Paul Gottfried

January 29, 2009

Jack Hunter, in responding to my comment, raised some questions that I began to consider from the time I posted my remarks yesterday. There is a perception on the part of blacks that the GOP is the ?white man?s party,? and it is impossible for the GOP to gain support among black voters, no matter how abjectly Republican politicians try to reach out to them. Although this reaction is based on a glaring misreading of the history of the two national parties in dealing with the black race, by now the judgment in question is so deeply entrenched that it may be impossible to counteract. Each new attempt by the GOP to beg for black votes looks more ridiculous than the previous one, and, as Steve Sailer shows, such self-abasement typically has no effect on the Republicans? success in recruiting black support.

Indeed, such groveling merely contributes to the impression that the GOP had been a racialist club up until recently. It is both laughable and counterproductive. Such wasted efforts resemble the GOP?s attempt to win Jewish votes, partly by allowing the brains of party leaders to be taken over by the neoconservatives. Here too the results have been dismal in terms of wooing a Democratic ethnic group into the Republican Party.

What is less clear, however, is that black voters have no ideological but only an ethnic attachment to the Democratic Left. Although blacks may not agree entirely with Barney Frank on social issues, Jack may be underestimating black sympathy for whites who sound like Frank. And this sympathy may exist, even if blacks, when given a chance, vote against their white Democratic leaders on the issue of gay marriage. Like Barney Frank and Barbara Boxer, most blacks feel alienated from a traditional white middle-class American society, and the Democratic Party, and particularly its left wing, seems dedicated to obliterating the type of white Christian culture that blacks rightly or wrongly associate with their exclusion from American society.

Blacks vote for the Democrats in the same way that Muslims in European countries overwhelmingly endorse the European Left. The Left these Muslims support is not so much a socialist as a socially radical one. It is eradicating the remnants of a European culture from which Muslims feel excluded and which if it still existed, would have kept them from settling in large numbers in Europe. To the extent blacks see the GOP as a bulwark of social and moral order, they believe it to be their enemy.

For blacks, the Democrats are a congenial party because it is a party of outsiders. Democrats are viewed as a gathering of disgruntled minorities, as opposed to what Jesse Helms used to refer to as ?normal Americans,? who tend to vote Republican. To the extent blacks think this way and act upon such thinking, they are definitely voting ideologically. The same is true for other groups that are voting to neutralize a pre-multicultural American society and culture. This, as Jack knows, is an attitude among self-defined outsiders that our late friend Sam Francis devoted considerable space to explaining.
Note my remarks should not be construed as a defense of the Republican Party, which today barely represents those traditional social beliefs that upset black voters. What I am noting is why blacks hate the GOP, as opposed to what the GOP really stands for. Blacks who hate the GOP do that party too much honor as a party of principle.