REPRINT: Why There Aren't More Black Republicans, 2 of 3

This blog post is reprinted from one I wrote on sodahead.com under the name CarbonMike (link to original here).

********

In Part One of this post, I started to address the issue of why there aren't more black Republicans, despite the fact that black people (especially poor and working-class black people) are a natural constituency for a party which has staked out family-values, socially conservative, church-on-Sunday territory in the American political landscape. For students of American history, Republicans are also the titular party of Abraham Lincoln -- not a minor thing to an ethnic group that used to be traded as chattel slaves, you might think.

What makes the picture even more puzzling is that the black demographic in question has witnessed firsthand the failures of liberal social policy of the last four decades or so (and if we liberals want to be seen as serious and intellectually honest, we have to admit that there have been failures and that they've happened partly on our watch). Version 1.0 of institutions like public housing and direct financial assistance to poor people fulfilled some of their intended functions, but failed at others, and while the intent may have been noble, the implementation in many cases had socially destructive effects. And as a resident of New York State, I don't even want to get started on the so-called Rockefeller drug laws -- conceived by a senator with a (D) after his name --
which after a couple of decades on the books we're finally, belatedly starting to dismantle. Poor and working-class people of color have been disproportionately
affected by all of the above.

So what's the problem? Why can't Republicans "enlarge the tent" and attract more people from the demographics that should already be with them?

Reason One that I cited was: Republicans are wrong on race, specifically (though not exclusively) with respect to black people.

Reason Two involves something a bit harder to nail down concretely: the concept of fairness: Poor, working class, and even many upwardly-mobile people of color tend not to trust Republicans because they believe that they don't apply their own political philosophy (and therefore cannot be trusted to govern) fairly and consistently.

This has almost nothing to do with political corruption, which afflicts both parties (correcting for the rise and fall of their fortunes) more or less equally. So conservatives please note: this is not a "Republicans are corrupt" argument, which would be unfair and even a bit silly.

Unfairness is also not the same as being "tough" on people (I'm looking at you, Ronald Reagan). The populations I've mentioned don't have a big problem with toughness, at least in part because they're accustomed to the fact that life is tough; that there are many chances to screw up; and that the consequences for same are often harsh. This is especially true of recent immigrants from the developing world.

I think the POC who make up the working poor, immigrants and their children, and the upwardly mobile working class can live with toughness. What they can't live with is the idea that the core values of conservatives/Republicans, specifically in the areas of criminal justice and economic and social policy, are too fluid to be trusted; that they are provisional values contingent on things like race or social class.

For example: In the middle of the healthcare reform debate, you had any number of conservatives -- on television, in print media, and especially in online forums like this one -- shouting (literally) at the top of their lungs that healthcare reform (especially if it included a public option) was a terrible idea because (say it with me) Government Can't Do Anything Right.

Now while that debate was in progress, we had an incident in Massachusetts involving a black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, in which a government agent entered his house on a valid suspicion -- but, having ascertained that it was in fact his house and the suspicion was therefore invalid, arrested him anyway because he didn't like his tone of voice.

Many of the exact same conservatives whose voices were still hoarse from screaming that government could do no right, immediately started screaming that government could do no wrong -- as long as it was wearing a police badge and a sidearm. There were hysterical condemnations of President Obama -- even though he praised the initial police response and the phone call that led to it! -- for uttering the obvious truth that it's stupid to arrest a man for disturbing the peace in his own house.

This is not limited to the Gates affair. Look at discussion of any police-on-civilian incident involving the allegation of excessive force, and you'll find that political conservatives, in the overwhelming majority of cases, come down on decisively -- even vehemently -- on the side of the police. Putting aside for a moment the merits of any particular case, siding with municipal government agents by default is a morally inconsistent position to take if your default position is that government can't do anything right.

Political conservatives are also usually (sometimes vehemently) pro-death-penalty. Without getting into a rhetorical war about the pros and cons of the death penalty (please let's not, guys), you can see where I'm going with this: if you don't trust government to run health clinics and give out free cheese to people, why would you trust it to administer a system of capital punishment?

Going back to President Obama: here you have a president who's embarked on a number of very ambitious policies. There are perfectly good conservative reasons to object to any number of them, and doing so in a thoughtful and reasoned way (listen up, conservatives) absolutely does not make you a racist, or a hatemonger, or crazy, or any other objectionable thing.

But if you're labeling him a totalitarian -- if you're calling him a Stalinist, to use a very common epithet on the right these days -- you have zero credibility if you were silent (as most American conservatives were) while the previous president was doing all the things to people that Stalin actually used to do: torture, extrajudicial kidnapping on home soil, trials based on secret evidence, and so on. Again, the point here isn't whether those acts were justified or not; that's a different discussion. The question is, how can you have been in favor of torture, warrantless surveillance, and the suspension of habeas corpus -- yet believe that doctors for poor people are a dagger aimed at the heart of the republic?

To me, true conservatism is about modesty -- that is to say, true conservatives believe that we should be modest in our attempts to effect the change we want through government power, because of the corrupting nature of all power (Google "Lord Acton"). Conservatism says that we should distrust our own well-meaning impulse to use government to prevent all unpleasant outcomes. The conservative mode of thought embraces a kind of detached skepticism and a tough-minded acceptance of human nature as its core values, and those are healthy and important values for any free society to have.

