Voting and the Fire Next Time
Why is it that liberals like my correspondent are so out of touch with blacks?
Last Monday a federal district judge in North Carolina upheld changes in the state’s election laws, including voter identification provisions, that were opposed by civil rights activists. The changes followed the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision that struck down a restriction in the 1965 Voting Rights Act which imposed on nine states (mostly in the South) a requirement that any proposed changes in voting practices be “pre-cleared” by the Justice Department to determine whether they had any discriminatory purpose or effect. Predictably, the Left is having a cow, and crying “racism.”
The new provisions in North Carolina include such draconian, and obviously racist, requirements as having a photo ID and registering before Election Day. They also reduced the number of days before an election during which people could vote, and ended the practice of allowing people to register before they turned 18. The governor compared the voter ID requirements to those necessary for “common practices like boarding an airplane and purchasing Sudafed.”
A correspondent who wrote to me a while ago, in response to some observations on why blacks don’t vote Republican, claimed that “The GOP of 1964 is not perceived as the GOP of today. Blacks today perhaps draw cynical conclusions from current GOP efforts to cut back on Black voting rights.”
His term “blacks today” presumably means at least a majority of blacks. But it is not at all clear that a majority of blacks “draw cynical conclusions from current GOP efforts to” introduce voter ID laws, which he characterizes as attempts to “cut back on Black voting rights.” In fact, just the opposite appears to be the case.
The Roper Center at Cornell University reports that a 2013 poll “found non-whites as supportive of voter ID laws as whites ….” The report continues, “…but a 2015 CBS News poll found a difference in attitudes about voter ID laws; 83% of whites and 66 percent of blacks supported them.” Nevertheless, only a minority of blacks opposed voter ID laws, which is contrary to our correspondent’s assertion.
The Roper report continues: “When a 2012 CBS News/NYT poll presented respondents with arguments for and against voter ID that mentioned the possibility of minority vote suppression, 53 percent of blacks supported such laws and 45 percent opposed….”
We don’t know how the question was worded, but according to Roper, even though the possibility of minority vote suppression was mentioned as a reason for voter ID laws, a majority of blacks still supported them.
And also, according to Roper, “A July 2015 CBS News/NYT poll found that 46 percent of blacks, but only 20 percent of whites, thought shortening voting hours and reducing time for absentee and early voting was an attempt to make it harder for minorities to vote.” That’s quite a difference between whites and blacks. But even so, a majority of blacks thought shortening voting hours and reducing time for absentee and early voting was not an attempt to make it harder for minorities to vote.
The statistics raise several questions. First, why is it that liberals like my correspondent (a highly educated, serious, and thoughtful individual of exceptionally generous spirit—and a valued friend) are so out of touch with blacks? My correspondent assumes that blacks are solidly opposed to voter ID laws, which clearly they are not.
Second, what is it that blacks do want from the political system? A majority, it seems from the polls cited above, do not pine for making the process “fairer”—i.e., making it easier to vote. Is what they want a different result from the voting—i.e., different policies promoted by the people they vote for?
That would make sense, but there’s no evidence for it. We’ve had fifty years of voting since the enactment of the various civil rights laws of the 1960s. Yet for fifty years blacks have voted overwhelmingly, at the local, state, and federal levels, for Democrats—and never more so than for Barack Obama: 99 percent in 2008, 95 percent in 2012.
And yet, those Democrats, year after year, decade after decade, produce policies that keep blacks down on the farm, down on the liberal plantation, the liberals’ vote-harvesting plantation, freeing them only once a year: to go to the polls and vote. Or if you find that too harsh, think of it this way: The Democrats not only have not promoted policies that would deliver blacks from the bondage of their previous condition of servitude; the policies they have enacted have improved the condition of blacks relative to that of whites not at all. See the piece that provoked my correspondent’s remarks, here.
Fifty years after the civil rights acts, blacks are disproportionately poor, disproportionately uneducated, disproportionately unwed, and disproportionately illegitimate. Disproportionately underlings. Fifty years after the civil rights acts!
Would blacks be better off today if they couldn’t vote—if they hadn’t been able to vote for the last fifty years? That would presumably have resulted in more Republicans being elected; and that would presumably have resulted in a stronger tendency toward free market approaches to public policy questions, as well as a more vigorous defense of traditional morality. What do Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Atlanta have in common? They’re all disaster areas; they’re all cities run by liberal Democrats; and those liberal Democrats would not have been elected without the black vote. And neither would Barack Obama, who has been the worst president for blacks since the racist Woodrow Wilson. QED. And so, for all their voting, blacks have made no progress at all.
Where is the fault for that lack of blacks’ progress? Not in their stars, of course, but maybe also not in an easily criticized, perhaps thoughtless, perhaps selfish, anti-black attitude among non-blacks that doesn’t quite amount to racism.