In most every election, 80% of blacks vote Democratic – the perceived party of free stuff – rather than for the party that ended slavery.
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Samizdata quote of the dayAugust 14th, 2010 |
 43 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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It’s racist to notice that.
The party of free stuff? How about the party of the Confederacy, of Jim Crow. And check Al Gore Senior’s civil rights voting record.
Hell, check the voting record of the entire Democratic Party.
But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 happened under President Johnson (a Democrat) and were actively promoted by the liberal wing of the Democratic party. So the Democrats get the credit among Blacks, even though there was considerable Republican support for – and considerable Democratic opposition to – the legislation.
Life ain’t fair, and the end of slavery was a long time ago.
This, rather than the “the party of free stuff” slur, is the source of the Democrats’ lock on the Black vote.
From where do my neighbours (white, black or green) derive the right to impose a ruler of their choosing on me?
This is the big problem I have with democracy. It is a long way from the Athenian ideal of direct representation, and even that wasn’t that ideal when you dissect it.
All I ask is that I may mind my own business, and the rest of society extend me the same courtesy.
Why is that so hard?
Ended Slavery?
Nope, that was the Republicans under Lincoln. Mind you, he wasn’t madly keen on the idea either. It was more a war contingency plan to fuck up the Confederates.
RAB,
Read it again, Republicans ending slavery is the point of the posting.
Jaded: either you support some form of a minimal state, in which case there is no way around some kind of wholly or partially democratic process, or you are not a libertarian but an anarchist. (Hate labeling, but since you labeled yourself…:-))
I find it very difficult to define my views myself Alisa. But I’ve got used to posting under this name, so I’m sticking with it.
Nonetheless, a minimalist state does not require impositional and coercive systems of control. To use another label, I am leaning toward a voluntaryist position at the moment.
I don’t have a problem with governments, rulers and institutions. I have a problem with imposition and coercion.
Jaded, a state by definition requires impositional and coercive systems of control (and that last phrase is redundant anyway, as control by definition implies imposition and coercion). Consequently, a voluntaryist position requires and absence of a state (with all the imposition and coercion inherent to it, with which voluntarism cannot coexist). In other words, welcome to anarchy.
Thanks Cats, Mea Culpa, it was that pesky “for” in there that I missed. I thought she was saying that the Dims were the party of free stuff “and” ended slavery.
Though given that black public support for Obama and the Dims is undimmable even in the face of the facts, they probably do think the Democrats ended slavery.
RAB,
Hey, they still believe OJ was innocent, too. Willful ignorance of truth in spite of the facts is unfortunately the most common expression of the First Amendment in the country these days.
Blacks vote on current issues, like everyone else. Votes are almost never thanks given for past actions, they are demands for future actions.
I don’t vote for the Whig party, I don’t think anyone else around here does either 😉
Hey, where’d my comment go? I wiped the spittle off the keyboard and the screen, dammit!
RAB – I suspect that a majority of Americans believe that the Democrats ended slavery. Otherwise, all those bribes paid to the teachers’ unions would have been wasted.
Blacks were reliably Republican voters until the Great Depression. Roosevelt changed everything. Reason rarely trumps emotion (if it’s even employed, which is rare).
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” – H. L. Mencken
Laird: Reason rarely trumps emotion
Please see Current’s comment above.
Alisa, I disagree with it. If blacks were truly voting on current issues (and using reason) they would understand that the Democratic big government, welfare-state policies of the last 50 years have not only been an abject failure but have been especially harmful to them. Yet still they overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Voting for Obama (accepted by them as “black”) is understandable, I suppose, but not the knee-jerk support of all Democrats. They are still held in thrall to the legacy of Roosevelt, which is not “voting current issues” but rather is the epitome of voting solely on emotion and past accomplishments (however ephemeral they may be in reality).
Overly simplified history: US blacks vote mostly democrat because of the Civil Rights movement.
Some republicans were in favor the movement but too many intelligent republicans were caught up in intellectual, theoretical libertarian arguments about the individual’s right to discriminate that they successfully ignored the terrible effect segregation laws were having in the south (and how they were poisoning the national dialogue).
The democratic party of that time (the white part at least) had two wings:
1. northern social liberals (they were in favor of Civil Rights)
2. southern conservatives dead set against the civil rights movement
After the victory of the civil rights movement those in the second wing of the democratic party either rebranded to join the winning side or joined the republicans (see Strategy, Southern)
Republicans haven’t had much luck in addressing US blacks successfully ever since they absorbed the southern conservatives. The libertarian wing of the repulbicans still won’t back down from theoretical ideological arguments that end up defending southern racism (by default at any rate).
Still waiting for my reply to be released from smitebot purgatory, Alisa.
Also waiting….
A higher percentage of Republicans (in both House and Senate) voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats did.
