The GOP and Black America

Sophia Nelson is a black Republican and former GOP congressional staffer and committee counsel. She's got a long essay at the Washington Post discussing the paucity of black Americans in the Republican party.

Ninety-five percent of black voters turned out for Barack Obama this year, and Nelson was one of them. She doesn't really explain her personal decision, other than suggesting that the GOP's basically blown off black Americans and the party's lack of vigorous outreach has apparently left her feeling like a jilted lover.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic, has a brief post on Nelson, and here's an interesting perspective on the GOP from "Ivan," in the comments:

The article strikes me as misguided in its prescriptions, as the Republicans have a much bigger problem with people of color than "lack of outreach" and "not talking to them": namely, that it is a safe haven for racists of various stripes. Worrying about outreach in its current situation is like worrying about a car's paint job when the engine won't even run. The GOP needs to make it clear, both in style and in substance, that racists are no longer welcome, and it needs to do so consistently and for a long period of time to convince people that its racism is in the past (the way Democrats did by supporting civil rights and rejecting the Dixiecrat wing). In essence, they need to disown the Southern Strategy.

The big problem for the GOP is that they've become dependent on that wing of the party for electoral successes, so over the short term such a rejection will be very costly in electoral terms. But if they don't do this, they're dead in the long term, not just because of fast-growing minority populations (Latinos don't like the GOP crypto- and not-so-crypto-racist policies and rhetoric any more than Blacks) but because it aggressucely alienates the young-voter demo, whites included.

Basically, the GOP made a deal with the devil when they welcomed the Dixiecrats into the party. It gave them a generation's worth of dominance at the Presidential level, but now the bill is coming due and the compounded interest looks brutal.

Ivan puts a reasonably plausible face on the common left-wing smear of the GOP as a party of racists.

The problem, of course, is that since Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984 - where the GOP won 49 out of 50 states - it strains logic to suggest the post-1960s Republican Party is an exclusively Southern-based political machine. Sure, the party appealed to issues that generated subtantial support among white Southerners, many of whom were Democrats and would cross party lines to vote for Republicans when latent racial issues were salient.

But one key theme associated with this debate is the "Southernization of the America," a topic developed by historians and sociologists, and which was discussed in an Economist essay in 1994 (see also this entry at Wikipedia). The party appealed to cultural and economic issues that were increasing important to white working class voters, and these issues were nationalized. It's frankly not racist to be outraged that white workers were being passed over in the workplace due to aggressive racial quota programs, or that qualified disadvantaged white students were being shut out of placement at competitive universities because of race-based affirmative action.

Indeed, as Thomas Edsall has argued, agressive welfare-state liberalism, and extremely race-conscious policies, drove moderate-to-conservative white working class voters from the Democratic Party in droves:

Public policies backed by liberals have driven these new alignments. In particular, busing, affirmative action, and much of the rights revolution in behalf of criminal defendants, prisoners, homosexuals, welfare recipients, and a host of other previously marginalized groups have, for many voters, converted the government from ally to adversary. The simultaneous increase, over the past two and a half decades, in crime, welfare dependency, illegitimacy, and educational failure have established in the minds of many voters a numbing array of "costs" - perceived and real - of liberalism.

Everyday Americans, frankly, were revolting against the excesses of the rights revolution and the cost of welfare state liberalism that to this day has not reduced poverty in America, and has contributed to the decay of the black American family, the radicalism of the gay rights militant movement, and irresponsibility in foreign policy and war.

Today, the GOP's failure to come up with a new governing vision, and the dramatic personality-driven politics of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama, explains the party's drubbing at the polls, among all demographics. In fact, Obama simply consolidated a black voting constituency that has turned out for Democratic candidates at rates of 80 percent since the Lyndon Johnson administration.

Those black Americans who refuse to abandon a victim's mentality aren't likely to be attracted to the more individualistic and responsibility-driven ethic that's been the basis for GOP conservative economic and social values for generations. To the extent that we've had a Democratic political realignment this year, it's largely been a matter of economic trauma. If and when the Democratic Party restores confidence and growth in the American economy, and voters find more opportunity across the free market system, we may see more of a return to a normal pattern of party competition based on relative evaluations of the parties' statements of core convictions and support for decency, mobility, and responsibility.

Until then - until the GOP can credibly restore its image of economic fairness and meaningful traditional values - the Democrats can get away with a politics of grievance that treats black voters as the same sharecroppers that Southern Democratic Party bosses exploited before the 1960s.