Conservatism Is, Conservatism Ain't: Black Folk and the Republican Party

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people. –Edmund Burke

On Tuesday, November 6, 1984, I had finally come of age and had the occasion of voting in my first presidential election. I cast my ballot for Ronald Reagan. But before you castigate me or congratulate me, whatever your political leanings may be, please allow me a moment to explain my choice.

I did not make that choice blindly, but I made every plausible effort to assure I made the right choice. Perhaps I was a bit naïve, and certainly I had not yet developed a critical eye, but I read whatever literature I could find, and I spoke with representatives of the various political parties. However, it was the Republicans who presented their ideas most clearly, most concisely.

I don’t ever remember hearing the word conservatism used, but the Republican message of God and family, of working hard to get ahead, of self-determination, of personal responsibility, sounded very familiar to me. These were the same values extolled by my family since my earliest consciousness. So when I entered the voting booth on that day, I pulled the lever for Reagan.

However, over the next few years I did my due diligence to familiarize myself with the party and with the party’s beliefs. And at some point during this period, I even began to refer to myself as a conservative, and consumed a wide range of reading material by conservative thinkers. Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley, and Whittaker Chambers are a few names that come to mind.

I did not agree with everything I read. I did not even understand everything I read. But one thing became abundantly clear: the conservatism I was reading about and the conservatism as it was being practiced were not the same thing. While the intellectuals and thinkers defined conservatism in one manner, bigots interpreted conservatism in another and hijacked it in pursuit of power.

Around the mid 1960’s, those calling themselves conservatives saw an opportunity. With disgruntled southern Democrats upset with Kennedy’s and Johnson’s civil rights stance, they quickly shaped a message which would appeal to the nativists, the racists, the anti-Semites, the anti-communists, and the religious zealots all worried about the subversion of white, Anglo-Saxon Christian culture, and united them against a common foe—liberalism.

The Republican Party effectively became a haven for reactionaries and bigots. They, in Edmund Burkes words, “became bidders at the auction of popularity.”

And this is where conservatism and the Republican Party find themselves now. The two are inextricably entangled in their own past, dependent on racist, discriminatory rhetoric and divisive cultural and social issues to remain in the good graces of its most ardent believers; but as the scales fall from the eyes of the nation, this group is ever-dwindling .

Furthermore, while once conservative ideas and beliefs were articulated by respected intellectuals and thinkers, they are now represented by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber and others of that same ilk.

And when I speak to black Republicans, they always cite those values I articulated earlier—God, family, hard work, self-determination, and personal responsibility—as reasons why they remain in the party as if one must be a conservative and one must be a Republican to also believe in these values. But they seem to blindly not to recognize that the Republican Party and conservatives gave up on that agenda a long time ago.

Every woman or man has the right to believe what they want to believe. Every woman or man has the right to choose to belong to whatever organization they wish to belong to. But in choosing what to believe and who to align themselves with, they also should think critically enough to know when they are being insulted, being denigrated, being debased.