Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
We all know about white flight. But Walter Russell Mead has an excellent post about black flight -- and what it says about liberal urban intervention of the past 5 decades:
The Census tells us that in the eyes of those who know best, these well intentioned efforts failed. Instead of heaven, we have hell across America’s inner cities. Blue economic policy has cut the creation of new private sector jobs to a trickle in our great cities, while the high costs of public union urban services (and policies that favor government employees over the citizenry at large) impose crippling taxes and contribute to the ruinously high costs that blight opportunity. All the social welfare bureaucracies, diversity counselors and minority set-asides can’t make up for the colossal failure of blue social policy to create sustainable lower middle class prosperity in our cities.
Most Blacks of course still vote blue at the ballot box, but more and more of them are voting red with their feet.
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Oct '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
Forget the racial aspect entirely. Here in once conservative Colorado, the coasters, east and west, have turned this state into a blue nightmare. When the donkey crap gets up to their knees, the left moves into a clean, conservative place, and then proceed, once again, the let the crap overflow our once pleasant place.
As Maggie Thatcher put it, "Socialism will finally fail when they run out of other peoples money." These people are the bedbugs that are infesting America.
Black America are just the group targeted for exploitation to the electoral benefit of the left. But they are, indeed, an equal opportunity exploiter.
Jan '11
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
Raycon is correct. He could just as easily have used the example of the Philadelphia suburbs, which are being increasingly stained blue by the out-migration of Philly Democrats; or formerly rock-ribbed Republican New England, "re-educated" by Massachusetts Democrats who don't want to face the consequences of their beliefs.
I submit, Mr. McGurn, that this development signifies a failure of the Right, a failure to engage and to fight. Instead of sending political missionaries into our inner cities to speak truth to Democrat power and offer practical ways out to our fellow countrymen trapped there, the Right believes it can get by with wagging a finger and tossing a voucher, safe in the very suburbs that Bobo Democrats are running to.
We lack the moral authority to call them hypocrites. They're just doing what we did, years ago.
So we end up with Allen West and Tim Scott, terrific black conservatives who are elected by white middle-class voters. That's nice, but it has no real political impact.
What we need are Wests and Scotts who will contest the black vote in Detroit and Camden, and who will do so successfully.
Oct '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
When I was a kid, it was called white flight. But even then, it was much less racial than cultural. The natural state of the universe is entropy, and that includes the world of culture and politics. Everything is in a state of constant decay. Without the application of sufficient conservative energy, we get the natural decay into liberal progressivism.
The reason most of the world has always lived with poverty and tyranny is that this is man's natural state. Western Christian-Judaism changed all that. Now we understood that the Creator God is overseeing our lives, and we can apply His energy to our lives. And when we did, we became the Anglo-sphere, culminating in America... if we can keep her.
Feb '11
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
People are generally more thoughtful and rational about their *personal* decision-making than about their political opinions...this is why capitalism works and socialism doesn't.
Feb '11
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
I wonder what percentage of those fleeing are public employees.
Edited on Mar 29, 2011 at 8:31amJan '11
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
More rhetoric. More finger-wagging.
Snarky and ineffectual. Try persuading a black inner-city resident with any of it.
Not likely.
I repeat: this process of black flight from the inner-cities like Detroit, or its predessessor, white flight from the same locales, in which the voting patterns of the migrants do not change, is the central political dilemma of our times.
It is a failure of the Right, the evidence that we are a status-quo, passive, non-dynamic force in politics intent on holding on to what is ours and bitching as it slides away.
If the Democrats - the Democrats, not the "liberal-progressives" or "the Left:" no one gets elected by the "Liberal-Progressive Party" - have suffered catastrophic reverses in the inner-cities, why are those areas still their electoral bailiwick?
Because we stopped competing there. We abandoned the field to them. We did not launch a counter-offensive to retake the cities, that's why. We let the Democrats keep what they had and move against us where we live. Some strategy.
