The Democrats’ Fear Of An Incipient Black Revolt in 2012

By Norman Berdichevsky

This is the first time since the early 1920s that a realistic chance exists that both the Black and the Jewish vote will fall outside the Democrats’ pocket where it has been safely kept under lock and key.

The enormous Black and Jewish majorities in the 2008 presidential election of 95% and 78% respectively will undoubtedly tumble in the upcoming 2012 race.

How far and how fast remains to be seen but as all too few so called ‘pundits’ and young voters are aware, both the Black and Jewish vote from the mid-19th century until after World War I were predominantly Republican.

A recent PJ Media poll of 800 conducted during Feb 21-22 gave support to hypothetical Republican presidential candidates of from 14% for Mitt Romney to 23% for Condi Rice. The recent highest vote share in the African American community for a GOP presidential candidate was for George W. Bush in 2004, with 11%. Although this may appear as trivial, it is obvious that even this glacier like movement is likely to incite panic as a harbinger of things to come.

Similar even greater movements towards the GOP by Jewish and Hispanic voters are also viewed with alarm among the Democrats and pose the possibility that any brief examination of the past will reveal that ethnic loyalties are not etched in stone.

Few young blacks about to vote for the first time are aware that Martin Luther King Jr. was a lifelong Republican. But such a fact , equivalent to the displays at the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum, could lend weight to the gathering avalanche of a reversal in the future, enough in any case, to change the political map.

The issue came to the fore with the recent clashes between Congressman Allen West (R-22, Florida) and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-20 Florida) in a heated exchange of views, made all the more poignant and media-worthy because both are from Florida and both are recent migrants to the state.

As a Black and a Jew, their constituencies represent the two strongest components of the Democratic coalition in Congress.

Their conflict reflects a much deeper cleavage – one between No-Nothing Northern carpetbagger ultra-liberal ignorance and deeply held prejudices against the South on the one hand, and West’s symbolic image as a return, after a gap of a hundred years, of the historic ties of common interests between African Americans and the Republican Party.

On the eve of the Civil War, countless editorials in Southern newspapers referred to the probable election of Abraham Lincoln as the candidate of “The Black Republican Party” using “Black” as a symbol of evil and as a sign that the black slaves looked to that party and its candidate Abraham Lincoln as the source of eventual betterment. During Reconstruction, 1865-77, the term was used with even greater vehemence by white Southerners at the spectacle of liberated slaves serving as Republican Congressmen in Washington.

The Dispute Between West and Wasserman Schultz

The DNC chairwoman’s remarks linking the Republican Party to “Jim Crow” caused an immediate double take among anyone familiar with American history but not among all those totally and willfully ignorant liberals, Northern Democrats and many Jews, for whom the period of Reconstruction, the Republican fight against the three S’s that characterized the Democrat Party for the first hundred years of its existence – Slavery, Secession and Segregation- are just a blank page. Only someone as colossally brainwashed or willingly ignorant as Democrat Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz could make the statements that…

“You have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws – and very transparently-block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. Photo I.D. laws, we think, are very similar to a poll tax.”

This remark came from a woman whose 20th Congressional District in Florida is the most gerrymandered in the country. Nobody has since ventured to ask the question why it is that the Democrats continually suppress the military vote by not allowing ballots counted even though they were legal in the states that received the ballots yet always agitate for convicted felons in prison to have the vote.

The Democrats feign ignorance about their own history in instituting and institutionalizing poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, tolerating lynch mobs and simple strong armed tactics to prevent blacks from voting in most Southern states for almost a hundred years after the end of the Civil War.

Wasserman-Schultz made her incendiary comments on June 6, 2011 during an interview on TV-One. She half-retracted her comments the next day after someone probably referred her to an elementary book on the history of the United States.

The National Republican Committee Chairman released a statement in response charging that …”Wasserman Schultz will literally say anything,” and called the congresswoman’s statements “absurd accusations” and “offensive remarks” leading her to admit that she had “used the wrong analogy” (foot in mouth disease).

Why the Angry Words?

Wasserman-Schultz has been carrying on a campaign of invective against Alan West since he was elected, accusing him of old fashioned prejudice against women, a lack of care about Florida’s senior citizens and failure to protect voting rights for minorities.

On July 19 on the House floor after Congressman West had left, Wasserman Schultz made these critical remarks and poured oil on the fire… “The gentleman from Florida. who represents thousands of Medicare beneficiaries, as do I, is supportive of this plan that would increase costs for Medicare beneficiaries, unbelievable from a Member from South Florida.”

Alan West was painted with the broad brush of callousness toward the elderly, women and – get this – “minorities.”

