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‘I Was Feeling Alienated:’ Glenn Loury Tells Ben Shapiro About His Journey Back To Conservatism
In a new “Sunday Special” interview, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro spoke to economist Glenn Loury about his return to identifying as a conservative.
Kicking off their hour-long discussion, Shapiro asked Loury what being a conservative means to him, a topic Loury discusses in his new book, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative,” which came out last month.
“Well, I could approach it in a number of ways. As an economist I could talk about libertarian ideas on the economy, markets, property, prices, limited government, free trade, that kind of thing,” responded Loury, who became the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard University.
Also, as someone who became a born-again Christian and a “very fervent believer,” Loury said, “I tend to be conservative on the cultural side.”
Thirdly, when it comes to race Loury said conservatism involves embracing “a kind of autonomy, self-determination, personal responsibility, not blaming the white man, more Booker T. Washington kind of bootstrapping kind of response to the existential challenge that being the descendants of slaves confronts black Americans with.”
WATCH THE FULL ‘SUNDAY SPECIAL’ EPISODE WITH GLENN LOURY
“My reaction to the problem of what do you do now? Do you have your hand out? Do you go around talking about racism and reparations or do you get busy building your own community, that makes me conservative too,” Loury explained.
“So I would say on all three of those, economics, culture, and black self-determination, I have finally at this late stage in my life come to embrace a conservative identity,” Loury said.
Shapiro asked Loury what forces propelled him away from conservatism for a period of his life.
“Some of those forces were not as flattering to me as others,” Loury said. “I was feeling alienated from other African American intellectuals … I kind of wanted to get back in the good graces.”
“I was getting pressured all over the place, even from my own family, even from my own children,” he added. “So maybe I was succumbing to that a little bit.”
Loury added that he leaned left on the “mass incarceration” of black Americans as well.
However, the economist encouraged black Americans to look forwards to the future rather than backwards.
“I want to say this to African Americans and anyone else who’s listening,” Loury said. “I think this backward focus is both kind of analytically wrong, the issue is going forward, but it’s also kind of corrupt. It’s a politics of dependency. Who is the audience when you say ‘wealth disparity?’ It’s the people who have wealth whom you’re asking to give you some. Y0u empower them with the ability to determine whether or not you flourish when it’s really your responsibility whether or not you flourish.”
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