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Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump, New York, Humanix Books, 2020.
Mention the Black Republican vote, and a certain smugness (or despondency) almost always colors the conversation: it never cracked 20%, so goes received opinion; it never will. But one liberal pundit on FoxNews confessed that the African-American outreach of President Trump’s re-election campaign keeps him up at night. Coming Home lays out reasons for liberal concern and conservative hope in sixteen engagingly written and information-packed chapters.
Conservative activists Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, who were at first skeptical of Trump, don’t overstate the increase in Black support for the GOP in general and for Trump in particular. They do, however, show how it put him over the top in 2016 in Pennsylvania, a swing state, garnering 20 electoral votes: 140 thousand Black Keystone Staters gave him his margin of victory. That gets the skeptical reader’s attention.
Blacks may be only 12% of Pennsylvania’s population, but more than 20% of them voted for Trump. That was “not supposed” to happen; he was “not supposed” to be the Republican nominee; once nominated, “not supposed” to win the general election. Should Trump replicate this inroad across America by election day 2020, the authors argue, he’ll win re-election in a landslide. (All things being equal, of course, which COVID-19 ensures are decidedly not). To beat him, Democrats will have to do more than intone, “But that’ll never happen.” Republicans need shave only a few points off the Black voting bloc to reduce the Democrats to minority-party status.
From Reconstruction to the Great Depression, Republicans took the Black vote for granted—the very thing they claim modern Democrats have been guilty of. This is a story too seldom told, and the authors tell it with bracing honesty and compelling illustrations.
More Blacks voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932 than for Franklin Roosevelt (FDR). Reaching out to them during his first term, however, FDR asked them to vote, not for the Democratic Party, but for him—a man who reinforced Woodrow Wilson’s segregationist policies. In so doing, Democrats introduced a seismic shift in political allegiance that has lasted 80 years.
The Grand Old Party (Lincoln was its first presidential candidate) was the party of civil rights; the Democratic Party, by bloody contrast, that of Klan terror, Jim Crow, and eugenics. Republicans have never, of course, been free of America’s dominant racial attitudes. But the authors’ vignettes of Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—all slandered by Democrat propagandists as white supremacists—show how they shunned the bigotry Democrats impute to them.
The shift in Black allegiance from Republican to Democrat was not sudden, and initially not overwhelming. It took a dozen years from 1936 for the shift to congeal. The book’s lively review of history show “what the hell happened,” as Trump might put it, that is, how Republicans dropped the ball.
Mulling over the bill that became the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, Goldwater suffered a crisis of constitutional conscience. Over the opposition of Dixiecrats and other Southern Democrats (like Lyndon Baines Johnson [LBJ], his opponent in the 1964 general election), Goldwater had voted for previous civil rights acts. The one that came up for a vote in 1964, however, was virtually a litmus test, which LBJ passed and Goldwater failed. LBJ predicted that the passage of this bill will “have them [African-Americans] voting Democrat for two hundred years!” (The “great civil rights president” did not refer to them as “African-Americans.”)
Robinson and Eberle review how Goldwater sought advice on the relevant constitutional issues, but do not specify what bothered the Arkansas senator. His first legal consultant was Robert Bork, whose 75-page analysis confirmed Goldwater’s apprehensions; William Rehnquist only reinforced his skepticism.
But Goldwater didn’t tailor his view of the Constitution for the sake of his presidential campaign. At the time, conservatives admired him for his principled stand, but that applause couldn’t save him from electoral defeat at the hands of the foul-mouthed bigot. Democrats made the most of that fateful vote ever since; and then, just as fatefully, Republicans gave up on the Black vote.
