The American Conservative crackup: why I quit Pat Buchanan's magazine.

• Author: Konetzki, Alexander
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE

Ever since Barack Obama burst onto the political stage in 2004, pundits have taken to calling the junior senator from Illinois a rock star. He inspires, they say, with his youth, intelligence, and soaring oratory. He transcends race.

This flattering picture, which makes even the senator blush, has seldom been challenged by political commentators or the public. And as of mid-March 2007, no one had tried in earnest to subvert the idea that, as president, Obama could help ease America's racial tensions because his mother was white and his father was black.

But that's exactly what Steve Sailer, a columnist for the anti-immigration site VDARE.com, tried to do in a piece he submitted to the American Conservative magazine, where, at the time, I was assistant editor. Using quotes from Obama's 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Sailer portrayed the senator not as a unifying figure, but as an angry black nationalist who completely rejected his white racial heritage as a young man and might do the same as president.

"[T]here is the confusing contrast," he wrote, "between the confident, suave master politician we see on television and the tormented narrator of Dreams, who is an updated Black Pride version of the old 'tragic mulatto' stereotype found in 'Show Boat' and 'Imitation of Life.'" Sailer surmised that Obama "offers important testimony about the enduring glamour of anti-white anger."

Even before I read the piece I knew I wouldn't like it. TAC's editor, who was pleased with Sailer's work, had told me as much. But I found the piece so offensive when I first read it that I jumped out of my chair and rushed into the managing editor's office to try to kill it on the spot. She and the editor promptly dismissed my objections. The piece is provocative, they said--it's edgy. It's racist, I said--and the magazine will be regarded as such for publishing it.

This editorial conflict over Sailer's essay was an early warning of the emerging conservative response to Obama's intimidating popularity. But it is also a telling moment in the brief, strange history of the American Conservative, a magazine that--like the conservative movement at large--is currently having something of an identity crisis.

At this point, I should mention that I'm a progressive. I didn't even know TAC existed until a former colleague encouraged me to apply for an assistant editor position at the magazine last November, suggesting that it might be a good first step toward a...