It's My Party

by Peter Robinson

  Yet this still seems odd. Why should African-Americans have provided such consistent support to the Democratic Party over so many decades? Black people are in many ways conservative. They go to church. They favor tough measures against crime. Jews may fear that Republicans are anti-Semites, but do black people have any reason to suppose there are more racists in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party? When it was the Democratic Party that promulgated Jim Crow? I have come across only one explanation for the loyalty of African-Americans to the Democratic Party that makes any sense. African-Americans want big government.

  There are three reasons why they should. The first is obvious. After centuries of slavery and then decades of Jim Crow, black people want the government to be big in order to protect their civil rights. The second reason is that black people are the poorest ethnic group in the nation. Black households are the most likely, in particular, to be headed by single parents, most often mothers—in 1998, 64 percent of African-American children under the age of eighteen were in households headed by single mothers. Black people therefore feel a need for welfare, food stamps, and the whole panoply of public assistance that big government provides. The third reason is that so many African-Americans hold government jobs. While just one in five white Americans with college degrees works for the government, three in five African-Americans with college degrees do so. African-Americans thus feel the same affinity for big government that autoworkers feel for GM and Ford or steelworkers feel for U.S. Steel. Big government sends home the paycheck.

  While the Democratic Party has been busy providing the big government that African-Americans seek, the GOP has scarcely even gone to the effort of making itself look welcoming. In 1896, the black Republican George H. White was elected to the House of Representatives from North Carolina. After White left office in 1901, it was 27 years before the election to the House of the next black Republican, Oscar De Priest of Illinois. After De Priest left Congress in 1935, it was another thirty-two years before the arrival of the next black Republican, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. When Brooke retired in 1979, it was 12 years before the black Republican Gary Franks of Connecticut arrived in the House, to be joined there in 1995 by the black Republican J. C. Watts of Oklahoma, who, since Franks left office in 1996, is the only black Republican member of Congress. One century. A grand total of five black Republicans in Congress. The Democrats had dozens. If you’re an African-American, you don’t need a doctorate in political science to know which party is yours.

  * * *

  As it happens, Justin Adams, a thirty-year-old African-American, is actually studying for a doctorate, although his degree will be granted in political economics, not political science. He is fit, handsome, well-spoken, and obviously intelligent—altogether so impressive that one of the first questions I asked when I got to know him was why he had decided to spend precious years pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford when he could have his pick of lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley. We will come to Justin’s reply in a moment.

  Justin’s mother grew up in the North, his father in the South. Both struggled to get an education. His mother worked in a library, where she read widely, trying to improve her mind. She succeeded, winning the single scholarship that her high school offered to Wayne State University. His father put himself through the University of Minnesota. “The things he went through,” Justin said one evening over dinner. “What things?” I asked. Justin grimaced, preferring not to go into it. “Let’s just say this,” Justin answered. “He essentially worked his ass off and mastered the material, and the professors gave him Cs, because that was the grade to give a black student. It was an impetus. It just made him work harder.”

  Justin’s father works in the aerospace industry in Southern California. During the most important years of Justin’s childhood, Justin’s family lived in Orange County. Now, Orange County is affluent, educated, and new—just forty years ago the county, which has a population of more than 2.5 million, amounted to little more than orange groves and cattle ranches. Orange County is thus about as far as you can get from the prejudices of insular southern towns or the segregated neighborhoods of northern cities—or so I imagined. Justin corrected me. There was so much racism in his Orange County neighborhood, he explained, that his parents never let him or his siblings play in their front yard for fear of exposing them to taunts. Once, playing a prank with some white kids in the neighborhood, Justin’s older brother helped to remove the hubcaps from a car. The owner of the car ignored the white kids, marched to Justin’s house and stood in the driveway, shouting racial slurs.

  Justin was raised a Democrat. “We were black, so we were Democrats,” Justin says. “That’s the way it worked.” When he got to be old enough to think about politics for himself, being a Democrat still made sense. “When I was becoming politically aware,” Justin says, “Reagan was in office. I don’t know. You just didn’t get the sense from Republicans that they cared about minorities.”

