Blacks and the GOP

[kingbighair]

@Magiver

You are accusing Reagan and/or the GOP of being racist and that is a complete load. Given the number of white people on welfare the logic of using “code” to garner votes would be political suicide.

Hardly a load.

As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to Political Scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis’ book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater’s name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP’s Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan’s version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

I think you are correct in saying it will ultimately be suicide. Demographics are not looking good in the long run for the Republicans.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Nobody

I think what drives away black voters must be different than what’s driving away Hispanic voters. But at any rate, I would like to focus just on blacks and their problems with the GOP.

Not to overgeneralize but Hispanic voters think abortion is a problem.

OK, first of all, take out the racist Republicans and only focus on the party platform and policy.

And other than THAT, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln?

The party platform doesn’t matter when most of the racists seem to find their home in the Republican party.

[ElvisL1ves]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Not to overgeneralize but Hispanic voters think abortion is a problem.

Catholic voters think abortion is a problem. So do Evangelicals, who comprise a large and growing percentage of Hispanics.

[Nobody]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Not to overgeneralize but Hispanic voters think abortion is a problem.

I missed something. What are you talking about?

[ElvisL1ves]

He may be suggesting that Hispanics will become Republican voters as soon as they realize where their true interests lie.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@Magiver

You are accusing Reagan and/or the GOP of being racist and that is a complete load. Given the number of white people on welfare the logic of using “code” to garner votes would be political suicide.

The GOP chairman recently admitted that the GOP had a Southern Strategy for the last 40 years :

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republican-national-committee/michael-steele-acknowledges-gop-had-southern-strategy-for-decades/

[Dick_Dastardly]

As far as the demographics thing goes :

The clock, Gillespie said, is ticking. He said Bush received 54 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote in 2000 and finished in a dead heat with Al Gore. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) got 55 percent of that vote in 2008 and lost the election by seven percentage points. “If the current voting percentages among white, black, Asian and Hispanic stay the same,” Gillespie said, “the Republican nominee will lose by 14 points in 2020. We have to be more competitive.”

Republicans look to rebuild their traction with Hispanic voters

[RickJay]

@Shodan

Actually, yes she did - Reagan was referring to an actual person.

The person he used as an example of a “welfare queen” was in fact a professional con artist, not a welfare bum. His claim was logically equivalent to saying that Kenneth Lay was arrested for stealing office supplies, and constructing from that political policy that holds that office supply thieves are a major source of large-scale fraud.

[The_Understander]

As an actual black person, perhaps I might weigh in.

I think that all people are creatures of habit, and deeply influenced by the environment in which they are born. It’s a well-documented phenomenon that we, as people, are quite heavily influenced by what our parents, teachers, peers, and other role models tell us when we are young and impressionable.

Most black people in my limited experience grow up in an environment where voting for Democrats is taken as a given. It is almost dogma. You’re black? You’re a Democrat. One can easily see the parallel when looking at, say, southern rural whites, and their overall tendency to vote Republican.

Looking deeper, I think **Diogenes the Cynic **and kimstu have outlined many of the points that this perception remains ingrained and appears for the foreseeable future to remain entrenched. And as the metadiscussion progresses between the posters here, those that have (naming no names nor intending no insult) a more conservative point of view tend to ascribe the particular problems of many (NOT ALL! GAH!) black people vis-a-vis poverty and familial structure to moral failings on the part of blacks–well, there are, to put it mildly, fair criticisms to be made there, as most famously Bill Cosby and Barack Obama–yet ISTM that other factors that might contribute to these issues (say, grinding poverty stemming from, for the most part, never being allowed to rise in society regardless of merit) are handwaved away as old business.

Economically, it is far more difficult to accumulate wealth without some startup capital. And as the sixties have transitioned to this new and uncertain period, it feels to me that only now are we beginning to see the slow awakening of the potential of thirty-six million people to what the world really has to offer to those who are arsed to ignore their programming and moral failings… but I digress.

Here is where the Horatio Alger myth of immigrants who have ‘made it’ is typically inserted. I am not interested in a rehash of that old argument–the question is, after all, why black people are more inclined to vote Democrat. I’ll sum up here, then, with a rhetorical question:

Why would you vote for a party that seems, in many cases, to despise you for existing and considers you a problem to be solved, rather than a people, to be treated as any other?

[DigitalC]

@Magiver

Generational transfer of social dependency on government programs. Are you suggesting that poverty doesn’t cycle from parent to child?

You seem to be equating “welfare queen” to “person on welfare”, nobody is talking about that.

[Shodan]

@RickJay

The person he used as an example of a “welfare queen” was in fact a professional con artist, not a welfare bum.

Distinction without a difference. All welfare fraudsters are professional con artists by definition.

