Why is the Black Vote in the Democrats' Pocket?

The Republican Party that Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan (re)built has not been designed to reach out to a group on the basis of identity, but on the basis of a given group’s ideas and values. By the party’s very definition — its basic principles — this precludes reaching out to groups which have race, ethnicity, and/or gender as their sole criterion for coalescing as a political entity. So when some observers wonder what the Republican Party is going to “do for” the “black community,” most Republicans will have a certain look of puzzlement on our faces, as if someone just asked why we don’t offer attachable wings so that our prospective party members can fly.

Many black Americans cannot shake the notion that a political party is supposed to provide quid pro quo. That the Republican Party won’t do anything for them besides get off their backs, get other citizens off their backs, and get out of their way so they can pursue happiness just isn’t good enough. But where did the idea come from?

To the best of my knowledge, the black vote everywhere on earth goes overwhelmingly to the leftist party. That's true in the U.S., Canada, Britain, or Brazil. Black dominated countries invariably track toward socialism. Political divisions in their nations are usually tribal, not the classic conservative vs. liberal split you see in Western nations.

People here often point out that blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican until the New Deal (some claim until the Sixties, but that's not true). But during that era there was no true leftist party in America and the GOP got the black vote by default. During Reconstruction, the black vote was largely controlled by the occupying forces. After Reconstruction, the revived Democrats in Dixie took an overtly anti-black position. The only real choices blacks had were the anti-black Dems and the Northern business oriented Republicans, and they supported the latter.

People today project backward, often acting as if the Dems back in 1915 were just like the Howard Deans or Nancy Pelosis of today, except they were white supremacists on racial issues. But that's not true. Both parties back then had a mix of liberal and conservative members. The GOP in many states was very liberal, even more so than the Democrats (Wisconsin, for example). Many Dems were firebrand conservatives. By the early twentieth century the black vote had been suppressed by the Dems in the South (where most blacks resided). Blacks outside the South still voted, and largely voted Republican because there wasn't really that big of a difference between the parties on economic issues. There was no national welfare state as of yet. The GOP treated blacks fairly for the most part, while the Dems despised them. Given that breakdown, blacks voted Republican.

In 1933 FDR took office and initiated the New Deal, the first real national welfare state. Blacks switched their allegiance almost overnight. Even though the Dems in the South were still hostile to them and didn't let them vote, those in the North became enamored with the Democrats. In the 1934 congressional elections, Congressman Oscar de Priest, a black Republican who represented Chicago's south side, was defeated by black Democrat Arthur Mitchell. No black district has sent a Republican to Congress since.

Non-Southern Dems saw this propensity for blacks to vote for socialism and immediately began pushing for bills to abolish the poll tax, combat lynching, and other such racial proposals aimed at winning the black vote. People here often erroneously claim that “Republicans” pushed those bills and “Democrats” opposed them, but that's not totally accurate. The bill to ban lynching, for example, was sponsored by New Deal Democrat Senator Wagner of New York. In the House it was drafted by Congressman Gavagan, a machine Democrat from Chicago. Most Republicans did support these bills, but they had no power to bring them to the floor in an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress. Southern Democrats opposed them and usually killed them with a filibuster, but almost every Democrat outside the South supported those proposals.

Republicans still could get about a third of the black vote in presidential elections if they put up a candidate who wasn't all that conservative (Eisenhower), but that was about the best they could hope for. If they put up a conservative, the black vote dropped to almost nothing for the GOP. Locally, the Dems thoroughly dominated the black vote.

Once the Great Society came along in the Sixties, and the black vote became radicalized, it was all over for the GOP and the black vote. We've only gotten about 10% of the black vote since then. Even in states like Michigan where GOP Governor Romney fell all over himself courting the black vote, the black voters flooded into the Democrat Party and turned Detroit into a leftist Democrat one-party fiefdom. In the South, where the remaining racist Dems stood in the schoolhouse door and fought until the very end to keep blacks from voting, the blacks rushed to city hall to register as Dems the moment the feds arrived to register them.

We get about 10% of the black vote, and that includes some wonderful conservatives such as Michael Steele and Herman Cain. We should continue to reach out to blacks on conservative issues that might appeal to them. But the idea that we can win the majority of the black vote is a pipe dream. And pandering won't work because all that does is turn off white voters while not picking up any black votes, because the Dems will simply outpander the GOP every time.

The tactic of “reminding” blacks of the Dems’ racist past, which seems to be a favorite here at FR, is absolutely doomed to failure.

Most critics to pinpoint the most important SINGLE cause of the cultural degradation in much of the black community. That cause is the destruction of the 2 parent black family. The precipitate cause of this tragedy was the welfare state created by LBJ and (mostly) the DemocRAT Party. But since Barack He who must not be middle named Obama wants to extend and expand the welfare state to all of America, he is careful to avoid drawing the correct conclusions. Oh he gives lip service to the notion of personal responsibility, but is extremely careful to avoid any implication of the DemocRAT Party.
When you point out that the Democratic Party’s entire history and policies have been antithetical to the best interests of the black community, and that to the extent that a major political party is responsible for any political and civil liberty that black people have, they owe it to the Republican Party, and even when you can prove that historically and factually the most amazing case of political cognitive dissonance then occurs.
The common response is, well that may be true but only the Democrats are “for us”. They usually go on to an entirely erroneous understanding of Nixon’s Southern strategy, a distortion of Berry Goldwater’s principled opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and completely ignore the fact that the Democratic Party was founded amongst other things, to extend slavery into the territory’s. The Democratic Party opposed 13, 14, and 15th amendment to the United States Constitution, reconstruction, every bit of foundational civil rights legislation from 1866 to 1968, instituted Jim Crow in the Southern states, refused to enact antilynching laws, and most importantly destroyed the two-parent black family with Lyndon Johnson’s welfare state. When you point out the fact that the modern-day Democratic Party is home to the pro-abortion forces that have enhanced the wildly disproportionate abortion rate in the black community, that doesn’t seem to register either.
The black community is in the throes of the worst political brainwashing outside of the Soviet Union and I just don’t know what can be done about it. I am constantly engaged in debates with people in my community and they are determined to vote for Democrats despite the clear and present evidence of their utterly destructive policies. The staggeringly high level of political cognitive dissonance amongst my people is frightening. Untill the black community attains some level of introspection, it is doomed to a level of frustration that no level of Republican outreach can fix.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.