But conservative skepticism should be fairly applied to all the enterprises of government, not just the ones which might benefit the undeserving, and not just the ones which happen to benefit low-income people of color. Appearances matter. Republican political inconsistency, played out in the public media every day, is not lost on poor black people, recent immigrants, the aspirants to higher classes. People who already have wealth and power don't care if the system isn't fair, no matter what color they are, because (1) they've obviously already overcome the existing barriers, and (2) their wealth constitutes a form of ongoing protection. Poor and working-class white people don't worry as much about the fairness of conservative governance (even though they probably should, at least occasionally) because conservative politicians are very vocal about their identification with, and preference for, that ethno-social-economic group.

People of color on the bottom and middle tiers of this economy, by contrast, need to believe that they've got a shot at the brass ring. They don't mind having to work hard to attain it; they just need to know that they (and more importantly their children) won't get slapped down because they reach for it. Appearances matter. In the American political landscape, who appears to speak for them, and who against?


Concluded in Part 3, thanks for sticking around so far...

REPRINT: Why There Aren't More Black Republicans, 1 of 3

This blog post is reprinted from one I wrote on sodahead.com under the name CarbonMike (link to original here).

********

I'm a pro-gun, pro-markets, pro-growth liberal who comes wrapped in a black skin. I also believe America is best served by having a serious and vibrant conservative movement as well as a serious and equally vibrant liberal tradition. But lately I've noticed that conservatives -- not all of them, but too many of their leading figures -- have been indulging in an awful lot of foolishness at the expense of serious, informed, rational dissent. At the same time, their political fortunes seem to be in decline (the changing demographic map is not in their favor, not to mention the disaster of the last eight years) and a question I hear often from mainstream conservative strategists is, how can we expand the party -- or more to the point, why can't we seem to?

Well, why can't they? Why aren't there more black Republicans/conservatives?

Some of my fellow African-American politics junkies probably remember the GOP's periodic "racial listening tours" (a term which is exactly two-thirds correct), an unintentionally funny exercise in which Republicans roam the highways and byways of our great nation asking why they can't seem to capture the black vote. Sometimes an obligatory black person is trotted out as if to demonstrate good faith, illustrating complete ignorance of the fact that it demonstrates just the opposite. I'm looking at you, Michael Steele.

The question itself is a testament to the almost pathological tone-deafness of many conservatives when it comes to black politics. Who would ever dare to field a candidate in Florida who was wrong on Cuba, or a candidate in New York who was wrong on Israel, or one in any Southern state who was wrong on guns? Not only would that person's defeat be a foregone conclusion, but once the electoral carnage had ceased, the operative question would be not "why did that person lose?" but "what ever made you think they could win?"

Yet the leaders and thinkers of the Republican party seem mystified that black people don't flock to the genius of its economic ideas and socially conservative ways. Why Are They Not Conservatives? Because conservatives are usually wrong on race.

Not just wrong in a speakers-making-occasional-gaffes sort of way. The GOP has gone out of its way ever since the Dixiecrat Flip to be consistently, aggressively wrong on race, every chance it gets. Its leaders can't seem to help themselves: Trent Lott and his CCC/Southern Partisan affiliation, not to mention his rhetorical appreciation of Strom Thurmond's brilliant segregationist ideas. Ronald Reagan slyly referring to "states' rights" in Mississippi. Lee Atwater's racially infused campaign propaganda (talk about victimology!) George Bush Jr. going out of his way to speak at segregationist Bob Jones university (which, by the way, was granted tax-exempt status by the Reagan administration). The countless Republican politicians and lesser operatives who feel compelled to make racial slurs about President Obama and his family.

Wrong, as well, in a hypocritical and cynical way. Conservatives -- and even many liberals -- take great pains to brand public figures of color who speak intemperately on the subject of race as being beyond the frontiers of civilized debate. Yet you can easily name any number of white conservatives who have made ethnically insulting, racially inflammatory, or downright racist statements -- loudly and in public -- and have not only avoided censure, but have continued to be accepted in mainstream political discourse. To my white brothers reading this: please don't pretend not to know what I'm talking about. I personally (along with most black people I know) have no special use for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but if neither one of those names can be mentioned without the accompanying phrase "racial demagogue" then someone needs to explain why Pat Buchanan is a talking-head show regular and Rush Limbaugh seems to have veto power over any public statement made by any Republican anywhere.

The irony here is that many black voters don't have any illusion that the Democratic party somehow automatically has their best interests at heart. Talk to young black urban professionals in my demographic -- who vote overwhelmingly Democratic -- and you'll have no problem getting them to admit that certain major elements of liberal social policy over the last few decades have failed, and failed badly. Those of use who love urban life and traditions understand, for example, that Jane Jacobs' The Death And Life of Great American Cities was -- intentionally or otherwise -- as much an indictment of liberal/Democratic public housing policies as it was a broadside against Robert Moses.

Conservatives really don't understand this, or at least behave as if they don't. You go talk to working-class black people of my parents' generation about, say, Clinton's welfare reform policies and most of them will say they didn't go far enough. Talk to black people who live in high-crime neighborhoods and you'll find that they're absolutely livid about crime -- on criminal justice issues, many of them are slightly to the right of Genghis Khan. Yet you can't get either group to touch the Republican party with a ten-foot pole.

Shouldn't conservatives be interested in attracting more of what seems to be a natural constituency for them? Sure they should be. Maybe they are. But the electoral numbers say that that's not enough. Black voters often resent being taken for granted by Democrats, but we prefer it to being treated with outright contempt by Republicans.