Regards,
Shodan

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Neither of those is a “welfare queen,” though which was a completely fictional and racist construct. There wasn’t even very much welfare fraud, and what there was was utterly trivial as a percentage of government spending. It was a fake problem which served to play right into the most base and hateful instincts of the voters (something conservatives have always been experts at, and which liberals have no idea how to do). At the same time Reagan was trying to get people outraged at the idea that some single, black mom might get away with an extra can of beans, he was paying military contractors $7000 for coffee pots and $400 for hammers. Those contractors really were getting obscenely wealthy by defrauding tax payers, but Reagan never demonized them or called them “queens.” Pretended concerns about government waste were patently contrived and disingenuous. It was racial scapegoating, plain and simple, and black voters are not too stupid to see such tactics for what they are.

[Magiver]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Neither of those is a “welfare queen,” though which was a completely fictional and racist construct.

How is it a racist construct when the majority of welfare recipients are white?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Because they were typified as black, DESPITE the fact that most of them were white.

[Magiver]

@Diogenes_the_Cynic

Because they were typified as black, DESPITE the fact that most of them were white.

Cite.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Reagan’s “welfare queen.”

[ElvisL1ves]

@Magiver

How is it a racist construct when the majority of welfare recipients are white?

Are you familiar with the concept of “dog whistle politics”? How about the use of code words?

[Kimstu]

@Magiver

Cite.

An interesting Nieman Report from 1999 on “The ‘Welfare Queen’ Experiment”:

The narrative (or storytelling) script for the welfare queen has two central features. First, it tells us that the majority of welfare recipients are women. Of course, the data show otherwise. The largest single group “on welfare” is children—about one in every four kids under the age of 18 receives welfare benefits. Nonetheless, given this script, most of the public connects welfare to gender. For instance, the “feminization of poverty” is a common explanation of American poverty rates.

This script then leads people to the next step in this association, what could be called a “gender narrative”—poor women choose to be on welfare because they fail to adhere to a set of core American values. From this perspective, single motherhood, divorce, desertion and a failure to hold the family unit together become the causes of their impoverished condition. In short, welfare dependency is a function of the moral failings of poor women. Their unwillingness to adhere to the principles of hard work, family values and sexual control thus deem them as undeserving.

The second key image that emerges from the welfare queen script is that most women on welfare are African-American. While African-American women do represent more than one-third of the women on welfare, in census data released in 1998 they accounted for only a bit more than 10 percent of the total number of welfare recipients.

This narrative script—skillfully locating the “intersection” of race and gender—was given its most public voice by then-candidate Reagan on the 1976 campaign trail. During that election Reagan often recited the story of a woman from Chicago’s South Side who was arrested for welfare fraud. […]

The implicit racial coding is readily apparent. The woman Reagan was talking about was African-American. Veiled references to African-American women, and African-Americans in general, were equally transparent. In other words, while poor women of all races get blamed for their impoverished condition, African-American women commit the most egregious violations of American values. This story line taps into stereotypes about both women (uncontrolled sexuality) and African-Americans (laziness). […]

An exhaustive content analysis of welfare stories in newsmagazines and network television news was done by Yale political scientist Martin Gilens. The content analysis of print covered the 1960’s through 1992; the TV content analysis covered 1988-1994. The studies, which were published in 1996 and 1997, found the following:

• Sixty-two percent of poverty stories that appeared in TIME, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report featured African-Americans.
• Sixty-five percent of network television news stories about welfare featured African-Americans.
• Fewer African-Americans are portrayed in “sympathetic” stories about poverty and welfare
• Newsmagazines depict almost 100 percent of the “underclass” as African-Americans.

Gilens concludes, “Clearly then, the overrepresentation of African-Americans found in weekly newsmagazines is not unique to this particular medium but is shared by the even more important medium of network television news.”

Thus, as seen through the eyes of the media, there are more blacks than whites who live in poverty. Gilens also found that the public dramatically over-estimates the number of African-Americans in poverty and similarly, in our surveys, we find that people under-estimate the number of poor whites.

[Shodan]

Probably due to the fact that so much higher a percentage of blacks are dependent on welfare (cite) than whites. In other words, any specific black person in the US is much more likely to be on welfare than any specific white person.

Regards,
Shodan

[tomndebb]

@Shodan

Probably due to the fact that so much higher a percentage of blacks are dependent on welfare (cite) than whites. In other words, any specific black person in the US is much more likely to be on welfare than any specific white person.

Which, of course, is why it has been so easy for those so inclined to mischaracterize the overall situation and to rely upon racial stereotypes and code words to make their case to a predominantly white voter base–which further explains why black voters, seeing that behavior, have tended to decline to join the party that most frequently employed those tactics, even when a very large percentage of blacks hold views that are consistent with planks in that party’s platform.

Even if they share views on various topics, few people will willing join a group that has used them as objects of scorn.