  After getting a Stanford master’s degree in political science, Justin decided his knowledge of politics was too abstract. He wanted to see politics in action. So in 1994 he moved to Sacramento, where he held a series of jobs in the state government. First he served as an intern in the governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Even as Justin went to work for the Republican governor, Pete Wilson, he supported Wilson’s opponent in the November election, the Democratic candidate for governor, Kathleen Brown. Then Justin began getting to know the state government a little better. The first shock hit him when he spent a year at the Department of Housing and Community Development. “They made loans to low-income families,” Justin explained. “But they were essentially grants rather than loans, because no one ever spent any time trying to get these people to pay them back. It was outrageous.”

  Next Justin spent a year at Caltrans, the state transportation department. There he discovered another rich picture of Your Tax Dollars At Work. Caltrans had seventeen thousand employees and an annual budget of $6 billion. “It was the bureaucracy of bureaucracies,” Justin said. The department’s employees divided neatly into two categories. The first was comprised of employees who were inert. “There were a whole lot of people you just had to say were dead-wood. They spent a lot of time just playing computer games at their desks.” The second category was comprised of engineers. They spent their days designing highways, bridges, and railroad lines that they intended to build for the people of California at a cost of tens of billions of dollars whether the people of California needed them or not. “It was primarily an engineering culture,” Justin said. “They didn’t want to hear about costs.”

  What he saw of big government made Justin feel uneasy with the party of big government. Two ballot initiatives forced him to act upon his unease, voting with the GOP, then joining it.

  The first was Proposition 187, on the ballot in 1994. Proposition 187, as we have seen, would have denied all but emergency services to illegal immigrants. To his own astonishment, Justin found himself supporting it. “I had a friend [in the governor’s office] who was crunching the numbers,” Justin explained. The cost to California of providing illegal immigrants with schooling, health care, and other services each year, Justin’s friend informed him, was between $3 and $4 billion—almost 10 percent of the general fund. Since his own family had been subjected to prejudice, Justin knew what immigrants were going through. He sympathized with them. He always had. But now that he knew the costs that illegal immigrants were imposing on law-abiding citizens, Justin found himself thinking thoughts that had never before entered his mind. He understood how hard his parents had worked to buy their home and provide for their children. That the state government was taking their money to provide for people who had entered the country in flagrant violation of the law—the very idea was infuriating. “Governor Wilson went out of his way to make it clear that the issue wasn’t immigration per se,” Justin says. “The issue was illegal immigration. How can it be right for people who are here illegally to cost
everybody else billions every year?”

  In 1994, Justin voted for both Proposition 187 and for the Republican Pete Wilson, who had endorsed it.

  Two years later, in 1996, Proposition 209 appeared on the ballot. Proposition 209 called for an end to all affirmative action throughout the state government. Before election day, when the proposition would be voted on, Governor Wilson took matters a step further. Lobbying the regents of the University of California, Wilson proposed abolishing affirmative action throughout the entire UC system. Wilson’s proposal proved inflammatory. Proponents argued that admission into the UC system should be based on academic qualifications alone. Opponents claimed that if Wilson’s proposal was adopted, black and Hispanic enrollment in the UC system would plummet. Justin found himself torn. “Initially I was opposed to ending affirmative action,” he says. But as he thought about it, what kept coming to mind was how hard his parents had worked, making their way into the middle class on their own merits. “Finally I decided that I supported the measure,” Justin said. “Nobody should be guaranteed a spot in a university.”

  The regents adopted Governor Wilson’s proposal, abolishing affirmative action throughout the UC system. * Then the California electorate, including Justin Adams, approved Proposition 209. Both measures were challenged in court. If Justin had had any lingering doubts about opposing affirmative action, the legal challenges, which ultimately failed, dispelled them. “The argument was that the measures discriminated against minorities because they didn’t allow race to be taken into account,” Justin said. “Being color-blind was somehow supposed to be discriminatory. It seemed completely idiotic to me.”