“But the provisions compelling private business enterprises would mean that YOU would not have voted for it Paul”.
I am not American (let alone an American Republican politician) so how I would have voted the year before I was born can hardly be said to explain why 80% of blacks vote the way they do.
Sadly it IS “the party of free stuff” that is the reason – listen to the tape of the “Obama money” crowd in Detroit, or watch the crowd in Atlanta only a couple of days ago (or endless other examples). These are people who have been robbed of their sense of shame – they have no pride, no self respect. They just chant for government money as “rights” in the Cloward and Piven bankrupt-America way (but remember the corruptors, including Cloward and Piven were WHITE).
Of course many white people are also like this (moral corruption knowns no skin colour) – and many black people are NOT like this.
But the truth is the truth – and the truth is reflected in the voting, and no the 1964 Civil Rights Act has got little to do with it (it is the “War on Poverty” welfare, launched in the same year of 1964, that is the cause).
Of course you are right, Laird. It’s just that my point was that b…..ks feel entitled to whatever, and the Dems promise to deliver (and they do) – hence voting for the Dems. In that sense it is rational (albeit very short-sighted and based on a false premise) rather than emotional.
Michael Farris: I was not aware of that libertarian-inclined-Republicans-against-the-civil-rights angle. Wasn’t the civil-rights movement opposing discrimination by the local and state governments rather than by private businesses?
Trying to compare Republicans and Democrats of different eras results in a game of semantics. Libertarians should think in terms of Force and its preferred absence, and those who prefer to use Force to either preserve a golden past or progress to some golden future. The parties have swapped roles over time.
The Republicans of the Age of Slavery were the progressives. They used offensive Force to meld a new Age. Meanwhile the Democrats preferred the use of Force to preserve the past. They traded positions depending on who had their time in the sun as the “new boss”. Of course for some Republicans of that era the party wasn’t progressive enough which spun off the Progressive Party as a consequence.
The Republicans were the party African Americans gravitated to through the 20’s. The watershed moment (literally) was the Great Flood of 1927. Hoover broke his promises to remedy wrongs perceived by the African Americans done to them after the flood. Roosevelt later seized upon this.
So, it was “free stuff” that was the lynch pin behind the migration from one party to the other. It isn’t a slur to point this out. Everyone who looks to government is looking for some sort of hand out or “rent seeking” as the government makes nothing – it merely collects by Force and hands out to select preferreds. Recognizing one such situation isn’t racist simply because there is a race element native to that particular situation. The Republicans failed to come through with the loot and the African Americans switched sides (just as “the sides” themselves might switch when it was politically sound to do so).
That’s essentially my point, Alisa, except for the “rationality” bit. Anyone who looks rationally (and honestly) at the history of the Great Society and its progeny has to acknowledge that it has been an abject failure. Hence my statement: any group which continues to vote Democratic on that basis is doing so wholly emotionally; there is absolutely no “rationality” involved.
Brad – pro Slavery Democrats also used force.
Both to keep people enslaved – and also to drag them back to slavery. The whole point of the Federal “fugitive slave laws” was to violate the law of anti slavery States and to violate the BODIES of black people who had escaped.
Anti slavery Republicans “Progressives”.
Not so simple – what about Salmon P. Chase?
He may have been a Democrat some of the time – but he was also the best known anti slavery politician in the United States (yes Chase was – Lincoln was virtually unknown on slavey matters till 1854 and not exactly clear even after this date). Chase was known as “the slaves lawyer”.
His argument (quite correct) was hat the “institution of slavery” was a series of violations of common and natural law (ALL the Founders would have agreed with that definition – INCLUDING THE SLAVE OWNING FOUNDERS) so only State statutes could “legalize” these crimes (such as false imprisonment – the defining feature of slavery, not being allowed to leave and not come back) in an State – States could not apply their statutes outside the State, and the very nature of the Statutes themselves was highly proglematic as they violated the basic principles of law THE STATE STATUTES WERE THEMSELVES AGGRESSIVE VIOLENCE (or, at least, their enforcement was).
Was Chase a Progressive?
He printed paper money during the Civil War – but, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he ruled it unconsitutional afterwards (he was overtuned in the Second Greenback case – but did not change his opinion).
By the they way let us look at the “conservative” alternative to Lincoln – the Confederacy.
Income tax – the Confederacy was MORE Progressive.
Government economic regulations and nationalization – the Confederacy was VASTLY more Progressive than Lincoln
Rule of law – Lincoln abused it, but it totally BROKE DOWN in every Southern State (almost at once) with the exception of North Carolina (and the Confederate government undermined the courts of North Carolina).
Trade – the Confederate government imposed a cotton trade embargo (yes it ATTACKED THE SOUTH ITSELF – in the hope that a cut off of cotton would make Europe put pressure on the North) and it only allowed general trade via certain ports – which was demented (and made the work of the U.S. Navy a lot less difficult).
