Dr. Benjamin Wiker
Post10.12.2020
Why African Americans should be very, very mad at the Democratic Party
Polls show Trump’s support among Black Americans (and Hispanics) is rising. This suggests that black Americans are in fact angry at being coopted for Democrat Party causes, even while they are intimidated into silence by the cancel-culture tactics of the Left.
Several other interesting indicators of anger: Kim Klacik, Candace Owens, Kanye West, Sharika Soal, Joe Collins: a growing list of black, highly visible celebrities and politicians who are fed up with Democrats. Republican congressional candidate Klacik’s viral video speaks for itself. Owen’s book Blackout has been riding the Amazon top 100 while other trendy books on race have come and gone. Soal’s enormous twitter following adores her conservative tweets. And Kanye West’s repeated arguments against abortion and its effects on the black community have been among the most powerful public statements in years.
Black Americans are angry with the Democratic party, but not angry enough. They should be very, very angry. They have good cause to be.
The Racist History of the Democratic Party
From 1830 to 1865, the Democratic Party worked to protect the unconscionable institution of slavery from being abolished. From 1860 to 1960, it worked to preserve the cultural injustices of slavery through the Black Codes, segregation, and discrimination. The famous fight to end segregation and address the economic and cultural damage it caused began in the 1960s with Democrat presidents John Kennedy and LBJ—but it was not a fight of Democrats against Republicans. It was a fight of the new Democrat Party against the old Democrat Party.
The new Democrats did well-intentioned things to redress the injustices of the old Democrats. But they very soon used the moral capital of the Civil Rights Movement to justify the sexual revolution. The real fight for real civil rights by Black Americans was thereby tarnished by becoming a useful tool for the pseudo-rights of the Left’s scheme of sexual liberation, which has become so radical that it goes beyond the liberation from morality to the liberation from biology.
Nothing captures this misuse of black Americans’ struggles more clearly than the BLM black fist logo embedded in the rainbow of the LGBTQ movement. Nothing should be more infuriating to black Americans of the Civil Rights era—who patiently endured injustices, who were sprayed with fire hoses while peacefully protesting, who were arrested for merely wanting a drink from a common water fountain—than to have the nobility of this cause used as currency to purchase the alleged “civil right” of drag queens to twerk in front of their children at the local library, or to allow public elementary schools to teach their seven-year-olds that they can choose their own gender, or to affirm that young men can enter the showers of young women in their high schools if they felt like being a woman that day.
This misuse by Progressive Democrats has continued for too long. As noted by Pew, black Americans are predictably far more moderate than the white liberal leftists running the Party. They have loyally voted for Democrats even while Democrats have done everything they can to undermine their actual moral and religious convictions. But that hold is slipping.
The final thing that Black Americans should be very, very angry with the Democrat Party about is the attempt to absorb the hard-won moral capital of the Civil Rights Movement into the white liberal intellectual elite’s endless fascination with Marxism and its offshoots. This causes the signature Marxist distortion of the actual complexity of political life into easily spouted, absolute, and irreconcilable antagonisms. Marx’s main economic antagonism, between the irredeemable capitalists and the entirely innocent proletariat, has been transformed into the irreconcilable antagonism of race: white vs black. As in classical Marxism, in this new Marxism the oppressors—in this case, whites—are all guilty by definition as a class and must be destroyed.
That all might help explain why it is that the Democrats, especially those governing our major cities, have done so little for black communities. They want them to be dependent so they can continue to be useful. They need their hard-won moral capital to reinvigorate their Marxism—and that means, by the way, that black Americans must not be allowed to rise into the middle class. America has been resistant to both Marxism and Socialism for so long precisely because of its large middle class. But as long as black Americans do not rise into it, the undeniable injustices of slavery and racism can be used to provide moral legitimation for Marxism. If black Americans do rise into the middle class and upper class in increasing numbers, they will cease to be the functional proletariat for WLM, White Liberal Marxists.
If you search for crowd shots of Black Lives Matter, you’ll find vindication of this arrangement. There is always a disproportionate number of young white liberals fresh from elite colleges—so many that one suspects that these WLMs have actually taken BLM over and are running it as an act of noblesse oblige.
All of this doesn’t let the Republicans off the hook or absolve them of moral responsibility, but it does help explain—I believe—why we will see more black Americans who are fed up with the Democrat Party voting for Trump.
Dr. Benjamin Wiker is a professor of Political Science, director of Human Life Studies, and a Senior Fellow at the Veritas Center of Franciscan University.
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