Group Dynamics and the African American Vote

Couple of posts by Pete Spiliakos at Ashbrook's No Left Turns Blog on conservatives attracting the African American Vote.

In the first he says that any conservative attempt to attract African-American votes is going to be filled with medals of dishonor because Liberals and Leaders in the Black Community are going to heap scorn on the conservatives trying to attract them, and cast out as Uncle Toms anyone who actually breaks from the Community to vote for or run as a Republican. That will last right up until the moment enough African Americans vote for Republicans that it is clear the scorn didn't work, and then we'll all pretend it didn't happen.

In the second he says that conservative starts on gaining African American votes have sucked. For emphasis he links William Voegeli's essay at Claremont about Movement Conservatism's lack of interest in Civil Rights.

All very interesting and worth a read.

On the broader point, I think Spiliakos maybe has a point. If Republicans want to attract the Black Interest Groups, they're going to have to treat them like any other interest group. Simple cosmetic "look, we hire African Americans" wouldn't cut it with with the Warhawks or the Wallstreeters or the Pentecostals, we wouldn't expect it to work for African-Americans. If conservatives are going to attract African-Americans they are going to have to find policies which attract African-Americans and don't repel the existing coalition, and not simply dress up the existing policies in the duly insulting black face.

Nonetheless, I'm underwhelmed by Spiliakos's two posts, particularly the second (I think he's closer to the truth with his first). The argument Spiliakos requires us to believe is that African-Americans know that their political future is with Conservatives -particularly Evangelicals and Pentecostals, since the foundation here is the shared Social Conservatism -but choose to vote against their interests out of spite for a miscalculation by a bunch of Catholics and Jews (Buckley, Podhoretz, and Kristol) 40 years ago. This is an idiotic reason to vote for Democrats. It's only made slightly better in the first post -which suggests that African Americans are being systematically lead astray by Liberals and the African American Leadership -if you consider being elevated from stupid to gullible a promotion. Worse, they'd be stupidly, hypocritically gullible, because it isn't like African Americans didn't spend a lot of time voting with people who hated them in the past -I refer you to the New Deal Coalition. So in this telling, voting with actual segregationists who currently actively hated African Americans was prefered to voting for the descendents of the people who misjudged the level of evil of segregation and thought that the massive coming racial welfare state (which not a decade later Daniel Patrick Moynihan would point out did more harm than good to African Americans) was the worse evil, then realized their error, and spent 30 years trying to make up for it with crime reform, welfare reform, and a bunch of other stuff.

What is this, the Stockholm Syndrom/Battered Wife approach to voting?

Rather, I suspect Voegeli has a better handle and Spiliakos missed it. The overlap between Conservative and African-American policy preferences is not as broad or as deep as it needs to be to maintain a coalition. African-Americans get a better deal from Democrats than Republicans. It's not just nostalgia for Johnson motivating the African-American vote. As early as Martin Luther King, Jr. the African American community was advocating for a more redistributive and socialistic Federal Government. In Voegeli's telling, we honor MLK on the Calendar, but we honor Malcom X in our policy. That's a policy Republicans simply can't deliver.

Further, this is a perfectly rational policy goal for African Americans. They are an extraordinarilly well organized social and political group, they deliver lots of votes in a reliable block, they have effective leaders, and their demands are not onerous to the majority of the population. It's a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.

Republicans are offering a dispersed benefit with a dispersed cost in exchange for African Americans giving up their current concentrated benefit. A history of distrust is not required to explain why African Americans don't sign on the line immediately. The only concentrated benefit Republicans can offer is to sign African Americans up in the pro-life league -which doesn't actually require becoming a Republican, and my admittedly cursory reading of the literature is that African Americans are not that exercised by abortion relative to their white coreligionists. In group dynamic terms, while they share a group affiliation, they do not share a salient affiliation.

There's a further aspect of African American Organizational Interests. Moreso than in other groups, there is a very strong social identification for African Americans (OK, the research on this was actually done in South Africa, but I'm going to guess its transferable based on some similar American results). One aspect of social identification is that it provides a strong set of norms that you have to obey to maintain that identification. Now, recalling the McArdle blog from a week or so ago, there isn't a strong "White" identification because that culture is so dominant identification of it is the social equivalent of asking a fish if water is wet. There's some network research that reaches the same basic conclusion -people identify based on small and unique markers -and small is an important, if relative term. A large body of African Americans and Whites will subdivide by race and sex, and if there are a bunch of people still in each group they'll subdivide again by something else. A smaller body may not feel the need to split.

So, unique in being part of the non-white population of the US is that you can have social identification based on color, but it isn't enough to identify yourself with a group. The group has to counter-recognize you, and that's where the norms come in. Now, in any group, these norms probably work to get everyone working towards the group's goals. But not everyone who wants to be "part of the group" shares those goals. Classic example: not everyone in the AARP supports the AARP's lobbying agenda, but because of the other benefits, they put up with it unless the AARP really ticks them off. Now take that logic and multiply from "gee, I get nice discounts" to "this is a defining characteristic of my life" and then contemplate how difficult it must be for African Americans to vote for Republicans when their leaders and communities tell them to vote for Democrats, they and their ethnic brothers get concrete benefits from voting for Democrats and in return Republicans are offering... the promise that eventually the well will run dry.

And we think this voting behavior is hard to explain, why?

And it gets worse before it gets better. These types of organizations are intended to be self sustaining. The benefits gotten from the first group action is used to fund the next one. The resources and benefits tie people closer and closer to the group identification, so it almost never weakens so long as the group is effective.

But it does eventually get better. The ecology of groups is fluid. Yes, for a long time African Americans as an organized interest have managed to dominate their field. But demography is changing. Whites are becoming closer and closer to African Americans in terms of organization as their hegemony on the culture erodes. Other racial groups are beginning to compete with African Americans in the Democratic Party. As this continues, the hold African Americans hold over individual (even lots of) African Americans will weaken. Fewer benefits can be used to hold membership, and even the importance of "being black" will pale in comparison to "getting anything, even if I have to work with white people to do it."

So, to sum up: African Americans get a good deal from Democrats. Republicans have nothing to offer them that will not alienate some portion of the existing coalition. Nonetheless, African Americans cannot forever stay in the Democratic Party because their position is premised on demographics that no longer hold. Once those demographics destabilize the African American position, they will reassess their political strategy -they might decide that the GOP is a better home for them based on things like shared social conservatism.

Other alternatives: the GOP jettisons some portion of the coalition to attract African Americans (probably the Wallstreeters, possibly the Libertarians). The country goes bankrupt and the Democratic Party is no longer able to fulfill its promises to constituent groups, like African Americans. African American preferences shift dramatically to the point they no longer consider the benefits they get from the government worth the paper they're written on. Or, the institutional voices of African America (ie the people who say "vote Democratic") do something really, really, really, and I mean Biblical Proportion, calling down lightning from Heaven, seven trumpets and a skywriter, really stupid so that individual African Americans consider membership in the "black" group to be nearly as insulting as being Republicans.

And a final note on Voegeli's essay: he makes a statement in there about how Fringe conservatives missed the "Civil Rights is OK" memo. I think he might be a little harsh on Buckley there. My recollection is that The Movement makes a point that the Conservatives aren't going to add a Racial State to their platform, so if Southerners want to join the coalition, that's great, but they're going to have to baptised to wash away the stench of segregation after their Come-To-Jesus moment. Its Southern rejection of this idea that leads to the Wallace run, and the failure of the Wallace run that leads the South to switch to the GOP on the Movement's terms. Sorta like what I'm predicting for African Americans.