Lastly paper money (the thing Lincoln is attacked so much for) – the South did it MORE.
“But it was wartime Paul” – that excuse works for Lincoln also.
Remember – from the start the Confederacy was MORE statist than the Union (in just about everything).
The idea of the “Conservative Confederacy” is a myth – a myth created by two groups of people.
Southerners wishing to claim “the war was not really about slavery – it was about trying to keep the government limited” (total B.S. – but believed by so many libertarians today).
And statists (north and south) who wanted to justify statism by saying “it was the way of Lincoln – against the reactionary South”.
Sometimes someone could be in both groups.
Who wrote the history of the United States that established the myth that Confederacy was conservative?
Woodrow Wilson did.
Wilson was BOTH a passionate racist AND a massive Progressive (this was QUITE NORMAL in his day).
He wanted to downplay the slavery matter in relation to the Civil War – because he hated blacks (so did not want the position of pro black freedom people to get a hearing) and he wanted to play up the “national government versus State Rights” idea of the war because HE FAVOURED NATIONAL GOVERNMENT POWER.
So he wrote an account of these matter than downplayed slavery and played up national government versus State Rights.
And academics followed him (ignoring the sources of people who had actually been active in the politics of the 1860’s) – and most of my own kind (libertarians) follow Woodrow Wilson as well, WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING THEY ARE DOING IT.
I partially disagree Laird. I am sure that you are correct about some of the members of these groups, but I am also sure that others vote rationally, but based on false premises (misinformation etc.). It may sound like nitpicking, but I think the distinction is important from the ‘metacontext’ point of view: the former group are a lost cause, while the latter may still be “converted” given the correct information.
Laird: “Anyone who looks rationally (and honestly) at the history of the Great Society and its progeny has to acknowledge that it has been an abject failure. Hence my statement: any group which continues to vote Democratic on that basis is doing so wholly emotionally; there is absolutely no “rationality” involved.”
It may look that way to you, but there are intelligent people who take a different view. Just go over to the Crooked Timber blog and talk to some of the Socialists there, they are by no means stupid. They would say that such efforts failed because they weren’t taken far enough.
The difference is one of counter-factual theory about how politics and economics works. The common man – black or otherwise – can’t be expected to always come to good conclusions about such questions easily.
So, we can’t write-off support for welfarism as simple emotion.
Current nailed it.
Alisa and Current, socialists may be “intelligent” in some sense, but willfully ignoring many decades of contrary evidence in order to cling to a favorite theory does not constitute “rationality” in my book. Clinging to your childhood “blankie” long after it has completely worn out is the epitome of emotionalism. Don’t confuse sophistry with rationality, unless that sophistry is employed to conceal an entirely different agenda. In that case I will concede intelligence and rationality, but only at the cost of also asserting evil intent.
“willfully ignoring many decades of contrary evidence in order to cling to a favorite theory does not constitute ‘rationality’ in my book.”
Ludvig Von Mises wrote something I think is very relevant here:
“Facts per se can neither prove nor disprove; everything depends upon the significance that can be given to the facts. So long as a theory is not thought out and worked up in an absolutely inadequate manner, then it is not a matter of supreme difficulty to expound it so as to explain the ‘facts’ – even if only superficially and in a way that can by no means satisfy truly intelligent criticism. It is not true, as the naive scientific doctrine of the empirico-realistic school has it, that one can save oneself the trouble of thinking if one will only allow the facts to speak. Facts do not speak; they need to be spoken about by a theory.”
Leftists have plenty of explanations of the failures of the implementations of their ideas. Those may not stand up to close scrutiny. But, an ordinary person cannot spare the time to put them to close scrutiny. It’s not simply a matter of looking at facts, it’s about the general skill of understanding ideas.
That may have been true in 1970; it’s not today. Intellectual laziness is, at best, “pseudo-rationality”; it gets no credit from me. Nor does torturing the evidence until it fits the Procrustean bed of your favorite social theory.
But I’m finished with this discussion. Let’s just agree to disagree and move on.
The party of free stuff:
Laird,
I see your point. I’ll also make this my last post in my conversation with you about this.
I think that part of the problem here is what we mean by “rationality”. You take it to mean rather more than me.
If we’re to take your view that anyone guilty of “intellectual laziness” is irrational then how many people could be considered rational? That could only include people who have the capability and education to think in intellectual ways and are not lazy about it. Intellectual laziness is perhaps a reasonable criticism of some of the intellectual leftists over at Crooked Timber, but I don’t think it is in general.
In my view your asking far too much of ordinary people. Think through your friends, lets say they’re given evidence and theories about some highly-emotive topic, how many of them would you say could assess the rival theories and come to a sensible conclusion? Speaking for my own friends I’d only trust two or three out of ~50. Most of my friends don’t have “intellectual” jobs, if they have university degrees then those degrees (like most modern ones) haven’t taught much about critical thinking or scientific thinking.
