Blacks and the GOP

Great Debates
21

Yeah, I remember Jack Kemp. He was the last Republican I can remember who did have an interest in poverty issues, apart from the Get-Up-Off-Your-Lazy-Ass-And-Find-A-Job school of thought that passes for Republican anti-poverty policy these days. I thought very highly of Kemp, and felt that he ought to have been the Republican nominee in 1996 instead of Dole. Heck, I might have voted for Kemp, and I’ve never voted for a Republican for president in all the years I’ve been voting, since 1988.

If there are Republicans who have stepped forward and proposed solutions for urban crises that don’t involve cutting welfare benefits and increasing tax cuts, I haven’t heard of them. I hope someone can correct me on this, but no such person has ever come up on my radar. This is probably why I’ve heard a number of blacks say–fairly or not–that “Republicans are against black people.” Me, I’m neither a Republican nor black, but when I’ve heard that sentiment, I’ve tried to fight it, even when I was campaigning hard to remove our last Republican president from office. I never had any luck persuading them. It might have worked better if I’d come out in favor of the Republican Party rather than merely saying they’re not fundamentally against black people. I mean, considering their gleeful attacks on “welfare queens” and so forth, I can’t in good conscience say they’re for black people, nor can I identify any Republican politician who seems to give a damn about issues that affect blacks significantly. I’m afraid the Republicans will have to make that case themselves, and I don’t see any of them making it. The Democrats had a long row to hoe in order to become the party of civil rights–they were courting the black vote as early as Franklin Roosevelt (though, obviously, not in the South.) Harry Truman made waves when he pushed for civil rights legislation during his second term. And, as has been mentioned upthread, it was Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act that started the exodus of racists from the Democratic Party to the less “PC” Republican Party.

22

I don’t think it’s that, because blacks tend to be more socially conservative too.

23

On what issues, though? Blacks are certainly more resistant overall than whites to some liberal positions such as gay rights, but they’re more accepting overall of less-conventional family structures, including single motherhood and extended rather than nuclear families as the basic family unit.

24

Honestly? I think it’s the perception that Republicans are racist. It doesn’t help that Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Tea Party, and Fox News are nearly all Republican and tend to be antagonistic toward blacks. The only conceivable option for Republicans to gain the black vote would be to support a platform for slavery reparations and try to look sincere about it. I don’t think this will happen; in fact, I suspect blacks will continue to vote Democrat for *at least *forty to fifty years.

  • Honesty
25

Things like abortion, gay rights, the role of religion in government, and so on.

26

Policy wise, you have to consider that the GOP is more a party of the affluent and secure middle class and blacks are less likely to be in either group.

However I think even wealthy blacks still generally want nothing to do with the GOP.

So all in all:

The contemporary GOP is a party grounded in white people upset about the civil rights movement of the 1960s

Endless code words against blacks (welfare, crime, drugs) which to a degree can be seen as beating around the bush methods of social control.

Opposition to policies that tend to help a reasonable number of blacks (social spending, affirmative action).

Hardline, knee jerk responses towards crime or poverty, issues which affect blacks more heavily than whites and which are not as constructive of solutions as efforts to invest in community to overcome those issues (investment in domestic job creation, better relations with police, etc). Point is, I think the GOP attitudes to crime and poverty could make blacks feel the vast majority of people in the GOP have never been exposed to either.

Those are guesses, but I’d assume things like that. Plus you end up in a cultural system where violating social norms is punished. I’m sure there are tons of blacks who vote dem for fear of ridicule, and i’m sure there are tons of whites in the south who vote GOP for the same reason.

27

Me too. In fact, I think the Republicans’ current anti-illegal-immigration strategy will play out similarly to their “Southern Strategy” of forty-odd years ago, meaning that Hispanics will be voting Democrat for the next several decades too.

Remember, the anti-racial-integration position was seen by many people at the time as even-handed and principled: they didn’t mind if other people wanted to associate with Negroes, and maybe they even associated with Negroes themselves, but they were damned if they were going to let Big Brother Government tell them that they had to associate with Negroes, or hire them, or serve them as customers, or let their kids go to school with them, or whatever.

From the segregationists’ point of view, at least on a conscious level, it was fundamentally about a matter of principle concerning freedom of association, rather than about anti-black prejudice. The Republican Party thought it was legitimate as well as strategic to embrace that viewpoint, figuring that segregationism would remain a viable political position for much longer than it actually did.

But the population in general ended up framing the issue in terms of the blatant injustice, bigotry and hatred it had revealed. Consequently, Republican support for segregation (ostensibly) as a point of principle became a liability rather than an asset. (As Rand Paul recently rediscovered, to his cost.)

Similarly, IMO, the Republican Party nowadays is staking a large part of its popularity on opposition to illegal immigration ostensibly as a matter of principle. Nobody likes illegality, and in theory there is nothing racist about wanting a consistent and enforceable immigration policy whose effects aren’t too economically and socially disruptive.

