CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1yr ago
The online rights generally thinks it's futile to court black voters to the GOP, as evidenced by this piece.
I'm very curious if taking account of regional differences might be crucial on this topic, and this is something I've been wondering about more broadly.
Some half-remembered data that I've seen recently but mostly won't double check now:
Blacks in the South have the highest rates of black homeownership in the country - here's the claim
I don't have the chart handy, but I saw a graph recently that showed that blacks in the New South (Georgia especially) are more optimistic that blacks in other parts of the country.
Blacks in the South are also, I'm almost positive, the most religious (just like everyone else in the South).
56% of American blacks live in the South, and this means the South is much blacker than the rest of the country - Georgia is 33% black compared to California's 5%, for example.
By the numbers, though, the biggest concentrated mass of black voters are in Northern or Rust Belt Cities - per this, the top 5 locations for concentrations of blacks are New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia.
The worst educational outcome gaps between black and white in the country are in intensely liberal, well-credentialed white coastal and college towns.
The share of the black population with college degrees varies quite intensely by city , with the New South doing well and the rust belt often doing pretty poorly.
There are a lot of blacks in the South who are rural, which isn't the case almost anywhere else in the country - and rural black poverty looks very different than concentrated northern urban ghetto black poverty (I saw an observation recently that in the South, as you go more rural, white homicide rates rise and black homicides rates fall until they nearly equalize).
There has been a century long effort by radicals in northern urban cities to use blacks and black failure as a vanguard for political revolution, and that has entailed constant attempts at radicalizing the black underclass, which has almost certainly left a cultural mark on those communities; the South has historically been much more aggressively antagonistic to immigration (and thus the radical traditions and practices that certain immigrants brought with them), and labor unions, and industrial cities before the 1950s, and agitation more generally (and has been much more traditionally Christian), so this cultural and political influence has had much less of an effect on blacks in the South.
Another important group, white Yankees, trace the entirety of their moral worldview and moral history to the fact of blacks being the worlds biggest victims, white Southerners being the worlds biggest monsters, and white Yankees being the saviors of history, and they intensely need social relations to be slotted into that story, resulting in profoundly patronizing and non-functional behavior and excuse making when it comes to black people and black dysfunction, as well as fascinating dumbing down; white people in the South mostly don't do this, and (because there are vastly more black people there) are pretty clear eyed about the fact that plenty of black people can be expected to uphold reasonable standards as citizens and take care of their stuff, and also that black dysfunction is absolute civilizational poison and can not be tolerated (and also, there's no shortage of white trash dysfunction in the South that doesn't look all that different, and that can't be tolerated either).
I could go on with this, because I do find it fascinating, but I'll stop.
The South obviously isn't a utopia, and it has its problems, but (having grown up in the New South and then moved to liberal college towns and Rust Belt cities), the way race relations play out there look pretty different, and that has consequences.
And I don't think it's entirely crazy to imagine a future where Republicans could possibly retool themselves to be more attractive to socially conservative southern blacks, especially men and religious black people. I mean, it would still be an incredible slog, because the parties are still pretty racially coded in the South in a way that doesn't actually have much to do with values or policy, but I can imagine a pathway from here to there.
Now, whether or not Republicans see any point to doing this in Southern states, and whether or not they see it as more useful than getting to terrify all other demographics about black crime by engaging in the right wing version of race baiting, is a different issues. But as internal immigration brings in more northern liberals to the New South, it's possible the current political dividing lines might shift enough that ditching race to focus on uniting all social conservatives in Southern states becomes a reasonable approach. The gulf in values between southern conservative blacks and PMC yankee liberals is really significant, and much bigger than the gulf between southern white conservatives and southern black conservatives, who honestly have quite a lot in common in terms of history and culture and values.
In some ways, all of this reminds me of articles I've read about Hispanics warming up to the Republican party - from what've I've read, Hispanics in Blue states are not responding that well, but outreach to Hispanics in Red States is actually working pretty effectively.
Some alternative arguments:
A lot of the politicians and voters of that era had military service as one of their primary formative experiences. That enculturated them to accept big projects, large hierarchies, central planning, and non-market power in a way that is frankly alien to most Americans today. It's not so much a question of competence as a question of faith in that way of organizing people. Similarly competent people would almost certainly be in business today instead - but post 2008 financial crisis, I suspect that that blithe faith in markets and business no longer a shared, default assumption by smart, competent younger people either (which portends unclear things about the future).
But also, more importantly, their "competence" was in many cases vastly outstripped by their confidence and even hubris, and the resulting disasters are specifically what led to the current lack of faith in government in the first place. If you read, say, "The Best and Brightest" (about technocratic failures and hubris leading to Vietnam) or "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" (about technocratic forced busing in Boston in the 70s), you get a really, really clear snapshot of why American faith in big, invasive, confident government collapsed, and why people turned back to markets instead (Gallup and Pew polls captured this collapse of faith in authorities and institutions quite nicely). All those competent politicians were able to get a bunch of bills passed, true, and roll out a bunch of programs, but that didn't mean they were actually competent in terms of being good governmental leaders and sustaining voter support in what they wanted to do, and several of their big programs were astonishing disasters with consequences that are still with us.
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