Perhaps I choose my friends like Oscar Wilde did. Perhaps your friends would do better, but do you think they’re representative of the electorate in general?
I may be harping on about this a bit, but I think it’s important. In my view one of the most important arguments against the modern welfare state is Jeffrey Friedman’s argument about ignorance. The common voter simply cannot understand it in any overall way, he or she isn’t equipped to understand what are good and bad policies for operating a state of the size and complexity of modern western countries. When the electorate make bad decisions the consequences are not immediately felt, they come much later. That’s one of the most important reasons to support a smaller state – it is understandable and democracy can function more as it was intended to.
Laird, the impetus to do something first is the motive behind a lot of things. Socialists might look at the history of communism, and say, “They couldn’t make it work, so WE’ll look extra special when we make it work for the first time!” They might see it as a challenge, instead of an impassible barrier.
It is the human condition that we are sociable individuals. We now live in a technological society where you can form your own subgroups, such as join an internet discussion group called Samizdata. Whilst I would say i am an individual, I am also sociable. Maybe socialists are born with more need for society than the ability to live alone? What you attribute to ill-will might simply be a different gene combination- and thus a different set of needs, and different ways of interpreting facts.
Political loyalties are not and should not be permanent.
The Republican Party forfeited its claim on black support in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when they acquiesced in the disfranchisement of Southern blacks, and in segregation in the North.
FDR won over blacks with his welfare-state politics. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, the national Democratic party took the lead in attacking white supremacy and segregation.
Alisa: Barry Goldwater, the nearest thing to a pure libertarian to be a major-party Presidential candidate, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This was part conviction, and part political pandering (he knew it would appeal to Southerners who had been reflexive Democrats). Goldwater himself had a record as a moderate civil-rights advocate – he helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard, and his family’s department store desegregated early.
The result was bizarre. The 1964 electoral result was a near perfect inversion of the Republican landslides of 1904, 1920, 1924, 1928, 1952, and 1956. In those years, the only part of the country carried by the Democrat was the “Solid South”. In 1964, Goldwater carried the heart of the Solid South (and his home state of Arizona) and nothing else.
The effect of the civil rights revolution and the “Southern strategy” was not that Republicans drew in white Southerner racists by pandering to their bigotry. Rather, it was that the conflict between their racist tradition and the national Democratic agenda caused conservative white Southerners to end their unnaturally lopsided (80-95%) loyalty to the Democrats. Once free of the old reflex, most younger white Southerners moved to the Republican column.
Current black loyalty to the Democrats is partly the heritage of the “Civil Rights Era”, and partly an artifact of the Voting Rights Act. Under the VRA, districts for the election of state legislators and U.S. Representatives had to be drawn to enable the election of as many black (and later, hispanic) members as possible. This was in response to district maps drawn to prevent the election of any black members.
The result was that the next generation of black politicians were nearly all from these black-controlled and overwhelmingly Democrat districts. No one wanted to change that, because the blacks elected liked their safe seats, and the Republicans were happy to see a strongly Democrat demographic group pushed off into a few safe Democrat districts. Thus all the black politicians were Democrats. There was no Republican organizing or serious campaigning in black areas for a generation.
There have been occasional mavericks, but it’s hard to buck a widespread and ingrained habit.
What can I say – nailed it again. I’ll shut up now.
Oh no Nuke, I’m totally with Laird on the ill-will point. Nothing to do with sociability either: virtually all socialists I know of (real socialists, not the ignorant and the stupid) are not great guys or gals to share more than a drink with.
You should get out and about more, Alisa! Australia’s very own Bob Hawke was a friendly socialist Prime Minister with a reputation of being a lady killer. In some ways he was not a typical socialist, since he opened up the australian economy to competition, but he was a socialist in bringing in MediBank, and other schemes (the failed Australia Card project).
Maybe all bl-cks come from New York, with their “What have you done for me today?” attitude?
Nuke, I didn’t say that all non-socialist (or partial socialists) are good guys, I said that all real socialists are bad guys.
Rich Rostrom – I do not agree with you about the key importance of the Civil Rights era (see my above comments).
However, I could be wrong – and Glenn Beck tends to agree with you (rather than me), so he working hard on that era (see tonight’s show – and the show over the next few days, part of a long running campaign going up to 8/28).
Mr Henderson – agreed. One vile person (man or women) would not convince me, it is the chant of the crowd that convinces me.
One of MANY such crowds in every major city in the country – demanding free money, free housing, free medical care, free everything.
If ‘Real Socialist’ really means closet communist, then you are right, Alisa. However, Bob Hawke really does think of himself as a real socialist, but he is not a communist. He would believe that the difference is a real difference, even if we think that socialism paves the way for stronger governments.
So he’s mistaken – big deal.