It has been suggested without much subtlety that now that Barack Obama has won the Presidency, that the 'white masters' of the Republican Party will cast off black conservatives from their ranks. Following this assumption to its implications, it follows that black conservatives were nothing more than suckups to the party in power and that their duty was to keep, by increasing minority membership in GOP, the Republicans a steamrolling majority party.
It's a rather crude analysis based on the continuing misunderstanding of the value of conservatism itself. Allow me to make a correction.
At bottom the question is what is the advantage of being a Black Republican. The answer is found in looking at the alternative. What indeed is the value of being a Black Democrat? The value, for the overwhelming majority who would 'be' is found in the act of voting, a momentary exercise. But behind the act of voting, if this momentary exercise is to be taken as something other than random, is the discipline of thinking. Thoughtful blackfolks who vote Democrat do so because they have accumulated a set of useful ideas and they expect their candidates to express and run with those ideas. So it is not so much what one does in the voting booth that lends credibility to the democratic process but the legitimacy and value of the ideas in play.
Thoughtful blackfolks do not get their cues on the usefulness of ideas through some shallow idolization of political candidates. It's not about JFK or FDR or LBJ so much as it is with the ideas behind them. Blackfolks rightly look to intellectuals like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T Washington and WEB DuBois to understand their worldview and ideas. In that constellation of thought and ideas, they find what is useful and true and agitate for their political candidates to act upon the principles of those ideas and conform to those worldviews. It is during the campaigns that voters determine the fidelity of candidates to ideas and solutions. The doing is about the time taken in service of understanding the value and usefulness of those ideas and their implications in policy. The being is the momentary act walking under a banner of like-minded people.
There is difficulty of course, with the only recently liberated African American in accessing ideas other than those preoccupied with immediate liberation. But there certainly are a set of African Americans so fully liberated that they might expand their consumption of ideas and worldviews to those beyond those aimed at the slave, the pauper, the servant, the underclass.
And so it is only natural to see some thoughtful blackfolks take their intellectual cues from intellectuals like Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott and Milton Friedman. It is entirely reasonable to consider their worldviews and their ideas. In that constellation of ideas, blackfolks would choose those they find useful and encourage politicians to apply and run with those ideas. The doing is about the time taken in service of understand the value and usefulness of those ideas and their implications in policy. The being is the momentary acto fo walking under a banner of like-minded people.
So what's the advantage of 'being' a Black Republican? There isn't much outside except having the company of like-minded people. But that's just a simple social benefit, rather like being a fan of a football team. If this is as deep as the analysis goes - merely to the 'being' it does a great deal of disrespect to those who discipline themselves to the task of comprehending great ideas and finding the usefulness of them in their lives. It seems to me that this is the great attraction of politics to thoughtful people in the first place.
We happen to live in a society, which like all societies is full of people with various capacities and desires to apply themselves intellectually over any meaningful period of time. That does not mean, under our Constitution, that they should suffer any disenfranchisement. Everybody gets a vote no matter how serious or shallow they are. So there are, of course, people who find their entire political raison d'etre in the social benefit of being a fan of a winning team. This is part and parcel of populism and identity politics with which all thoughtful people are aware.
The advantage of conservatism to African Americans is a greater understanding and perspective on a greater set of ideas than those which we have traditionally applied our consideration. To know more is its own benefit. To understand those ideas against which one has been opposed through ignorance is to gain a greater grasp of the political system and all of the interests in it. This is a capacity that more African Americans must develop if they are to advance in this society and in the world.
Lest anyone doubt. I do not mean to imply or suggest that there is only one direction in which the thoughtful African American might mature their political sensibilities. There are not simply Conservative, but Libertarian, Anarchic, Marxist and other categories of thinkers and ideas in Western Traditions and many schools of thought within any and all of those branches. If anyone cares to take a very simple axiom 'By any means necessary' seriously, then one cannot be so simple-minded as to do nothing more than follow the same intellectual and political path without any further investigation.
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