It's My Party (14 page)

It isn’t as if African-Americans were ungrateful. For decades after the Civil War, they proved overwhelmingly Republican.
In the South, where most black people remained after the war, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other Jim Crow laws limited
the ability of black people to express their allegiance to either party. Yet when they did vote, they voted for the GOP. According
to Seymour Martin Lipset, as late as 1932 black people gave a majority of their votes to the Republican presidential candidate,
Herbert Hoover, even as Hoover was losing to the Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt, in a landslide.

African-Americans first became Democratic for the same reason as did Jews: the Great Depression. The poorest people in the
nation, black people needed help even more badly than did anyone else, and the New Deal gave it to them. By 1936, black people
had changed their allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic Party, giving Franklin Roosevelt nearly 90 percent of their
vote. They have been giving Democrats huge margins ever since.

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.”