  Propositions 187 and 209 proved polarizing. “You were either for them or against them. I finally decided I was for them,” Justin says. Not long after voting for Proposition 209,

  Justin registered as a Republican.

  * * *

  Justin Adams is of course exceptional—few members of any ethnic group make it into doctoral programs at universities as prominent as Stanford. Yet there are other Justin Adamses. Lots of them. African-Americans are moving into the middle class. Consider a couple of statistics. Forty-two percent of all black people and 75 percent of married black couples own their own homes. Nearly a third live in the suburbs. In 1998 the number of black people who said they were better off at the end of the year than they had been at the beginning exceeded the number of whites who said so, indicating that African-Americans are benefiting from the current expansion—and know it.

  Here I have to take back part of what I said earlier. African-Americans do indeed want big government—African-Americans who still have not made their way into the middle class. But African-Americans who are already in the middle class look on big government with different eyes. They have experienced that most American of phenomena—hard work paying off. They feel a certain security in their position and abilities. Although they of course want the government to protect their civil rights, they know that racism has lost its power to hold African-Americans down. They don’t need public assistance for the obvious reason that they’re doing just fine. Many still work for the government, but a large and growing proportion work in the private sector.

  The Republican Party will probably never hold much appeal for African-Americans outside the middle class. Reform welfare? Abolish affirmative action? No politician I can think of would volunteer to run on that platform in Harlem or Watts. Yet even without trying—and Lord knows it hasn’t tried—the GOP appears to have won a surprising amount of support in the African-American middle class already. “Ordinarily a Republican is doing really well if he gets 10 percent of the black vote,” Jim McLaughlin, president of the polling company Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates told me. “But when you poll middle-class blacks, a lot of the time you’ll see a real jump in the numbers.” No one has performed a reliable nationwide survey of middle-class African-Americans, McLaughlin explained, so the evidence is only anecdotal. But the evidence all points one way: Middle-class African-Americans are more Republican than African-Americans as a whole. Recalling work his firm did for George Allen, the former Republican governor of Virginia, and James Gilmore, the current Republican governor of Virginia, McLaughlin said, “When we polled middle-class blacks, almost 20 percent supported Allen and Gilmore. In some places middle-class blacks voted Republican at almost the same rate as middle-class whites.”

  If for a change the Republican Party were actually to make a concerted effort to appeal to African-Americans, what should it do? Justin Adams provides a clue.

  If his parents imparted one value to their children, Justin told me, it was the importance of education. Justin’s parents went over their homework with Justin, his brother, and his two sisters every night. During the summers, when the neighborhood white children were playing games in the street or spending days at Disneyland, Justin’s parents made their own children continue their studies. “My parents bought a big chalkboard to drill the four of us children over the summer,” Justin says. “It’s still in the house.” His parents so impressed on him the importance of education that Justin feels compelled to get just as much education as his abilities permit. This is why he’s working on his doctorate. The fat jobs in high tech will have to wait.

  Although Justin’s family took matters further than most—Justin’s older brother got an MS in electrical engineering while his younger sister received a doctorate in molecular biology—polls indicate that black people across the country place the same importance on education. Yet a disproportionate number of black children are consigned to the country’s worst public schools. Force people who value education to send their children to bad public schools, and what do you get? Support for vouchers. Almost half of African-Americans support vouchers—one of the highest proportions of any ethnic group.

  How do vouchers work? Each year parents receive a check—that is, a voucher—for roughly the same amount that it costs to educate each of their school-age children in a public school. The parents may spend that money enrolling their children at the school of their choice—a public school, a charter school, a religious school, a technical school, or any other school. Vouchers face bitter opposition from teachers’ unions, which in turn represent an important constituency of the Democratic Party. Indeed, teachers’ unions have fought voucher initiatives so fiercely—when a voucher initiative appeared on the California ballot in 1993, the California Teachers Association spent some $10 million campaigning against it—that voucher programs have been put into effect in only a handful of communities.