The authors might have delved into the issues they merely allude to: the rights of property owners and of states, matters of interest to all conservatives, Robinson and Eberle’s presumptive main audience. After over a half-century, however, there’s no need for circumspection. It’s not enough to assert, as the authors do, that “there was a higher law than the Constitution, and discrimination, hatred, mistreatment, and segregation violated that higher law.” That’s how progressives, who regard the Constitution as a “living document,” argue. If the authors think Goldwater and his advisers were wrong to conclude that the CRA of 1964 jeopardized those rights, they should have argued for that position explicitly; instead they left this reader guessing. If, on the other hand, they prefer loose to strict construction of the Constitution, they should have declared for that preference. Conservatives can review the historical record and then judge whether Goldwater’s fears have been borne out.
The Left and their media advocates immediately consigned Republicans to damnation, to the benefit of Democrats (including elected Klansmen among them). That’s why Robinson and Eberle date the beginning of advocacy journalism to 1964. Ever since then, the message to Black Americans has been: Republicans are racists; they want to “put y’all back in chains” (in Joe Biden’s slanderous pandering). Overturning that narrative has been the perennial burden of Republicans seeking elected office.
But Black Americans have been taking a “second look” at the Republican Party. They’ve been asking (a) whether Democrats are taking their vote for granted and (b) whether Republican values align more with their own. Among those values, the authors highlight four: (1) life, (2) education, (3) jobs, and (4) security. Robinson and Eberle outline a strategy for frontally challenging Democrats on each point. This entails
(1) exposing the targeting of Black babies for abortion by Planned Parenthood;
(2) liberating Black youth from the progressive clutches of the United Federation of Teachers (another big Democrat donor) by promoting school choice;
(3) creating business opportunities (e.g., Enterprise Zones) for Black entrepreneurs, while exposing the “Green New Deal” as a regulatory threat to everyone’s cost of living, but especially that of Black families; and
(4) supporting drastic reduction of the competition African-American workers face from low-skilled immigrants, legal and illegal alike.
These are live issues for all Americans, of course, but there are Black dimensions to each, and the authors treat them in depth. The GOP of today—Trump’s Republican Party—has made these concerns organic to their political outreach. Now underway, this strategy should help reverse the effects of decades of Republican benign neglect.
Democrats offer no solutions to the problems they create and exacerbate: the dissolution of the Black family coupled with disproportionate termination of Black pregnancies; the slide of Democrat-governed cities into dystopias of crime and squalor; competition for jobs by low-skilled immigrants.
Nor do Democrats want them solved: just as modern medicine’s business model is to make you dependent on drugs and machines, so the Democratic Party’s is predicated on the persistence of Black dependency on government. To end the latter would cut off the income stream to which dispensers of taxpayer largesse have become accustomed. (They are also rather attached to their own power.) Young conservatives like Candace Owens and movements like Blexit (Black exit from the Democratic Party) are catalyzing this process. They’re creating new political relationships.
Unlike the other party’s prominent mouthpieces, Trump never adjusts his dialect to his audience. In 2016, candidate Trump rhetorically asked African-Americans: “What the hell do you have to lose?” Now he can rattle off a half-dozen things they might lose if he’s not re-elected: historically low Black unemployment and poverty rates; defunding Planned Parenthood; the First Step Act; greater border security; support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to name a few. As though channeling Yogi Berra, Trump says he’s kept not only all his promises, but even more promises than he made.
The authors note that with three years of Trump’s achievements to evaluate, Black Americans are taking the measure of a man toward whom, not too many years ago, they were favorably disposed. (The Apprentice had a large Black audience.) President Donald Trump is not the orange boogey man. He’s not that to Kanye West, Jim Brown, or Alice Johnson. Twenty years ago, well-known Black conservatives could be listed on an index card; Robinson and Eberle needed eight pages to update that roster.
They wrote their book to reinforce and extend the realignment inaugurated in 2016. It offers a defense of the message of realignment and ideas about how to propagate it. Getting it out isn’t easy: ideologically, the mainstream media are nearly homogeneous; among them Trump has more enemies than friends. (For example, only one percent of the Fox News Channel’s audience is Black.) All conservatives should arm themselves with this book to help dislodge the “Republicans are racist” crud that has marred the political landscape over the last fifty years.