What is a conservative radical?

According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (October 2015), Daniel Patrick Moyniham was a conservative radical.  What is a conservative radical?  Simply put, a conservative believes in freedom and family; a radical believes in justice.  A conservative radical is holistic in that she/he believes in freedom, family and justice.  A biblical conservative radical (Luke 4:18-19) believes in a freedom that releases the oppressed and a Jubilee justice that repairs the damage done by oppression and then builds kingdom of principles into a new and more just society.

Moyniham served in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations but did not feel completely at home in any of them.  As a scholar and senator, he thought deeper than any of them.  But he was widely misquoted and defamed asserts Coates.  Coates, a black scholar/writer, has redeemed the unfairly defamed Moyniham, a white scholar/ statesman.  Moyniham deeply believed in society's most important social institution, the family.  All government policy should support the family.

Moyniham served under President Johnson but he did not fully support the War on Poverty because it was too welfare oriented, did not provide adequate support/jobs for black fathers, and did not address the fundamental cause of poverty---oppression.  In his book, The Negro Family addressed both the centuries of white oppression that damaged the black family, created the dysfunction, and then he designed policies to correct them. But the media and many scholars ignored his oppression argument and focused on his description of the tangle of pathology in the black family.  Of course, few whites are comfortable with the white responsibility for oppression so they quickly change the focus to inferior blacks, black dysfunction.

A quotation from Coates:

"President Johnson offered the first public preview of the Moyniham Report in a speech written by Moyniham and the former Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin at Howard University in June of 1965, in which he highlighted 'the breakdown of the Negro family structure.'  Johnson left no doubt about how this breakdown had come about.  'For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility,' Johnson said.  Family breakdown 'flows from centuries of [white] oppression and persecution of the Negro man.  It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family."

"The press did not generally greet Johnson's speech as a claim  of white responsibility, but rather as a condemnation of 'the failure of Negro family life.'"  Few whites understand oppression and fewer still accept responsibility for widespread Anglo oppression that caused Indian genocide, African enslavement, and the theft of half of Mexico's land.

Nixon liked some of Moyniham's ideas so he proposed the Family Assistance Plan, but it died in the Senate.

The American church has failed to combine freedom, family and justice because it does not understand the extensive biblical teaching on oppression and justice.  So the clever forces of evil outsmarted the church and designed a new system of oppression---the unjust mass incarceration of young black and Latino males.

American church: stop oppression, do justice or face judgment.

An historical example:  Lincoln freed the slaves---released from oppression.  Hooray!  Well, not so fast.  When the freed slaves walked off the plantation, they were instantly homeless, landless, foodless.  As might be expected, many freed slaves died.  Not a very pro-family policy.  A society that is truly, actively, pro-family, must add justice to freedom.  In an agricultural society, each freed slave family needed 40 acres and a mule to be self-sufficient.  Lincoln and Congress did not pass such legislation; maybe Jubilee justice should have been part of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Freedom without justice is a hollow, shallow victory.  Quickly, slavery was replaced by another system of oppression---segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs and lynching.

Luke 4:18---freedom, release of the oppressed; 4:19---Jubilee/Sabbath Year justice.  Or with liberty and justice for all!