Conned Again?

By Patrick Hall

I would give anything to be completely wrong in the upcoming Midterms about blacks voting overwhelmingly for the Democrat nominee. I hope, that the black community will come to its senses, and cease voting in-mass for Democratic candidates, despite, since 1970, the Party has done more for its Black Democrat Political class, that is, people like Jim Clyburn (D-SC), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Maxine Waters (D-CA), than the rank-and-file black voter. Their socio-economic well-being has not always been well served.

Two tragic cultural-political paradigms underpin the ongoing devolution within a large segment of the Black community. First, the high rates of black crime and violence in the year 2022 are matters of reality and historical fact. They are not the bigoted imagination of Whites. Secondly, this is even more damning. Many of the most violent, crime-ridden, and culturally dysfunctional cities in the United States today are run by blacks.    

Here is another tragedy. The Democratic Party has not done very much to benefit their greater constituencies. White, Latino, and Asian Democrats are now suffering under the current Biden/Harris and Pelosi administration. In several unguarded movements, while talking with some of my Democratic friends, they are having their regrets or buyers’ remorse considering the direction of the country after voting out the mean-old orange man. According to a data company, Statista, their computation shows that 78.3 % view the country as heading in the wrong direction. Inflation, crime, the border crisis, foreign policy failures, and willful surrendering of our energy independence, have all been exasperated if not vexed by the current crop of Democrats supposedly representing them.

However, despite the endemic dysfunctionality in far too many Democrat-controlled precincts, Blacks will still vote in candidates, like Kweisi Mfume (D-MD) or Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who once in office will generally ignore these communities. For example, in Congressman Mfume’s district which includes the city of Baltimore, crime and all types of urban decay continue to metastasize. Nothing seems to get better for the citizens of Mfume’s district. The same can be said about other Black Democratic lawmakers that control the body politics in places like St. Louis, Newark, New Jersey, New York City, or Philadelphia. Currently, 58 Black politicians are serving in the 117th Congress and only two are Republican, or more appropriately identified as Conservative.

Sure, the black political class and their immediate beneficiaries will do well as always.  Maxine Waters and the new guard of black Democrats such as Cori Bush (D-MO), will survive and thrive. However, the socio-cultural and economic stasis in which Blacks experienced a short reprieve under President Trump’s economic policies, will return to the same old stagnation and problems that Democrats have been promising to address, since Johnson’s Great Society.  Once more, I want to be wrong about my prediction, but the black community will still vote 85% to 90% Democrat.

The money and power-grubbing fraud that is the BLM Global Network Foundation, founded by Marxists, is now the newest socio-political contrivance, that continues to use the black community as props for their so-called work against police brutality via the insanity called Defund the Police. Despite garnishing millions in donations from various Democrat supporters, BLM does little to address issues pertinent to strengthening the black family.  For example, BLM has been generally mute on the issue of school choice or some kind of voucher system where public tax dollars could follow the student to the school of their choice. This would provide a needed avenue for black parents to escape the credentialed and unionized incompetence of inner-city government schools. What people need to understand, which I pointed out back in 1997 in Conservative Review Magazine, is this. The teacher’s unions, the NEA, and their upper echelon, primarily view the public schools as a jobs program for adults, with our children’s education a tertiary concern at best.  As it stands, pouring millions of additional dollars into the current administrative structure of inner-city public schools has only served to make failure, mediocrity, and stupidity more expensive.

BLM and their Democratic enablers can distract the larger black community from addressing the many self-inflicted problems, while at the same time, pointing to the police, racism, and income inequality as the main obstacles impeding the black community.

Blacks will vote Democrat!  Regardless of the truth, much of today’s social pathology seen among the black underclass is an outgrowth of the welfare state that has made self-destructive behaviors, less costly for individuals who engage in destroying the cultural-economic ecology of their neighborhoods. The recent beating death of a cab driver by black youths in New York City, one of them a thirteen-year-old female, is not surprising considering the cultural anomie that has been embedded in the black underclass. Where is BLM? Where are local and federal elected officials addressing these monstrous events?  Their silence on black-on-black crime has always been deafening.

 There have been over 16,000 black homicides since 2019.  The vast majority of these murders were blacks killing other blacks. But little is said of any consequence from the Cory Bookers or Jim Clyburn’s, who are conspicuous in commenting on the “extremely rare” police killing of blacks.  In Jamaal Bowman’s (D-NY) district, black makes up 24% of the city population. However, the vast majority of serious crimes: 65% of those murdered in 2020 and 74% of shooting victims were black. If we add in Hispanics who represent 29% (though many of them are black) of New York’s population:  since 2020 88% of murder victims were black or Hispanic, along with 74% of rape victims, 69% of robbery victims, and nearly 80% of felony assault victims.  Yet, we are treated with tiresome political tropes about institutional racism and the need for more “social programs” for the black community.

 Does anyone remember the billions of dollars spent on the black community as part of Johnson’s Great Society Programs? The problem isn’t racism or the need for more social programs. It is the fundamental breakdown of “civil society” in a significant portion of the black community. “Outcome inequality” will continue to hamper far too many in the black underclass. But once more, black will still pull that lever for a Democrat when it comes to election time.
 
Jeez, Louise, I want to be wrong considering the black community’s brainwashed disposition for a party that doesn’t have to do squat for them.  The Black Democrat Political class will continue to keep alive the lie, that those mean-old racist Conservative Republicans are the progenitors of what ails their community.  The NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, BLM, and the cacophonous musings of individuals like AOC and her merry band of ineffectual People of Color,  will continue to benefit from the political atrophy of black voters. After all, keeping people, ignored, dependent, and angry has been a successful formula for Democrats (or closet authoritarian plutocrats) to garnish the black vote for decades. The 2022 midterms will be no different.

[Patrick is a retired University Library Director. He is graduate of Canisius College and the University of Washington where he earned Masters Degrees in Religious Studies Education, Urban Anthropology and Library and Information Science.  Mr. Hall has also completed additional course work at the University of Buffalo, Seattle University and St. John Fishers College of Rochester New York. He has published in several national publications such as Commonweal, America, Conservative Review, Headway, Freedom's Journal Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, and American Libraries. He has published in the peer reviewed publications, Journal of Academic Librarianship and the Internet Reference Services Quarterly. From 1997 until his retirement in January 2014 he served on the Advisory Board of Urban Library Journal, a CUNY Publication.]