Why the GOP’s preoccupation with winning the support of blacks who will never support the GOP?

Mark Jaws writes:

Up until 20 years ago I had seriously thought the GOP could capture a sizable portion of the black vote. After all, a sizable number of the blacks I had known in the housing projects which dotted the lower East Side were tough minded realists who showed no quarter when it came to punishing muggers and drug addicts. The blacks with intact families (there were such things back in the 1960s and early 1970s in New York City) were church going, salt of the earth type of folk. So, was it so preposterous for a young Mark Jaws to think that if the Right could just craft the right message, it could bring millions of blacks back to the “party of Lincoln?”

Now, of course, I know better, which is why I have to ask myself why the GOP wastes its time trying to capture an electorate, a majority of which wildly applauds the anti-white lies spewed by its so called leaders? Not only are these hearts and minds almost impossible to win, but why bother to fish where there are no fish to bite?

For example, let us assume that an equally divided 50/50 electorate is 80 percent white, nine percent black, eight percent Hispanic, and three percent Asian. Then, based on fairly well established voting patters (e.g., the GOP captures 55-60 percent of the white vote, while getting 11 percent of the black vote, etc) we can compute the following: The Democratic 50 percent is made up 35 percent white, 8 percent black, 5.5 percent Hispanic, and 1.5 percent Asian, or in other words, 72 percent of Democratic voters are white, with minorities making up the remaining 28 percent. For the 50 percent voting bloc which makes up the GOP, 45 percent are white, one percent black, 2.5 percent Hispanic, and 1.5 percent Asian, or in other words 90 percent of GOP voters are white, although the number is probably higher (as many “Hispanics are counted among the whites for particular surveys).

If I were a GOP strategist, I would consider just how vital is it for my party to pick up the black vote, and at what cost to my solid white conservative base? With nationwide illegitimacy rates at 70 percent, the black vote is tailor made for permanent residency on the welfare plantation and isn’t going anywhere—not now or ever. A clever GOP strategist (do such people exist any more?) would bait his or her fishing hook aimed at the more numerous and infinitely more reasonable whites who currently swim in the Democratic Lake.

The reason why the Democrats recaptured the Senate in 2006 is because George Allen, my former U.S. Senator, in addition to allowing himself to be “Macacca’ed,” made useless and pointless gestures at the black community (such as launching a state-wide tour to “apologize for slavery”) while “dissing” a portion of his white base, many of whom, including my rebel secessionist son in-law, stayed home. Allen lost by 6,000 votes. One would think the GOP would learn. But it won’t, which is why I no longer offer it my automatic support, and have joined the Constitution Party.

LA replies:

“Why bother to fish where there are no fish to bite?”

The answer to Mark Jaws’s question is the same as to the question: Why does Hollywood keep making anti-Christian, anti-American movies (such as the recent spate of films on Iraq) even though most of them flop badly? The answer is belief, ideology, even morality. The movie makers believe in the message of such movies, and feel that making them is the right thing to do. Similarly, the GOP subscribes to racial liberalism. For the GOP to give up on the idea that the GOP is good for all Americans of all races and therefore should be supported by all Americans of all races, would be to abandon the universal liberal belief system that constitutes the GOP; it would be to admit that they are a party of whites. They can’t do that. So Republicans have to keep trying to win over blacks, to demonstrate that they are the party of all races, even though the blacks keep rejecting them. For the same reason Republicans and conservatives have to keep up the effort to “close the gap” between black and white academic performance, even though such gap-closing never occurs, and for the same reason that they have to keep saying that all immigrants from all backgrounds can assimilate into America, even though it’s obvious that they can’t, and for the same reason they support Bush’s doomed effort to spread democracy to the Islamic world.

They do these things, not to achieve a real outcome in the real world, but to demonstrate to others and themselves who they are, what their real beliefs are, to affirm their allegiance to goodness, as understood according to liberalism.

Once years ago I asked my mother, who in her political views was pretty much formed by the New York Times, why liberals kept pursuing some utopian goal that obviously was going nowhere, and her answer was, “Well, we have to try.”

That’s it in a nutshell. The trying demonstrates the good intention to achieve a liberal world, without which a liberal would cease to be a liberal.

David B. writes:

I believe it was late in the 2000 campaign, when I read somewhere an answer to this question. It referred to why the 2000 GOP convention put forward so many black speakers, led by Colin Powell. They were actually doing it to appeal to white suburban voters who “would not stand for racism.” These upscale white voters, the Soccer Moms and their husbands, were supposedly uncomfortable with the idea of a “white only” party. During the 2000 race (and afterward), when George W. Bush was making a speech, you would see several black faces in the background. Of course, Bush received about the same percentage of the black vote as Barry Goldwater had in 1964. The GOP strategists assume it helps with the “anti-racist” white voters.

Mark Jaws writes:

I strongly disagree with David B. The GOP is not a “whites only” party; rather blacks as a racial voting bloc have chosen to align themselves with the party of Marxist redistributionists.

LA replies:

I don’t understand Mr. Jaws’s point. It’s a common view (frequently expressed here and elsewhere) that the extravagant GOP minority displays, especially at the 2000 convention, have been in large part aimed at centrists, white “soccer moms,” to make them feel comfortable with the GOP.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 29, 2008 10:05 AM | Send