By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, October 25, 2019
Representative Elijah Cummings was born before Brown v. Board of Education, an era of de jure segregation in the public
schools. That ended early in his life; he never lived to see the end of de facto segregation, and I do not think
that any of us is likely to. He did live to see a sea change in American
attitudes toward race and the election of a black president. He is the first
black member of the House to lie in state in the rotunda. These represent
momentous changes.
Cummings also lived to see the decline of Baltimore, the
nearly complete abandonment of the Republican party by black voters, and the
nearly complete abandonment of black voters by the Republican party. Cummings
entered the House in 1996, succeeding Kweisi Mfume, who left to lead the NAACP;
Mfume had succeeded Parren Mitchell, Maryland’s first black congressman,
representing Maryland’s first majority-black House district. In that sense,
Cummings’s career might be read as a kind of postscript to the civil-rights
era, one of many and one that Republicans would do well to think on.
It should hardly need repeating in 2019, but the
Republican party is distinct from the conservative movement. The Republican
party — which really was, once, the Party of Lincoln — has a good deal to say
for itself on the question of civil rights. President Dwight Eisenhower was
irritated by Earl Warren’s sweeping decision in Brown and is reported to have said (the quotation is disputed) that
nominating the former Republican governor of California — “that dumb son of a
bitch Earl Warren” — was the worst mistake of his presidency. But Eisenhower,
who had once reveled in the title “supreme commander,” was no presidential
supremacist. “The Supreme Court has spoken, and I am sworn to uphold the
constitutional processes in this country,” he said. “And I will obey.” His
language was tepid, but Eisenhower was a man in full when it came to doing his
duty. In a subsequent standoff with Orval Faubus, the segregationist Democratic
governor of Arkansas, Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to escort black
students into Little Rock Central High School. It is a testament both to
Eisenhower’s personal stature and the complicated facts of race and
partisanship in the South that, in the wake of Brown, Eisenhower did a little bit better in the South than Barry
Goldwater would running against the civil-rights bill in 1964.
(People sometimes forget that Lyndon Johnson won a
majority of southern votes in his contest against Goldwater.)
The tragedy of the Republican party is that it has
followed practically its every achievement in civil rights with a sigh of
relief and an unspoken (sometimes spoken) understanding that this, finally —
from the Civil War to the 13th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1866, of
1957, or of 1964 — disposed of the question of African Americans’ place in
American life, liberating the Republican party to go back to being a
conservative business-interest party, which is what it is in its heart, such as
it is. (And that isn’t so bad.) The insufficiency of that view should be
obvious, even to a politician.
The distinct tragedy of the conservative movement is that
(for reasons both principled and sometimes less than admirable) we often get it
wrong when trying to balance our temperamental resistance to social change per
se (which necessarily will put conservatives on the wrong side of some issues)
with our philosophical dedication to the principles of the American Founding
and the project of working toward making more perfect their imperfect
implementation.
Representative Cummings understood himself as a civil-rights
leader, but the legislation most closely identified with him was mainly
constituent-services stuff for the federal employees in his district, who
represent one of the most powerful forces in U.S. politics. This is not to
disparage Cummings’s record on civil rights; to the contrary, it highlights an
unhappy fact of political life: When it comes to civil rights in 2019, the
Democrats do not have a lot of competition from the other party.
Republicans have not won the majority of African
Americans’ votes in a presidential contest since the election of Herbert Hoover
nor a majority of African Americans’ votes in congressional races since the
1940s. (The drift of southern whites away from the Democratic party and the
exit of African Americans from the GOP both are rooted in the New Deal, though
of course race and other contributors are at play.) But even though they did
not win majorities, Republicans once could achieve significant support among
black voters: Eisenhower won about 40 percent of the black vote in spite of his
frosty welcome of Brown. Politics
always is in flux, and there are no silver bullets. Democrats believe that if
they can put Texas in their column, then Republicans will never win another
presidential election. In reality, Texas once was a solidly Democratic state
while California was a strongly Republican state. Things change. But
Republicans, if only for reasons of narrow self-interest, ought to appreciate
that even a respectable losing margin among black voters would be a game-changer
for them: Democrats could lose a lot of presidential races with two-thirds of
the black vote.
But what might Republicans say to the people of Baltimore
who elected Elijah Cummings to office? That their city is a nest of vermin,
that “no human being would want to live there”? Baltimore is a mess, but human
beings do live there — American human beings, at that. So far, black Americans
have remained largely unmoved by Republican promises of tax cuts and regulatory
reform. Many black families are with the GOP on school choice, but not enough
to pull the “R” lever. And the reason for this ought to be obvious enough:
While African Americans may be with the Republican party on this or that issue,
they do not believe that the Republican party is with them. But it once was.
And it is no great mystery how to change that.
Republicans would like to have more support among black
voters. But they despise the cities where many African Americans live and where
they predominate politically; Republicans have ruled out cuts to the
entitlement programs that disproportionately benefit whites but take a rather
more skeptical view of the means-tested social programs that disproportionately
benefit African Americans; when there are questions of police misbehavior,
Republicans instinctively side with the police; they were hellfire and
brimstone on crack but have taken a gentle turn on opioids, which are abused in
large measure by rural and suburban whites, etc. And what do Republicans now
have to say for themselves?
Well, did you know
that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed on disproportionately strong
Republican support? Or, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done
an amazing job that is being recognized more and more.
Remember
Gettysburg?
Black unemployment did hit a record low in 2019, and that
is to be celebrated. But the steep decline in black unemployment began almost a
decade ago. The prosperity gospel is lousy theology but it is very fine
politics — done right. “Look what the
Mighty Trump hath done for you, poor black folks who aren’t swift enough to
understand your own interests!” is not what “done right” means.
Vacillating between indifference and condescension is not going to get it done.
Maybe Republicans will just keep saying, “What have
Elijah Cummings and his brand of politics ever really done for African
Americans?” That’s a fair question, and a fair line of criticism.
But after the criticism — what?
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