Blacks and Republicans – Writing in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday, James Traub analyzes emerging political trends in the black community and concludes — hold your hats — that blacks, even the new generation of moderate black leaders who eschew the old concentration on race, continue to reject the Republican Party in overwhelming numbers because … they prefer the Democrats.
This nearly unanimous black rejection of the Republicans is, of course, the Republicans’ fault. “Why has the new generation of black leaders spurned the new Republican party?” Traub asks. Not because most black voters are Democrats. On the contrary, “[T]he problem lies with contemporary Republican culture and principles.” What about the pronounced inclusiveness of the last Republican convention? “Stage-managed,” says Traub. Well, then, what about the fact that President Bush appointed blacks to unprecedentedly high positions in his cabinet and staff? It may be, Traub says, “that as foreign policy figures” Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleeza Rice “have less symbolic value than comparably placed figures in domestic policy would.”
Could Traub possibly be saying that blacks have a higher regard for “symbolic value” than for real power? Or could it be that Republicans get no credit for appointing blacks when the appointments are made without regard to race? But then, former President Bush got nothing but grief when he appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, an appointment that was widely regarded by critics, and others, as explainable only by race.
“The problem,” in Traub’s view, is that Republicans are, well, you know, Republicans. “There are few black voters, and few black leaders, who do not view the state as a mighty instrument for social justice and economic progress,” Traub writes, while Republicans, by largely rejecting this notion, “have squeezed themselves into a narrow … sectarian space … occupying the territory of moral absolutism that moderate black politicians are abandoning.” Left unexplained is why skepticism of state power is sectarian moral absolutism while uniform belief in it throughout all sectors of the black community, allegedly leading to loyalty to Democrats hovering slightly below 100%, is pragmatic and moderate.
My analysis assumes, of course, something Traub may question, which is that the black community, like other communities, has differences within it. In other communities these internal differences lead to partisan differences as well, but not so with blacks. Indeed, black voters have become so synonymous with Democratic voters that in their last stab at the redistricting issue, Hunt v. Cromartie (2001), the Supremes held that where “racial identification is highly correlated with political affiliation” it is nearly impossible to separate racial from partisan motives. Since blacks vote overwhelming for Democrats in most places, and since partisan gerrymandering is legitimate, this opinion may have given a green light to redistricting that is, in fact and in effect, race-based. In other situations making race a proxy for certain attitudes, behaviors, or beliefs is rightfully condemned as stereotyping, and in still others policies that are adopted with non-racial motives but that have a racially disparate impact are said by liberals to violate civil rights laws.
In short, what Traub is really saying is that the only way Republicans can appeal to blacks — and not just liberal blacks, but all blacks: anti-abortion blacks, pro-gun blacks, pro-school voucher blacks, rural Baptist blacks, urban Catholic blacks, etc. — is to cease being Republicans. Well, O.K. I have no trouble with the argument, or the fact, that blacks vote for Democrats because they agree with them, but I do have a great deal of trouble with the apparent inability to apply that striking insight to both sides of the political spectrum. Every time a black Democrat loses to a white Republican, for example, the immediate and obvious and largely unquestioned explanation is race.
When North Carolina elected Sen. Jesse Helms, twice rejecting black Democratic challenger Harvey Gantt, it was obviously because of race. It couldn’t have been because a majority actually preferred a conservative Republican to a moderate/liberal Democrat. That assumption is still so pervasive as to be invisible, which is a not bad working definition of common knowledge. Thus in a recent otherwise thoughtful article on the just concluded Democratic primary for the Senate in North Carolina, David Broder discusses why some blacks favored Erskine Bowles over Dan Blue, the black former speaker of the legislature.
… African Americans such as Barbara K. Phillips, who attended the Bowles rally here, said that after Harvey Gantt’s two losing Senate campaigns against Helms, “it’s clear we have to bring the state along further before we can elect a minority member to this kind of office.”
Thus, by definition neighboring Virginia (my state), usually thought to be the epitome of conservatism, either has been brought “along further” than North Carolina (“the valley of democracy between two mountains of conceit”)… or Douglas Wilder, a black who was elected governor here a good while ago, is a potted plant.
