When the 80th annual convention of the NAACP gathered in solemn conclave in Detroit last July, the delegates listened approvingly to Executive Director Benjamin Hooks’ call for “civil disobedience on a mass scale that has never been seen in this country before.” Mr. Hooks was upset that the Supreme Court recently delivered itself of some rulings against affirmative action, and he threatened unprecedented shenanigans if Congress “is reluctant” to reverse these rulings through legislation. But Mr. Hooks’ rhetoric was familiar to the delegates’ ears. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom the NAACP once criticized for being too reckless, long ago developed the politics and oratory of intimidation into a high science.

What surely but pleasantly surprised the delegates was to hear, the following day, rhetoric not very different from that of Mr. Hooks from the lips of a member of the Bush administration, a former Republican congressman, and one of the more clamorous claimants to the now-vacant throne of American conservatism. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp did not, it is true, threaten to chain himself to the lamp posts on Capitol Hill if elected public servants choose to vote against his wishes. But he did succeed in rather subtly endorsing the core of the political ideology that has animated the NAACP and the rest of the American left for most of this century.

Mr. Kemp began his speech with warm praise for Mr. Hooks, and that might be dismissed as a mere obligation of courtesy. But the housing czar proudly repeated Mr. Hooks’ endorsement of him for his present position at HUD. Mr. Hooks “said I was a liberal with a big ‘L’ on relations between the races,” beamed Mr. Kemp, “And, Ben, I won’t let you down.” He kept his commitment to uplift Mr. Hooks throughout the rest of the speech, affirming “what a thrill it was the other day to sit next to Ben Hooks at the White House, as President Bush and distinguished civil rights leaders and members of Congress celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a milestone on the road to freedom and justice.”

After generous applications of progressivist boiler-plate from Dr. King, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson, and after praise for, among others, Hubert Humphrey and W.E.B. DuBois, Mr. Kemp got down to business. He cheered “the boycotts, the sit-ins, the marches, the legal challenges” of the 1950’s and 60’s—”I wasn’t there, but I wish I had been”—as “Chapter One” in what promises to be a kind of civil rights equivalent of a Russian novel. “Chapter One” was “about freedom and justice, about removing legal barriers, about full rights for each and every one of us as American citizens.” But “Chapter One” is not the end of the story.

“At the dawn of a new millennium,” sang Mr. Kemp, “we are engaged in a new chapter of this ongoing revolution, for as you in the NAACP have said so well, ‘The Struggle Continues.'” “Chapter Two” (how many chapters there are Mr. Kemp didn’t say) will be “about economic prosperity, about jobs for everyone, and growth, and a bigger pie and more seats at the table.” The specific contents of “Chapter Two,” in Mr. Kemp’s reading, include enterprise zones, tax breaks, privatization of public housing, and a good many other ideas that he intends as “free market,” “entrepreneurial,” or opportunity-enhancing alternatives to liberal paternalism.

Such alternatives may or may not be enacted and may or may not work if they are, but they seem to be harmless enough and are probably worth trying. The problem with Mr. Kemp’s speech, and with the general approach to American blacks that his fellow Republican outreachers such as Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater, and President Bush are articulating, is not that they want to rely on free enterprise to ameliorate the material life of blacks but that they encase their ostensibly free market policies in a rhetorical and conceptual framework that contradicts them.

In affirming that “Chapter Two” is “not only about a chance to drive a truck, but a chance to own the truck . . . not just a chance to have a job, but a chance to own the company,” Mr. Kemp implicitly conceded that the much-touted equality before the law, which “Chapter One” was supposed to have achieved, wasn’t enough. After recounting statistics on black economic progress in recent years, the secretary explicitly assured his audience that “clearly, this is not enough.”

It only serves to remind us how far we have to go. Over half a century ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt saw one-third of a nation ill-clad, ill-housed, and ill-fed. By 1987, the CNF had increased eightfold; and still—56 years after FDR’s statement—one-third of black Americans remained below the poverty line . . . ill-clad, ill-housed, ill-fed.

Behind all of Mr. Kemp’s invocations of the free market and the individual unfettered by cumbersome laws and economic regulations, there lies the hidden assumption that it is the duty of government (specifically, the federal government) not only to ensure economic opportunity for all citizens alike through equality before the law, but also to ensure economic success. If Mr. Kemp happens to believe market rather than paternalistic policies are the best instruments to carry out this supposed duty, he has nevertheless granted a basic precept of socialism in acknowledging that the state ought to be involved in the design of economic results, and that if those results are not equal, they aren’t just.

That, of course, is what the NAACP wants to hear. It’s what most of its delegates and members believe; it’s what Dr. King, Hubert Humphrey, and Dr. DuBois (who joined the Communist Party at the age of 98) believed; and it’s why Mr. Hooks is so mad about the Court’s rulings against affirmative action, the purpose of which is to fix the results whenever race is a factor in the competition. It’s also why, for all Mr. Kemp’s apologetics for his past, his party, and his political persuasions, the NAACP is not going to listen to his endorsement of the “market,” the “opportunity society,” or other slogans of entrepreneurial capitalism. Those slogans, if taken seriously, presuppose a limited and neutral state, equality before the law but not of condition, and a “level playing field” on which all the players compete under the same rules. Whether such classical liberal ideals are at all possible or desirable is another question, but they are utterly incompatible with the kind of governmental intervention in social and economic arrangements for the achievement of particular results that the NAACP demands and is willing to break the law to obtain.

By recapitulating not only an affirmation of egalitarian social reconstruction through political means but also a celebration of the liberal heroes, icons, and slogans of the civil rights movement, Mr. Kemp and his fellow outreachers may in fact gain the votes of black Americans and perhaps even the support of Mr. Hooks and the NAACP. But let us not deceive ourselves that such gains would represent any victory for “conservatism.” Rather they would represent a consolidation of liberal values and the crystallization of the liberal mentality among blacks and their (largely self-appointed) leaders as well as among (largely self-proclaimed) conservatives. They would constitute the modern equivalent of finding out which way the crowd is running, getting in front of it, and announcing yourself as its leader. Once conservatives accept, as Mr. Kemp evidently does, the legitimacy of egalitarian reconstruction, it will be far easier to continue and revive reconstruction through the bureaucratic paternalism in which black Americans remain trapped and in which their leadership maintains a powerful vested political interest, than through the entrepreneurial renaissance that Mr. Kemp promises.

A different approach that conservatives might use to attract not only black but also more white votes is to talk about (and deal seriously with) things that really matter to most Americans—crime and the need for swift, certain, and strong punishment for it; the family, community, religion, and other social institutions that control violence; and the senselessness of a centralized, bureaucratic, social engineering government that not only impedes “opportunity,” but also displaces and destroys the social bonds and disciplines that are the only real creators of opportunity or of the ambition to use it well.

Maybe this kind of rhetorical and conceptual framework, reflecting genuinely conservative ideas, wouldn’t gain Mr. Hooks’ endorsement, and maybe black Americans are already so enslaved to Mr. Hooks, the NAACP, and the other lobbies of the civil rights establishment that they wouldn’t buy it either. But there’s more to political leadership than winning votes, and maybe conservatism with a big “C” is what politicians who claim to be conservatives and serious public leaders ought to be talking about.