How the GOP Lost the Black Vote

Immediately after the Civil War, almost all black voters flocked to the Republican Party which they viewed as the protector of their liberties and freedom.  One hundred and fifty years latter, the Democratic Party is viewed as the GOP once was and for good reason.  The GOP has sold its soul to thinly veiled white supremacists and the descendants of the past versions of today's Christofascists who used the Bible to justify slavery and then later segregation.  A similar phenomenon has also occurred with the Hispanic vote.  And driving this jettisoning of decency and the principle that all Americans are equal under the law has been short term cynical political expediency.  Now, with the nation's demographics changing rapidly, the GOP may yet be about to have karma come back and bite it in the ass.  An op-ed in the New York Times looks at what happened and the issue of whether or not the GOP can or will change.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican Party is struggling with its future. Will it be a regional, Congressional party fighting a last-gasp battle for a shrinking base in a David and Goliath war against ominously expanding federal government? Or will it become a national, presidential party capable of adapting to a new American reality of diversity and expression in which the government serves an essential function in regulating public safety, providing a safety net and serving as a safeguard against discrimination?

[Senator Rand] Paul ventured across Washington to historically black Howard University and gave a speech aimed at outreach and bridge building.  The man is mulling a presidential run after all. 

The speech was a dud. It was a clipped-tail history lesson praising the civil rights record of the pre-Southern Strategy Republican Party, while slamming the concurrent record of the Democrats.  It completely ignored the past generation of egregious and willful acts of insensitivity by the G.O.P. toward the African-American community. 

During the speech Paul asked, rhetorically and incredulously: .  .  .  . How did we lose that vote?”

You can’t be serious, Senator Paul. In fact, I know that you’re not. No thinking American could be so dim as to genuinely pose such questions.  Let me explain. 

Republicans lost it when Richard Nixon’s strategist Kevin Phillips, who popularized the “Southern Strategy,” told The New York Times Magazine in 1970 that “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.” 

They lost it when Nixon appointed William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, a man who, while he was a law clerk in Justice Robert Jackson’s office, wrote a memo defending separate-but-equal during Brown v. Board of Education, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.” 

They lost it in 1976 when Ronald Reagan adopted the racially charged “welfare queens” trope. They lost it when George Bush used Willie Horton as a club against Michael Dukakis. They lost it when George W. Bush imperially flew over New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when people were still being plucked from rooftops and were huddling in a humid Super Dome.

They lost it when the McCain campaign took a dark turn and painted Barack Obama as the other, a man “palling around with terrorists,” a man who didn’t see “America like you and I see America.”

They lost it in 2011 when a Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrinch, who was the front-runner for a while, falsely and preposterously claimed that: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” 

The Republican Party has a tarnished brand in the eyes of the African-American community, largely because of its own actions and rhetoric. That can’t be glossed over by painting the present party with the laurels of the distant past.