Buyer’s Remorse Among Blacks?

Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower earned a respectable 39 percent of the black vote in 1956. In 1960, Richard Nixon won 32 percent. But in 1964, after opposing the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater garnered a pitiful 6 percent.

Thus commenced the divorce between black voters and the Party of Lincoln, an estrangement that continues to this day.

Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney among black voters by a margin of 93 to 6 percent in 2012, when black voters comprised a larger share of the electorate than under Goldwater. In fairness, black voter turnout swelled during both of Obama’s presidential elections, as people who’d existed on the margins of American society for so long were thrilled to send the first African-American to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yet now, approaching seven years after that frigid, blue-skied, January morning — I still remember the smell of smoke from jubilant cannon fire following Obama’s oath — many black Americans are experiencing buyer’s remorse:

• They see how the president’s eloquence hasn’t translated into effectiveness.
• They see policies holding back the black community rather than enhancing it.
• They’ve seen the disparity between black and white unemployment jump 61 percent since the days of former President George W. Bush.
• They see a Justice Department that has inflamed racial tensions rather than ameliorate them.
• And they see an administration seeking to destroy charter schools in states like Louisiana and reject funding for private schools that offer lifelines of hope for poor and black children. This despite the fact that black parents say they’d prefer a private school over a public school for their children by a margin of 44-35 percent, and 59 percent of black parents support charters, while 30 percent oppose.

We are seeing young black millennials like Demetrius Minor, an Atlanta minister, radio host and author who grew up immersed in liberal political orthodoxies only to realize he wanted to spend his life preaching a message of freedom and self-sufficiency.

Related: Black Pastor Blasts Obama on Abortion

Or Markeece Young, a 19-year-old activist who says he became Republican because of our first black president. He saw that ideas trump identity. Young faces the wrath of a derisive Twitterverse that labels him an “Uncle Tom” and worse, a traitor for daring to embrace Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition to judge a man by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.

If Republicans are perceptive and innovative, they will seize a moment ripe for change. One GOP presidential candidate with a clear-eyed idea toward this end is Rick Perry.

Leaving aside his third-tier polling status, 2012 stumbles, and more recent foot-in-mouth moments, Perry recently gave a groundbreaking speech urging his fellow Republicans to begin a healthy conversation about race instead of continuing the legacy of dysfunction wrought by Goldwater. An ambitious Arizonan who claimed the mantle of “conservative conscience,” Goldwater was in many ways a powerful visionary who clearly saw the dangers of expansive government.

Yet in a case of classic blind spot, Goldwater may have rejected the Civil Rights Act from such a highly libertarian vantage point that we could pretend to live in a colorblind society. This is an admirable end, though he thought we were at Point B when we hadn’t even passed Point A. Policies of slavery and Jim Crow told us that we weren’t. And black voters knew this, so they began to associate Republicans with an ideology of oppression when the libertarian mantra of “free minds and free markets” is precisely the opposite.

It is liberal ideology that seeks to impose rules on employers that destroy jobs held by our most vulnerable.

It is liberal ideology that seeks to impose rules on employers that destroy jobs held by our most vulnerable. Liberals champion minimum-wage laws, which are correlated with job losses among the young and the non-white. They promote occupational-licensing and prevailing-wage regulations that protect incumbent (and more likely white-owned) businesses from entrepreneurial, black-owned upstarts.

They seek to destroy educational innovation, choosing to side with powerful teachers’ unions rather than students of color. As Perry said, liberals strong-arm zoning regulations that price out minority residents. It is Democrats like Hillary Clinton that bash businessmen and believe they can forcibly raise wages by punishing employers. The list stretches on.

In 2016, conservatives can show they are the ones who champion a better vision for improving the lives of black Americans. They can start chipping away at that yawning cavernous voting gap between the two parties among black voters. A first step, as Perry extolled, is to recognize historical mistakes, to address them head on and repudiate them. This takes a humility and self-awareness that most conservative leaders currently lack. But given our Founders’ understanding that we have the power to move toward a more perfect union, it is entirely within their reach.

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