If you want to apply "conservative energy," then you have to learn how to spell it:
F-I-G-H-T
Jun '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
"I submit, Mr. McGurn, that this development signifies a failure of the Right, a failure to engage and to fight. Instead of sending political missionaries into our inner cities to speak truth to Democrat power and offer practical ways out to our fellow countrymen trapped there, the Right believes it can get by with wagging a finger and tossing a voucher, safe in the very suburbs that Bobo Democrats are running to."
Can this be hand delivered to every Republican politician and chiseled in the lobby of the RNC?
I witnessed this failure to fight during the Newark riots as a kid. Over 40 years later you still can't convince former residents to head a few miles down the road to grab dinner or take in a show in a once great city. The fleeing politicians all relax on the docks of their graft-financed shore homes. Part of the problem is that cowardice is often profitable.
Jan '11
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
I come from a neighborhood just outside of Philadelphia. My parents, and the parents of nearly everyone in the neighborhood, all came from either West Philly (the Irish) or South Philly (the Italians).
But what caused that flight was the GI Bill. Almost all of the families would have moved out of the inner city anyway, but they didn't have the means. Once the GI Bill allowed vets to go to college, they weren't tied down to where the factories were. They got a couple bucks in their pocket, so as soon as they could get out, they did.
I suspect blacks were always as eager to get out as whites were after WWII. So why, all of a sudden, do we see blacks moving away from the inner cities now? What enabled them to do it? The GI Bill enabled the white flight. What is enabling this flight?
Jobs, obviously. The stranglehold that Democrats had on the inner city was based on their ability to provide jobs. Now that they can't offer jobs, there's no motive to swallow their extortion.
Oct '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
I think Freesmith is nailing it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to not contest the urban,black vote and then say that there's no point in trying because they just vote Democrat. This is also conceding the argument to the Left that blacks are victims and that only govt intervention is going to help them.
Blacks are also conservative when it comes to athletics. Their success in sports is often criticized as an insignificant, uninspiring exception but I think it's opening to make a persuasive argument for conservative principles. The only thing that counts in sports is your performance and nobody cares where you came from or how hard your childhood was. Competition produces talent and we see athletes are continuously pushing the limits of what can be accomplished. All we have to do is demonstrate that what blacks know to be true in sports applies to the rest of life. If you substitute all the athletic references with education, jobs, etc. you basically have a conservative message.
Aug '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
I see this as a good illustration of why the libertarians are wrong about immigration given that we're pretty committed to a minor detail of our society called "democracy." This would be different if we had Tiebout competition between benevolent autocracies but I don't see Arizona and Texas turning into Hong Kong, Singapore, and UAE anytime soon.
People may vote with their feet to go to dynamic regions but they aren't very good at understanding why those regions are dynamic. Rather they seem to think "I really like how my new home has low crime, low cost of living, and a robust labor market, but it would make it even better if we also had more litigation, regulation, and patronage to make it more fair and equitable, like where I just moved from."
Edited on Mar 29, 2011 at 10:18amJul '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
Also known as the California Effect or Californication.
What is so infuriating is the total inability to learn from their mistakes. Insanity? ABSOLUTLY!
Jan '11
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
America, JayDee_007, was built by people who were running away from their problems.
The difference is that when they came here they were taught by the dominant culture the lessons they needed to learn. They were taught through example, school and benign neglect.
Those who didn't want to learn settled into insular communities, outside the mainstream of American life. Nobody cared. Those who learned the new ethos prospered and set up power centers that were virtually autonomous from the older elite.
Centralization has ended that. We now have a single, self-selecting, dominant elite, one which is unique in human history.
Our elite is at odds with its own patrimony. Other elites have looked down on society's lower classes, but none has ever disdained its own past.
Until ours every other culture has honored "the graves of its fathers and the temples of its gods."
We conservatives are not immune to the effects of this societal self-loathing; even if we reject it, we are unmanned by it.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst of full of passionate intensity."
That's why we wag our fingers and whine, when we should fight.
Jun '10
Re: Blacks Vote Blue, but Fleeing to Red
Freesmith: ...
Our elite is at odds with its own patrimony. Other elites have looked down on society's lower classes, but none has ever disdained its own past.
...
Exactly so.