Howard Dean said the other day that, "If you look at folks of color, even women, they're more successful in the Democratic party than they are in the white, uh, excuse me, in the [laughs] Republican party."
The "white" party. Good one.
Whatever the opportunities may be for blacks within the Democratic party I think a good case can be made that Democrat policies have been a disaster for blacks over the last forty years. Entitlement programs, to take but one example, have fostered a dependence on government that made black males superfluous in the lives of many poor women. This led to a disproportionate number of illegitimate births and single parent families. It also pushed black men into lives of promiscuity, drug abuse, and violence. The rarity of stable black two-parent families perpetuates poverty across the generations and spawns a host of dysfunctionalities, including misogyny and crime.
None of these problems existed in the black population to anywhere near the extent they do today prior to LBJ's Great Society of the 1960s. Black opportunity was severely and cruelly attenuated in the first half of the twentieth century, yet blacks had stronger families and much lower levels of male violence then than we find today. Six trillion dollars has been transferred from the American taxpayers to the American poor in the last fifty years, but poverty remains as obdurate as ever.
Mr. Dean may boast about the occasional bone Democrats throw to their African American serfs, like medieval royalty tossing coins from their carriages to the paupers in the streets, but Democrat policies have not only failed to alleviate their abject circumstances, they actually exacerbate them.
Why blacks stay in a party that keeps boasting about how it helps them while in fact doing little to give them the kind of opportunities they really need (e.g. committed, two-parent families, choice in schools, a sense of self-reliance) is one of the big mysteries of modern politics.
RLC
