THE PARTY OF LINCOLN (ROCKWELL?) :

Courting minorities : A GOP challenge (W. James Antle III, July 8, 2002, Enter Stage Right)

There appear to be two schools of thought on what Republicans can do to rectify this situation [their failure to win the votes of minorities]. The most popular one is to cease being Republicans. This would entail adopting Democratic positions on affirmative action, bilingualism, multicultural education, immigration (particularly amnesties for illegal immigrants) and perhaps even social spending and moving to their left wherever possible. The problem with this strategy - aside from small matters like principles - is that the presumption is always in favor of the Democrats on these issues. To counter this would require a lengthy, concerted effort to promote these initiatives as central to the party that would consistently meet or exceed the inevitable Democratic attempts to take them back. This can only be done at the expense of virtually the entire conservative base that currently makes up the GOP.

The second school of thought is to present an activist conservative agenda as something beneficial to minorities. Liberals have trapped minority children in failed government schools and refuse to allow them to escape. In these government schools, many children receive bilingual education that interferes with their ability to learn English. The creation of jobs and wealth among minorities can be encouraged through capital gains tax cuts, Social Security privatization, estate tax relief and enterprise zones. Tax-free enterprise zones and tenant ownership of public housing are policies that can be promoted as solutions for the urban poor.

I was once a fervent exponent of this school of thought. Experience, however, has not been kind to it. Other than school vouchers, none of these issues seem to have much resonance among minority voters. There has finally emerged a younger generation of minority political leaders willing to resist their older counterparts and the teachers' unions in fighting for school choice - mainly, from within the Democratic Party. Advocacy of vouchers has gained Republicans little support from minority voters, but has alienated other voters who already have the economic means to effectively exercise school choice. There are a few bright spots where you can find GOP candidates who took this approach and did better than usual among minority voters, but it has produced no clear advantages in general.

Though he soft-peddles the point somewhat, Mr. Antle is suggesting, quite accurately, that school choice hurts the GOP with white voters. They are, for the most part, satisfied with their public schools and are fearful of what a large influx of black and other minority students might do to those schools, so they generally oppose vouchers. To which, we say : tough!
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2002 1:56 PM