Should the GOP Do More to Reach Out to Black Voters?

Insight on the News, p. 41
January 8, 2001

by
Paul Gottfried

Despite all the outreach displayed by Republicans, including the omnipresent theme of diversity at the Republican National Convention, the Republicans' New Majority Council, established in 1998 to interface with the black community, Bush's persistent refusal to oppose affirmative action in presidential debates and his showcasing of Republican advisers, 93 percent of black voters gave their support to Al Gore and to other Democratic office-seekers.

Adding insult to injury, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which Bush courted during the campaign, produced shameless TV ads that attempted to link his resistance to hate-crime legislation in Texas to the grisly murder of James Byrd. Notwithstanding his conspicuous outreach, Bush fell almost 8 points behind the percentage of the black vote obtained by Bob Dole in 1996, 9 points behind Reagan's in 1984 and 6 points behind the totals received by the conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964. In the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower carried a majority of the black vote in his presidential campaigns. Syndicated columnist Sam Francis surmised from these figures that an inverse relation exists between the amount of Republican catering to black voters and the results achieved. Some Republican leaders, including former congressman Jack Kemp, loudly have lamented the mass exodus of black voters from the GOP since the sixties. Yet, more than 90 percent of congressional Republicans (in contrast to about 50 percent of congressional Democrats) voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in the late sixties Republican President Richard Nixon introduced what became the essence of the civil-rights revolution for black leaders - affirmative-action programs. Nixon and Labor Secretary George Shultz pioneered minority set-asides in government contracting.

Republicans lost the black vote not because of racist rhetoric or a racist past but because the Democratic Party outbid them for that vote. Most black voters want less of what the Republicans appear to be offering - limited government - and more of what Democrats do offer: quotas and other forms of compensatory justice directed at their community.

There is no way that Republicans can pick up large chunks of the black vote except by playing ball with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rep. Maxine Waters of California and other black politicians with demonstrated mass support among blacks. The price for such cooperation should be obvious: It would oblige Republicans to take the initiative in pushing affirmative action, reparations to blacks and hate-crime legislation aimed against whites. After all, the reason that these leaders rage against Republicans is for dragging their feet on such issues. When on Nov. 4, Gore told a black Methodist congregation in Pittsburgh that Bush's reference to strict constructionism was a code word for slavery, for having some people considered three-fifths of a human being, he was drowned in cheers and applause.

That kind of rhetoric will be de rigueur for Republicans who have the stomach to pursue the black vote any further. Recall that Bush had Confederate memorabilia scrupulously removed from the Texas statehouse prior to the start of his campaign, but the gesture didn't satisfy the civil-rights establishment. More dramatic groveling will be required before Republicans will be able to bring that group around.

Republicans who think they will garner black votes by doing less are deluding themselves. Democrats court the black vote by promising social programs and by making public confessions about white burdens of guilt in the appropriate places. Republicans can do the same, but in the process they will look like faux-Democrats and will relinquish what differentiates them, at least theoretically, from the Left - the belief in real constitutional government as opposed to a parody of one.

Moreover, it is both dishonest and demoralizing for white Americans to apologize to blacks for what some white Americans did or did not do to black Americans in the past. This is a rite of humiliation that tens of millions of Americans are loath to join. These Americans vote for the Republican Party not as an antiblack party but in retaliation against an antiwhite one. Like my white neighbors in Pennsylvania-Dutch country, they believe that Republicans, if nothing else, proclaim the right idea: All American citizens should be treated the same under the law. As white Americans, they will treat black ones fairly but see no reason to mortify themselves when addressing black groups. Republican strategists are hopelessly nave if they imagine they can hold on to such voters while playing pals with Jackson and Kweisi Mfume. Whatever they may chip away from the 10 percent of the total American vote cast by blacks this year, these strategists likely will lose from traditional Republicans. Such people do have choices besides voting for the Democrats such as staying home or voting for third-party candidates on Election Day.

