Free Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes by David Horowitz Page A

demagogues in the Congressional Black Caucus? What if Republicans were no longer available to function as racial bogey-men? What if African-Americans were to see that Republican policies like educational choice and Republican values like personal responsibility might work to the benefit of their communities? What if they were no longer to vote 90 percent Democratic? What if they were to free themselves from the chains of a one-party system that feeds them tokens and shamelessly exploits their moral capital for its own agendas?
    These are the real stakes that keep the liberal melodrama alive, and that prevent a taken-for-granted community from fully entering the American polity and exercising its rightful power.

 
6

Democrats and Blacks
     
    W HAT IF 90 PERCENT of the white electorate had turned out in the last election to vote for Republican candidates in virtually every electoral district across the country?
    What if Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott had spent the weeks before the 1998 election visiting all-white churches and making not so covert appeals to the congregations' alleged racial interest in expanding the Republican majority, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did for the Democrats?
    What if Senator Carol Moseley-Braun had been defeated because 93 percent of whites voted against her (instead of 93 percent of blacks voting for her as they did)?
    What if a Republican representing a white suburban district had received 94 percent of the vote against his opponent the way Charles Rangel actually did in his Harlem district? (This, mind you, was only 1 percent less than the widow of a Tennessee candidate, murdered by his opponent, received in defeating her husband's killer.)
    What if Colin Powell was President and Tom Wolfe had written a piece like Toni Morrison's fatuous New Yorker article, hailing him as the first white African-American president because he did not come from a dysfunctional family, spoke the King's English, played the violin, and favored cuisine like quiche lorraine?
    The morning after the election I received the following phone message from a member of my family who is black: "Well, I just had to call to chuckle over the election results. Black people finally got heard. I guess O. J. and Bill Clinton do have something in common." (Well, she got that last point right, though hardly in the way she probably meant it.) I decided not to respond in kind. But suppose the circumstances had been reversed, and the Democrats had lost big time, and I had called my black relative and said: "I just had to chuckle because white people were finally heard."
    Of course, the double standard by which we have come to judge the behaviors of white and black Americans has gone so far that a significant portion of the public has been persuaded that the lockstep political choices of the African-American community are quite natural and are motivated by a justifiable racial solidarity — in other words, that they have nothing remotely in common with the counter-examples I have proposed, which would rightly be regarded as expressions of deplorable racial prejudice.
    But are these racial reflexes of the African-American community so obviously appropriate to African-American interests, as liberals claim? Larry Elder, a black libertarian talk-show host in Los Angeles thinks they are not. Recently, Elder published the following list of "15 Reasons Why Blacks Shouldn't Support Clinton":
Tax hikes. During the Reagan years black teenage and adult unemployment fell dramatically because lower taxes stimulated business formation and expansion, creating employment opportunities for unskilled labor.
Affirmative action. This promotes the fallacious idea of the "Big Bang Theory of the Black Middle Class" — that the black middle class owes its existence and success to government preferences rather than its own achievement. In fact, the growth of the black middle class was more rapid before affirmative action programs were put in place.
Minimum wage