Florda_mike said:
Fabulous summary Bubba and much you describe was in movie indeed!
I'm learning the last you mention of democrat(at least their politicians!?) going republican is fallacy in our books born from democrats desiring to separate themselves from being pro slavery and they've done very well separating and republicans have enabled them to do it
Bubba I look at what democrats have done to get black vote with welfare regs and other entitlements and it just doesn't seem much different than slavery to me as they attempt to make a person unable to sustain themselves
Republicans are to blame for not directly addressing problems in black community and seemingly writing off black vote. That's just as guilty if true as the well being of blacks have suffered and there needs to be a solution no matter who's to blame
Just solve the problem and address it honestly and openly is all I want
Thanks again
Ok, let me come back to this. First off, I am not a Democrat nor a Republican. There are platform plans in each party that I don't like, and I don't want to have to defend either party across the board. I didn't vote for Hillary and didn't vote for Trump. Just want to put all that out there so you have a clearer sense of where I'm coming from.
All this said, neither party is a monolith. You'll find diversity of opinion in both on most issues (abortion is an exception among Democrats). This diversity is true of welfare as well.
I can show you speeches by Robert Kennedy from 1967 and 1968 in which he was calling for welfare reform because of concerns about creating dependency. And of course it was under a Democratic president (Clinton) that we passed significant welfare reform -- with the help of Republicans in Congress who were essential to making it happen. Gore supported Clinton on this and actually held his feet to the fire when he wavered.
So it's not like Democrats all march in lockstep on this issue. (Nor, of course, do all Republicans.)
It has become a popular talking point among Republicans that Democrats want to make black people dependent on them to create a new plantation mentality. It is a popular talking point among Democrats that Republicans hate the poor.
Both of these have it wrong, in my opinion.
Democrats pushed these programs because they used to be the party of the poor and working class, and the programs arose out of a genuine desire to help the poor and help people temporarily get through tough times (even before there were limits, most people didn't stay on welfare more than a year).
By coincidence, not long after many of these programs came on line, a crisis hit the inner cities where so many black people lived. Factories and employers started moving out of the city and into the suburbs. Jobs disappeared in the inner city, and many residents lacked the means to get to where the jobs had gone. So unemployment went up and poverty went up. That allowed drugs and crime to move in.
Rural poverty in the South and Appalachia was always awful. In the 1960s it really was at a Third World level in some places. There is a famous story of a doctor who was sent to Mississippi to operate one of the first federally funded health clinics in a rural area. He'd see patients who didn't have access to healthcare and prescribe medicines for them that were covered under welfare reimbursements from the feds. He sometimes would write prescriptions for milk and fresh vegetables and fruit that poor black people would take to the grocery store. After a while, some bureaucrat from DC called to tell him that he wasn't supposed to write prescriptions for anything but medicine. The doctor shot back: "Last time I checked, the medical treatment for malnutrition was food." He didn't have any more problem after that. But this illuminates the kind of poverty that many people were living in when these programs began.
Ironically, or perhaps not, in recent years we have seen the same pattern repeat itself among white people in rural areas, coal country and the Rust Belt. Jobs moved out, just as they did 50 years earlier in the inner city. Unemployment shot up. Drugs and crime moved in. Our society's response to the problems of the inner cities back then was to lock up black people, which meant that many of them couldn't get jobs or lead productive lives when they got out. We seem to have a more mature response now with the opioid epidemic about treatment and rehab over prison. (And yet we also have Jeff Sessions wanting to go back to the failed system of mass incarceration, which did as much to destroy poor families as the drugs and crime did.)
All programs, whether they involve defense spending or welfare, have a way of growing way beyond their originally planned limits and becoming entrenched and difficult to change. People who champion these programs resist efforts to reform them because they fear the real intent is to destroy the program, and because they have become invested in their continuation.
There are some Republicans who genuinely want to destroy welfare programs (I believe Paul Ryan is among them; anybody who reveres Ayn Rand after they become a mature adult cannot claim to be a serious Christian, much less a serious Catholic, but I digress.) There are many more Republicans who want to modify or reform these programs rather than abolish them. Defenders of these programs (mostly Democrats) often fail to make distinctions between those who want to kill the programs and those who want to reform them. They just brand them all as haters of the poor.
The script gets flipped, by the way, on defense issues. If you're a Democrat who wants to reform defense spending and eliminate rampant waste and fraud, or maybe revisit the actual need for a certain weapons system, or maybe just hate the idea of $400 toilet seats on airplanes, Republicans will brand you as failing to support the military and "weak on defense."
Black people overwhelmingly vote Democratic because they believe that Democrats support the policies and programs they most care about. It's not just welfare by a long shot. It's also affirmative action. It's ballot access for black voters. It's criminal justice reform. It's a commitment to civil rights enforcement.
It's true that the Democrats often have taken black votes for granted (Hillary sure did, and they didn't turn out for her in some key places as they had done for Obama). A lot of black voters resent being taken for granted.
A lot of Republicans would genuinely like to have more black votes. They don't think of themselves as racist and they don't want to be seen as racist. But you look at a lot of issues that black voters care about, and the Republican Party and Republican candidates aren't with them. What's there to bring them over to the Republican side?