In practice, though, what’s going to stick in people’s minds is the injustice and blatant racism through which this opposition is frequently expressed. The general public will end up being revolted by anti-immigrant extremism, and Hispanics, like blacks before them, will end up with a deeply entrenched perception that Republicans are racist.

28

Conservatives like Tipper Gore?

29

Remember, back in the days before An Inconvenient Truth when Al Gore’s image in the noise machine morphed into some kind of cross between Captain Planet and Scrooge McDuck, the Gores were seen as very centrist and even slightly-righty red-state Democrats of the moderate-hunting DLC persuasion. (Hell, Gore’s 2000 running mate was Joe Lieberman.)

Yes, Tipper’s record-labeling campaign was perceived as quite a conservative thing for a Democrat to do.

30

We’ll leave the argument with the first statement aside, as it’s difficult to prove one way or another. But the second one!!! come on. man, that’s absurd. I find most rap music and country music barely tolerable, but on the metric of morality they’re light years apart. The glorification of killing… the treatment of women… You’ve got to be kidding!

31

Well, there’s quite a bit of “glorification of killing” and senseless violence, particularly against women, in country music. The iconic Johnny Cash line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” would probably be considered horrifying if it occurred in a rap song, but being in “Folsom Prison Blues” it’s basically just a popular joke.

Johnny Cash also sang in “Cocaine Blues” how he “took a shot of cocaine” and “shot that bad bitch down”. Morality? Not so much, really.

32

You can cherry pick examples, but *overall *country music (And I’m not a fan of it by any means) is far less misogynistic than rap. It’s not even close.

33

In terms of sheer numbers of songs expressing such sentiments, sure. But in terms of the attitude toward such sentiments? If the views on murder and aggression toward women in, say, “Folsom Prison Blues” and “Cocaine Blues” are considered immoral anomalies in country music, then why are those songs iconic classics of the genre?

Yes, country music emphasizes murder and misogyny less than rap music does overall, but I’m not sure I buy the claim that country music fundamentally rejects murder and misogyny more than rap music does.

34

Blacks aren’t idiots. They know darn well that most Republicans do not view “blacks” as a demographic social entity all that positively. The more socially liberal east coast Republicans view blacks as helpless, stubborn wastrels who will not pull up their socks and get on with improving themselves. The southern Republicans have the largest animus against blacks, and see blacks as lazy, and dangerous morally corrupt parasites out to scam and injure white culture. To western Libertarian lite Republicans blacks are products of a corrupt social and economic culture, but their disdain is less personal than that of the southern Republicans, and less morally loaded than that of the East coast Republicans.

Few blacks with their eyes open have much reason to trust Republicans as looking out for their best interests.

35

“I killed a man in Rio just to watch him die.”

Country music glorifies spousal abuse, adultery, alcoholism and violence.

You want to talk about treatment of women? here’s Hank Williams Jr.:

“Now my girl friend slapped me in the face
And I said “Darling, that was your first mistake”.
And then she went wild and her eyes turned red.
She started breaking everything and screaming loud
And kicking me and cussing me out
And I gave her a little adjustment on the top of her head.
It was an attitude adjustment, Ah she loves on me all the time.
Just an attitude adjustment, She’s got a whole new frame of mind.
She don’t nag and I don’t beg, We get along and like I said,
Just an attitude adjustment Ah, everything’s just fine.”

Ha ha ha , how funny.

Johnny Cash (a favorite of mine, even though I don’t like country music) sang about murder more than once, including more than one song about killing women (“Delia’s Gone” comes to mind)
They just don’t talk black and say fuck, so no one gets offended.

By the way, bilge like “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” is just as offensive in its own way and sends all the wrong messages.

36

Well… other than the large preponderance of music within a defined class being oriented one way or another, which is the most reasonable people would put a metric on the overall misogynous tendencies of the music, I’m not sure how you you intend on measuring this.

Honestly, your position is borderline absurd. Rap positively glories in murder and misogyny. Country has some elements that talk about shooting and ass kickings and righteous beat downs but this is a fraction of the overall output.

37

Rap music glories in sex and violent braggodocio. So does country (so does metal). Rap just uses more profanity and hyperbole.

38

So if we were to research the number of musicians involved in gangland shootouts what would we find? Saying Rap is more vulgar is an understatement of reality.

39

How many rapppers have been involved in gangland shootouts, and what does that have to do with the music itself?

40

All right. Remember, though, what this hijack was originally about was the claim that country music is no more “morally responsible” than rap.

I quite agree that most of country isn’t as focused on murder and misogyny as a lot of rap is, but I’m not convinced that it’s because the country genre actually rejects murder and misogyny as morally irresponsible, rather than because the country genre simply finds other topics more interesting to sing about. Like pickup trucks, and being lonely, and drinking, and loving the American flag, and so forth.