Why can’t Republicans attract minority votes? Strong agreement on social values hasn’t made a dime’s worth of difference at the polls. What gives? Ta-Nahesi Coates and Shelby Steele provide two interesting recent takes on the disconnect.
Steele, who is among only a handful of prominent Black conservatives, says the problem is that conservatives are uncomfortable with their own strengths, and losing a game of me-too-ism with political liberals:
Liberalism’s glamour follows from its promise of a new American innocence. But the appeal of conservatism is r
elief from this supercilious idea. Innocence is not possible for America. This nation did what it did. And conservatism’s appeal is that it does not bank on the recovery of lost innocence. It seeks the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people. The challenge for conservatives today is simply self-acceptance…
According to Steele, the Bush administration was guilty of blatant (and ineffective) pandering with its promises of compassionate conservatism and faith-based initiatives. In the end, he writes, “it was only a marketer’s ploy – a shrewd advertisement with no actual product to sell.”
Coates, a blogger over at the Atlantic, suggests Black rejection of conservative candidates today is built on more than a century of broken trust:
People wondering why the GOP can’t get a foothold in the black community, need to not just think about Goldwater and
Nixon. They should think about Du Bois telling black men to go fight in The Great War, and then having those veterans come home to the Red Summer of 1919. They should think about the pogroms that greeted Booker T’s compromise. There’s a lot of hurt out there. A lot of ancient hurt. A lot of it, even in these times, quite deep.
I don’t pretend to know which of these perspectives carries more water, though I find both interesting. If Coates is right, it may not matter whether Steele is too. How long would it take conservatives to repair a hundred years of damage?
One additional thought on all this. Is it possible that the neocons have blown up any bridges between Blacks and conservatives with their desire to reshape the world in America’s image?
Fellow Inside Blogger Harry Allen recently made me think of Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem from 1899, “The White Man’s Burden.” (If you’re not reading Harry, you should: here and here.) Kipling famously called for whites to take up the thankless job of imperializing other nations to bring hope and order and civility to their dark-skinned natives – those he called “half-devil and half-child.”
Could this have come to mind for some minorities as they listened to George W. Bush’s second inaugural address? This is where Bush made the neocon case that it is our uniquely American burden to export liberty (by force, if necessary) to those dark corners of the world still ruled by tyrants and oppressors.
Bush was more subtle than Kipling, and his address, drenched as it was in rhetoric and sybolism, seemed to come from a place of genuine belief — that, “There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.”
I don’t know. Maybe it’s a stretch to compare Bush’s platform to Kipling’s… I’m just trying to imagine what it might have sounded like to minorities, especially Blacks with a strong sense of history. Can you see where they might get nervous when we talk about the burden of spreading our values to the corners of the earth?
One thing I’ll give Kipling: He was far more of a realist than anyone in the Bush administration. The man didn’t offer even a a scent of hope we’d go out into the world and be “greeted as liberators”:
Take up the White Man’s burden— And reap his old reward The blame of those ye better The hate of those ye guard