This doesn't mean the Republicans are racists, not by a long shot. But as an example of how lines get blurred, look at the issue of ballot access (Democrats will call it voter suppression). In state after state, Republicans didn't just pass voter ID laws; they cut back early voting. This made no sense if what you cared about was ballot integrity, since you still had to show an ID if you voted early. But it made a world of sense if you wanted to reduce black turnout, because the legislators knew that a disproportionate number of black voters use early voting (while a disproportionate number of white voters use absentee ballots). So when Republicans cut back early voting to reduce black turnout, was that racism? Or just an attempt to get a political advantage? The Republicans would say it was just politics. But in the end, does the distinction actually matter? Either way, it's not going to help bring black people over to the Republican side.
Most of the divisions between the two parties historically have been on economic issues. The Democrats since FDR were the party of the working people and the poor. The Republicans were the party of rich and big business. Between the Depression and the 1970s, when a much smaller percentage of black people had opportunities to rise into the upper middle and upper classes, it was natural that they would identify with Democrats on economic issues alone. Some of those same divisions still account for voter choices today, although the Dems are not the working-class party they used to be, partly because of the decline of unions).
The Republicans were never a populist party. Reagan changed that to some extent but not fully. They still nominated traditional GOP bluebloods like the Bushes and Mitt Romney.
Trump comes along with a very appealing populist message. He's actually trying to appeal to working-class people on the grounds that the elites in both parties had forgotten about them. He promised the coal miners that their jobs were coming back (which was bull****) and promised manufacturing workers that all the plant jobs were coming back (which was also bull****). And he had a point when he asked black voters what they had to lose, since so many still lived in segregated neighborhoods that lacked jobs and good schools. That's something traditional Republicans (not even Reagan) would have done.
Trump is a salesman and a flim-flammer. If he could actually deliver on his sales promises, he might succeed in building a populist coalition that included lots more black voters. I get the appeal. But Trump is a con man.
Even so, con men often do well. Trump would do better if he didn't turn around so often and shoot himself in the foot with black voters by tweeting that black critics of him have low IQs, or saying that there were good people among white nationalist groups, or by flirting with clear racists like David Duke.
And black voters also get repelled by people like Jeff Sessions, who is what the Klan looks like when it goes to law school and becomes a respectable pillar of the Methodist Church. They'd be more willing to step over toward the Republican side if it weren't for people like Roy Moore (it was the black vote that beat him in Alabama).
And they'd be more willing to step over to the Republican side if they thought the Republicans supported working people and the poor on economic issues. Republicans in a lot of states are following the Kansas and Oklahoma model: Cut taxes in ways that mostly benefit the wealthier, and then cut services to the bone to help offset the loss of tax revenue. That approach led to a crisis in Kansas, and in Oklahoma it means they can't afford to keep the schools open for five days a week. Black voters still associate Republicans with trickle down economics, and they've seen over the course of almost 40 years that very little actually trickles down to them, certainly not enough to create Reagan's promised rising tide that lifts all boats. Real wages have been pretty stagnant since that time, and income inequality has grown.
To a lot of black voters, it looks like the Republicans have been the party of empty promises who are still firmly on the side of the wealthy elites and big business and who don't give a **** about them. I would argue that this has been a bigger reason than welfare policy for why they have stayed mostly in the Democratic camp.
Trump had a real chance to make some inroads if he had been serious about the concerns of black voters. But he seems to have pretty well convinced them that he's not.
You're right that someone needs to address the problems of black people who grow up in poor inner-city neighborhoods like Southside Chicago or West Baltimore or parts of Miami or the 5th Ward in Houston. Most of the problems, from crime to low school achievement, have roots in entrenched poverty and lack of opportunity. Take kids out of those neighborhoods and put them in places where they are surrounded by the things all kids need -- a critical mass of caring adults, safe places, housing stability where they're not having to move to another place every few months, decent nutrition and decent access to healthcare, decent education and opportunities to serve others -- and they thrive. All the attainment gaps between them and white suburban kids disappear. There are some real successes here like the Harlem Children's Zone or the Parramore neighborhood in Orlando and some of the charter schools where kids actually live during the week.
And the same is true with white kids who are growing up in the Rust Belt and rural areas where the opioid epidemic is rampant. They're falling through the cracks right now at the rate you used to think of with the inner city. Change the situation with the "basic nutrients" that all kids need, and their whole life trajectory changes.
The problem is that these interventions are expensive because they have to be pretty intensive. Money is no guarantee of success; it has to be spent on the right things. Democrats too often defend the expenditures to protect their programs as if money alone were all that is needed. Republicans too often want to cut funds to save money and pretend that money isn't part of the answer (it is). Both parties are part of a US culture that wants to do things on the cheap and claim victory rather than invest the time and money to do the job right.
We know how to do it right, because there are too many efforts like those I described above that are doing it right. But these tend to be smaller and isolated because it would cost so much to take them to scale. It's more about summoning the will than reinventing the wheel. As a country, we just don't really have the will.