It is important to underline the reasons for the close connection made by black spokesmen between racial sensitivity and government preferences in jobs and admissions. Such a connection continues to drive black politics. Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America and Robert Weissberg's The Politics of Empowerment document the key role of public employment and government favors in the creation and sustenance of the black middle class. Unlike Asians, Jews and many West Indians, the majority of American blacks identify social mobility with special treatment by the state. That treatment is assured and expanded by cranking up white guilt to pressure lawmakers into offering blacks newer and ever more costly forms of compensation. As Weissberg demonstrates, this racial shakedown does not benefit most blacks, but the political and fiscal empowerment of black politicians does provide jobs to black professionals. The latter have become role models for other blacks, who believe that their own career engines will be greased by government. Given the fact that a much higher percentage of the black middle class has risen this way than is the case for other groups, the operative assumption, according to Weissberg, is unfortunately correct.

This pattern of mobility also explains why there is less of a correlation between testable intelligence and socioeconomic status for middle-class blacks than for most other ethnic and racial groups. Such a finding, according to Sowell, need not demonstrate an inherent genetic disadvantage. It means that blacks are able to rise beyond their demonstrated merit and, moreover, deem this as acceptable. And black politicians go on the warpath, screaming about "bringing back slavery" whenever objections to this arrangement are raised.

There is a mechanism of reinforcement at work here, which has been noted by black critics of affirmative action and black empowerment. Talk about victimization also justifies a system of rewards that is mostly unrelated to merit and it raises the prestige of black politicians who can shake down the white establishment for favors, even if most blacks never receive the benefits of that shakedown. There is no way that Republicans can oppose these practices while playing catch-up for black voters, particularly if they must deal with the scam artists in question.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party may have bitten off more than it can chew in rushing to serve the civil-rights establishment. The question is how much the Democrats can cede on one side without making the rest of its constituency uneasy. Jewish voters did not take offense when Democratic vice-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut paid court to Louis Farrakhan, despite the minister's stated enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler. Lieberman is undoubtedly a Jewish celebrity, and many of his Jewish Democratic voters seem far more anxious about the Christian right than they do about black anti-Semitism. But this indulgence of black excesses may be only temporary, and one wonders whether Lieberman's obsequious behavior would have been tolerable to his Jewish fans if it had been a non-Jewish Democrat who had visited Farrakhan to please black politicians. Even more significantly, over half of white Catholics still vote for the Democratic Party because of what may be an ancestral identification with organized labor and working-class issues. But will this diminishing Democratic constituency shrink faster if the Democrats put more government muscle behind black professionals and their children, to the detriment of blue-collar Catholics and their kids?

And what about the Asian vote as a permanent asset of the Democratic Party? Though that vote went to the Democrats this fall, things may not stay that way. Most Asian-Americans are strongly opposed to affirmative action and voted to end it in California. Hardworking Asians chafe at the preferences given to those who, unlike themselves, don't earn their way into universities and jobs. It may not take long before they notice on which side the Democrats are standing on this issue. Unprincipled Republicans would do well to ponder such questions before becoming Democratic clones.

At a more pragmatic as well as principled point in its history, the Republican Party heavily recruited Italian-Americans in Boston, Philadelphia and other Eastern cities. This provided the party with an entry point among ethnic Roman Catholics and a countervailing force to the Irish vote that the Republicans had no serious chance of winning over. The predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republicans built bridges to a group that would help them to gain influence in the cities, did not challenge Republican ideas and got on with English Protestants better than either of these newfound allies did with the Irish. Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo spoke about "coming home to the party of my father" when he became a Nixon Republican in the early seventies. Rizzo reluctantly had changed party affiliations in his bid for police commissioner under then (Irish Democratic) mayor Richard Tate and, according to his biographer Sal Palantonio, had regretted this act as a betrayal of his Italian Republican roots. The Republican attempt to reach out to Rizzo's coethnics had succeeded because it was doable and because it did not require the abandonment by either side of its dignity or identity. The present desperate quest by Republicans for black votes will involve losing both in return for pitifully little.