But the real reason to defame West is obvious. It is not because she is the protective angel of the poor and elderly and West wants to deny them a remedy because he is heartless. He is a next door neighbor in Broward County and a proud BLACK REPUBLICAN whose name causes panic among Democrat campaign hustlers like David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and challenges the entire Democratic monopoly on the “minority voters” and the constant appeal of the Democrats to elderly voters posing as their protector. They are assumed to be wards of the state whose welfare benefits need to be safeguarded from the grasp of evil Republicans.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, like defeated demagogue Alan Grayson, pervert Anthony Weiner and, of course, the President, have always idealized the support of Blacks, Jews, women, and senior citizens for the Democrat Party.

West upset the applecart. This was his unforgivable sin. He has challenged the old monopoly of the ruling Democrat puppets – the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Congressman Charlie Rangel. These three have presided over the African-American community as “leaders” and led their followers into an ever deeper hole of dependency on the federal government.

Contrast the media’s obeisance to this triumvirate of scoundrels with the almost total silence towards the man who is without a doubt the country’s most prominent, distinguished and honored African-American outside of government – a philosopher, economist and historian whose record of achievements is buried and hidden by the media apart from Fox News.

I refer to Thomas Sowell, undoubtedly also the most prominent black critic of the policies of Barack Obama, of affirmative action and the whole range of welfare and educational policies designed by the Democratic Party during the last fifty years. He has been a senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University since 1990 and is the recipient of the highest awards including the National Humanities Medal for prolific scholarship in history, economics and political science and the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement.

Wasserman-Schultz’s remarks stem from the traditional avoidance of attracting blacks of this caliber and retaining their hold on a population dependent on government programs of dependency. The allegiance of the black and Jewish vote in the pocket of the Democrat Party for the past three generations since the Depression must not be challenged (witness the expulsion of Senator Joe Lieberman) and from the fact that anything that does not support that political alliance is absolutely beyond the pale.

The first county in the United States to directly elect a Black congressman and accord Jews full equality as voters and as candidates for all public offices was…… Georgetown, South Carolina!

Yes, in deepest Dixie in a county which was the center of the rice growing plantation economy where blacks (mostly slaves) outnumbered Whites in 1860 by a ratio of 10:1. Of course, under Reconstruction, blacks, as citizens, would obviously elect a fellow black. Joseph Rainey from Georgetown was the first black representative elected who was not unseated in the aftermath of a white backlash and even enjoyed some white support.

He was a moderate Republican and not one of the ‘Radicals’ determined to punish the South. Rainey was of mixed race. His father had been a barber who had earned his freedom. In Representative Rainey’s inaugural address, he vowed to improve the lives of all South Carolinians and to benefit the state he loved.

During his term in office, Rainey supported legislation to protect the civil rights of Southern Blacks and promote the economic reconstruction of South Carolina. In May 1874, he became the first African American to preside over the House of Representatives. By 1878, Reconstruction was ended when the white Democrats regained control of all southern state legislatures and used paramilitary violent groups such as the Klan and the “Red Shirts” to suppress black voting.

All the early black congressmen and senators elected during Reconstruction were members of the Republican Party. The Democrats objected to many of the newly elected black officials and managed to unseat several of them who had been elected in 1870.

Colonel West’s anger is both justifiable and understandable. He was told in effect to remember that, as a Black, he should “know his place” (i.e. the Democrat Party). Other “traitors” who arouse the same ire and passions among Democrats are black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, newly elected Florida Senator Marco Rubio of Cuban origin, Jewish Republican House majority leader Eric Cantor (from Virginia), conservative women like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and the Indian-American Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

Nikki Haley, the Indian-American female Republican governor of South Carolina, is also a first generation American, the child of immigrant parents and also a member of the other Democrat constituency on which a monopoly is claimed – immigrants – thus effectively throwing three strikes against her.

Allen West refused to have more called strikes against him by a partial umpire and warned the pitcher he was about to throw the bat at her.

Norman Berdichevsky is a native New Yorker who lives in Orlando, Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1974) and is the author of The Danish-German Border Dispute (Academica Press, 2002), Nations, Language and Citizenship (McFarland & Co., Inc., 2004), Spanish Vignettes; An Offbeat Look into Spain’s Culture, Society & History (Santana Books, Malaga, Spain. 2004), An Introduction to Danish Culture (MacFarland, 2011) and The Left is Seldom Right (New English Review Press, 2011). He is the author of more than 200 articles and book reviews that have appeared in a variety of American, British, Danish, Israeli and Spanish periodicals such as World Affairs, Journal of Cultural Geography, Ecumene, Ariel, Ethnicity, The World & I, Contemporary Review, German Life, Israel Affairs, and Midstream. He is also a professional translator from Hebrew and Danish to English and his website is here.

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