WHOSE BLACK PROBLEM? :

The Last Color Line (JAMES TRAUB, September 8, 2002, NY Times Magazine)

Why has the new generation of black leaders spurned the new Republican party? [...] The problem lies with contemporary Republican culture and principles. Bush's compassionate conservatism revolves around rituals of inclusion -- staged events, highly touted appointments. The new generation of black leaders, however, takes inclusion for granted; they have always been included. Symbolism, at least symbolism by itself, has lost its force.

The real significance of a race-neutral politics is that it accepts pragmatic, meliorative solutions to the nation's problems -- which may help explain Bill Clinton's immense popularity with black voters. The new generation of leaders accepts the value of the market. But there are few black voters, and few black leaders, who do not view the state as a mighty instrument for social justice and for economic progress. And though President Bush's focus on rigorous standards for schools has wide support among black leaders and voters, his administration has otherwise been so dominated by a fixed antipathy to governmental activism that it has proved to be more inhospitable to blacks than was that of his more moderate, if less symbolically attuned, father. (It may also be true that as foreign policy figures, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have less symbolic value than comparably placed figures in domestic policy would.) Even Ron Kirk, a Texas tax-cutter, says that he cannot in the current circumstances stomach the administration's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut.

If you looked at these two phenomena together -- more black moderates, fewer black Republicans -- you would say that black leaders have distributed themselves more widely across the political spectrum, while Republicans have squeezed themselves into a narrow space on the edge of that spectrum. And it is precisely the kind of ideologically conservative, antiurban, sectarian space in which an increasingly secular black political culture is bound to feel uncomfortable. Conservative Republicans are occupying the territory of moral absolutism that moderate black politicians are abandoning.

Nearly all of this column--other than the fact that blacks continue to vote almost exclusively for Democrats, as they have done since FDR supplanted Lincoln as the Great White Father figure--is silly. To take just a few of the more egregious errors, as Charles Murtaugh has pointed out, blacks are actually one of the least secular segments of the American population now. When they vote against Republicans they are voting against people who share their spiritual beliefs. Likewise, as if it were still 1965 in America, Mr. Traub asserts that big government programs are "pragmatic" and "meliorative". Go tell the unwed teenage mother in Cabrini Green about it. In fact, it seems at least at first blush to be the Republican driven programs like welfare-to-work that are pragmatic, rather than the Democrat defended handouts. Blacks are certainly free to continue to believe that LBJ cared about them and Newt Gingrich didn't, but the former destroyed the black inner city and family, while the latter pushed through a major reform that seems to be effectively treating many social pathologies.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 8, 2002 8:13 AM