poverty; it did not even address the deeper problem of self-respect. If anything, affirmative action undermined self-respect by creating the impression that black people had to be judged by standards lower than the ones applied to whites. At best, compensatory programs made it possible for talented individuals to escape from the ghetto, widen

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