  In 1992, during his first campaign for mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, the Republican Bret Schundler went door-to-door in his city, explaining vouchers to parents, many of whom were African-American. He told them that a public school education for each of their children cost $9,000 a year. Then he asked if they believed they could get a better education for their children if they were simply given the money and permitted to spend it on any school they chose. “Not one parent said, ‘I don’t understand,’ ” Schundler has written. “Instead they replied, ‘Thank God.’ ”

  Supporting vouchers would permit the GOP to prosper, gaining support among middle-class African-Americans while helping children who would otherwise attend bad public schools. Yet Republican politicians have tended to shut their eyes, imagine the ferocious, well-funded opposition from teachers’ unions that voucher plans would engender, then surprise themselves with the number of other proposals they can come up with instead. Bret Schundler has found it impossible to get a voucher plan through the New Jersey legislature—a body controlled by Republicans. The only voucher plan a Republican has managed to enact was signed into law last year by Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. According to Bush’s legislation, vouchers will be given to parents whose children attend the state’s worst public schools—but only after the schools have failed to meet certain standards in two out of four years.

  The GOP might never give vouchers the support they deserve. Never underestimate the abil
ity of Republicans to miss an opportunity. On the other hand, who knows? In their heart of hearts, in my experience, a surprising number of Republicans would actually like to do some good.

  THE CATHOLICS

  David Brady was raised in Kankakee, Illinois, one of six children in a Catholic family of Irish, German, and French descent. His father worked at the General Mills factory. His mother sent all the children to parochial schools, and every Sunday she scrubbed them, dressed them in their best clothes, and walked them—the family couldn’t afford a car—to church. Both David’s parents were Democrats. I asked David over lunch if his family took its membership in the Democratic Party seriously. David replied with a story.

  “My mother was one of fourteen children,” David said, “so the kids in our family had a lot of aunts and uncles. But the one we loved best was our uncle Ray. He’d fought in the Second World War, and he’d come home with a lot of loot—a couple of Japanese guns, some Japanese helmets, stuff like that. He’d show that stuff to us kids, and we loved it. Then Uncle Ray did something bad. He voted for Eisenhower. He said he liked Ike as a general. I can remember lying in bed and overhearing the grown-ups arguing about it. For a long time, nobody talked to Uncle Ray—even a kid like me wasn’t allowed to talk to him. It was like he’d been excommunicated. Hell, yes, we took the Democratic Party seriously.”

  * * *

  We are dealing here with white Catholics—that is, Catholics who are neither African-American nor Hispanic. (African-Americans and Hispanics are so distinctive that they have to be dealt with separately, African-Americans above, Hispanics in a later chapter.) The Irish and Germans got here first, beginning to arrive in large numbers in the 1840s. The Irish came to escape the potato famine. The Germans came for a variety of reasons, but their desire to escape being pressed into military service by one or another of the petty German principalities should not be underestimated. Virtually all the Irish were Catholics. Most of them remained in cities as laborers. (Some of the few who became farmers, as it happens, settled near my grandfather, who was a farmer himself. He also operated a water-powered sawmill that, each fall, with the rearranging of some belts and pulleys, became an apple press. Good teetotaling Baptist that he was, my grandfather pretended he didn’t know that when the Irish brought him their apples to press, they intended to use the juice to make hard cider. “What did he say they were going to use it for?” I once asked my mother. She replied, “Gallons and gallons of vinegar.”) Like all urban laborers, the Irish became Democrats. If anything set them apart, it was the aplomb with which they did so, simply transferring the animosity they felt toward the English lords who had oppressed them for centuries in the Old World to the WASP Whigs, and, after the formation of the GOP, WASP Republicans whom they found looking down on them in the New. (David Brady, who thinks of himself as mostly Irish, retains this animosity toward WASPs in a remarkably pure form. If you want to get off to a bad start at a meeting with David, show up dressed like a preppie. You’ll have to endure his gibes about penny loafers and Brooks Brothers clothes before you can get down to business.)