(Reprint from The New York Times)

The Last Color Line
By JAMES TRAUB

Since our political culture has been dominated for much of the last 40 years by the dynamic of race -- by an acceptance of moral responsibility that over time has curdled into an endless round of accusation, guilt, repudiation and more accusation -- it's probably unwise to pronounce the hostilities finished. Certainly the underlying problems that afflict many black Americans -- impoverishment, educational failure, social and geographic isolation -- have abated but hardly disappeared. Yet as the second national election of the new millennium approaches, black political culture seems to be moving further and further from an adversarial, race-conscious model. There is a new black candidate on the campaign trail, a candidate who presents himself or herself in race-neutral terms and whose political views are eclectic and pragmatic. The two most prominent examples of this phenomenon are Ron Kirk, who has a real shot at becoming the first black senator from Texas, and H. Carl McCall, who, if August polls are accurate, could be poised for a surprise victory over the better known and more liberal Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor of New York this Tuesday.

Meanwhile, young moderate blacks have squared off against black incumbents with more traditional agendas in Congressional and mayoral races in Newark, Georgia, Alabama and elsewhere. The civil rights struggle, and the sense of politics as a cockpit of moral absolutes that struggle fostered, is a matter of history, not personal experience, for a generation of leaders under 50. Many of them, in fact, were raised in the integrated, middle-class world made possible by that struggle. The 32-year-old Cory Booker, who unsuccessfully challenged Sharpe James for mayor of Newark, was raised in an almost all-white suburb in New Jersey. Denise Majette, who unseated the fiery Cynthia A. McKinney to become the Democratic nominee for Congress in the black-majority suburbs outside of Atlanta, graduated from Yale and Duke Law School. (Carl McCall, at 66, is a member of an older and less privileged generation, but he is a glandular moderate who feels perfectly comfortable on Wall Street, where he once worked.)

This generational change will be a balm to white liberals, whose politics have been so heavily determined by an agonized sense of ''what black people want,'' as defined by the black leadership class. And it will be a boon to the Democrats, for it will help heal the ideological rifts within the party. But what will it mean to today's Republicans? When G.O.P. leaders beat a path to Governor George W. Bush's doorstep back in 1998, they were banking on his philosophy of ''compassionate conservatism'' to put an end to the party's perceived antagonism to the poor and the marginalized. The national convention stage-managed on Bush's behalf prominently featured blacks and Hispanics; his two highest foreign-policy officials are black.

And yet the fact is that few if any of the new crop of black Congressional aspirants are Republican. And since the only incumbent black Republican in Congress, J.C. Watts Jr. of Oklahoma, is retiring -- allegedly in dudgeon at his own party -- there will be no black Republicans in Congress next year. Among Hispanics, there are only three incumbents, two of whom represent conservative Cuban-American voters in Florida.

Why has the new generation of black leaders spurned the new Republican party? That black voters are overwhelmingly registered as Democrats obviously offers a very powerful rationale for staying inside the confines of the party, whatever your views. But this calculus does not necessarily apply to blacks running in majority-white areas. The problem lies with contemporary Republican culture and principles. Bush's compassionate conservatism revolves around rituals of inclusion -- staged events, highly touted appointments. The new generation of black leaders, however, takes inclusion for granted; they have always been included. Symbolism, at least symbolism by itself, has lost its force.

The real significance of a race-neutral politics is that it accepts pragmatic, meliorative solutions to the nation's problems -- which may help explain Bill Clinton's immense popularity with black voters. The new generation of leaders accepts the value of the market. But there are few black voters, and few black leaders, who do not view the state as a mighty instrument for social justice and for economic progress. And though President Bush's focus on rigorous standards for schools has wide support among black leaders and voters, his administration has otherwise been so dominated by a fixed antipathy to governmental activism that it has proved to be more inhospitable to blacks than was that of his more moderate, if less symbolically attuned, father. (It may also be true that as foreign policy figures, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have less symbolic value than comparably placed figures in domestic policy would.) Even Ron Kirk, a Texas tax-cutter, says that he cannot in the current circumstances stomach the administration's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut.

If you looked at these two phenomena together -- more black moderates, fewer black Republicans -- you would say that black leaders have distributed themselves more widely across the political spectrum, while Republicans have squeezed themselves into a narrow space on the edge of that spectrum. And it is precisely the kind of ideologically conservative, antiurban, sectarian space in which an increasingly secular black political culture is bound to feel uncomfortable. Conservative Republicans are occupying the territory of moral absolutism that moderate black politicians are abandoning.