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How the GOP Can Win Black Votes: Sideline the NAACP
A note: I’m using NAACP is a stand-in for itself and every other supposed “civil rights” organization that purports to speak on behalf of the black community, but, in actuality, has cast its own mission and history aside, and is now no more than a fully owned and operated subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.
Let’s be clear here: any GOP plan involving the NAACP, the Urban League, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc., or any affiliated individuals (e.g., pastors, community organizers, etc.) in any outreach effort to the black community is not only a waste of time, but a willfully stupid act of self-sabotage. It earns you no goodwill, and it only arms them with extra credibility for when they inevitably turn around to smear you as a racist.
Like clockwork, Republican presidential nominees troop to deliver speeches to supposed “civil rights” groups that they know will definitely not only endorse their Democrat opponent but also condemn them as racists no matter how much they self-flagellate and abase themselves.
Make no mistake; if the Angel of Death were to appear before the leadership of the NAACP and ask them to choose whose life he should take, between David Duke or Tim Scott, they wouldn’t hesitate in choosing Sen. Scott.
Scott, the first elected black US Senator from the Deep South, Strom Thurmond’s successor, no less, is a much much bigger threat to their hold on power than any white supremacist.
Note that your efforts will initially be greeted with mockery and jeering. Every late-night host, Colbert, Myers, Kimmel, Fallon, Noah, etc., would get a lot of applause out of mocking these attempts at outreach. “Saturday Night Live” would get in on the act as well and then will come the supposed serious news anchors and editorial writers, who would sigh and shake their heads at the futility of it, not to mention journalists making snarky entries on Twitter and Facebook.
The laughter will stop the moment they realize you’re serious and that you’re not letting up. Then the panic will set in.
Which is when you will see a flurry of editorials and opinion pieces demanding a role for the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, Al Sharpton, etc., and insisting that any outreach effort must be “bipartisan” to demonstrate your good faith. You will see arguments saying it is intrinsically “racist” for a Republican to campaign in the black community, and doubly so for doing it without first engaging with left-wing “leaders of color.”
This is around the time when the media’s stable of tame domesticated “Republicans” (e.g., Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Michael Steele, etc.) will be trotted out to denounce the first serious attempt by a Republican in decades to woo black voters as “divisive” and “petty,” and call for “bipartisanship.”
The more shameless among them would claim that the NAACP was utterly fair and non-partisan in the manner in which they treated Bush, McCain, and Romney and echo the charge that speaking to the black electorate without the blessing of the NAACP is racist.
At some point, you would have to release a statement acknowledging and praising the NAACP’s past heroic work on civil rights (this is very necessary) but bluntly state that the organization is now far from the honorable non-partisan organization they were back then, and instead are now nothing more than wholly owned and operated subsidiaries of the Democratic National Committee, and the Trump Campaign (and GOP) rejects the position that it needs their permission to speak to African Americans.
This, of course, will also be decried as “racist.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Published in Politics
I guess everything’s okay then. Peace.
No, just that you haven’t provided the evidence for the thing you so sanctimoniously preached to the rest of us about. We’re just talking. Don’t dismiss what I have to tell you. Or does that go only one way?
Ed, read the links. It’s your country.
Yes, it’s my country, but it’s your assertion. I did read the links, and I don’t think it comes anywhere close to proof that racism is a meaningful force today. I could do with a little less patronizing BS about listening and not disregarding as if, gee whiz, everyone else has some lock on truth that I just haven’t been listening to all this time – it’s as simple as just looking at this not at all flawed social science and having the scales drop from my eyes and ears. Never mind that I have been listening, and watching, and observing. Often directly. I’ve experienced the same neighborhood(s) over decades and watched terrible changes; while the main difference is superficially racial, the actual differences are legion – and things conservatives have been addressing for decades.
Disparities in income are arguably due at least in part to historical, actual discrimination which, in point of fact, no longer exists. When, for example, liberal academics point to wealth- and behavior-related health outcomes to argue that discrimination still exists, they are putting ideology ahead of empirical fact. Family status and education have a far more direct effect on persons of all races. Ill-conceived welfare policies have limited the quality of life magnitudes more than has the KKK. Urban schools do more to inhibit black careers than any fantasy white supremacist cabals.
There are no restaurants that refuse blacks. No hotels, no employment agencies, no realtors. To believe that that still exists even in some vestigial form is less about the reality of our current society than the white believer’s need to act out some autoerogenous ideological hero drama and/or the black believer to prefer the seeming security of the victim plantation.
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson used to race each other to any city where anyone claiming racism in firing or promotion got into the news because there are so few instances for them to exploit anymore. You don’t see much of that anymore.
The best message for GOP politicians is not to cringe and apologize for something that does not exist and instead ask now that the barrier to opportunity caused by racism has been removed, what do you need to make use of that opportunity? What is holding you back and what can be done? And don’t tell me it’s more of the same. The Great Society built the ghetto and destroyed normalcy for generations of its intended beneficiaries so what should we be doing instead? Schools? Housing? Vigorous self-improvement actions as a pre-condition of social welfare benefits? Investment, hiring stimulus?
Guilt is for narcissists. What are the policies that get us all to move on? That is what the GOP should be saying and thinking about.
There is no policy except getting out of the way and letting people move on in their own messy ways. I know: that doesn’t justify some big authoritarian discrimination regime, nor does it justify massive sucking off the public teat – or downright looting the public cupboards. Nor does it justify a comfortable yet unhealthy identitarianism which encourages people to wallow in victimization instead of beginning the long hard road toward self improvement.
Agreed in principle. However, heavy political lifting is required to actually get out of the way. There is an entire industry you and I are paying for. There are a lot of votes involved. And some very entrenched attitudes.
Slavery persisted until the Civil War even though the vast majority (even most Southern whites) always found it repellent. There was also a large majority that thought chaos would erupt if it were suddenly ended. We are in similar cognitive territory with the welfare plantation. To change the dependency mindset, to change the idea that opposition to counterproductive welfare spending is racism and to redirect resources (no way they suddenly dry up) requires some political will, dialogue and salesmanship.