Opinion
Columnists
Wonder Land
FDR offered the hope of prosperity. Can the new president do the same?
By
Daniel Henninger
One search term would
not show up on any list: black Americans.
Conventional wisdom
now holds that Donald Trump is president because he identified the angry white
counterparts of black voters who have watched the world pass them by election
after election.
Maybe black voters
are angry, too. And maybe with Donald Trump, of all people, they’ll get some
political respect that matters.
In September, Mr.
Trump visited a private charter school, the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences
Academy, in one of that city’s toughest neighborhoods.
Why take the time?
Commentary at the time noted that Mr. Trump’s support in polls among Ohio’s
blacks was about zero. The campaign’s real targets were white, blue-collar
voters in places like Parma on Cleveland’s west side.
Still, Mr. Trump gave
a quiet speech to a small audience at that Cleveland charter about the “ladder
to success.”
“I define that,” he
said, “as a great education and a great job.” He added: “You cannot have
prosperity without safety. This is the new civil rights agenda of our time.”
Wonder
Land Columnist Dan Henninger on why the president-elect’s policy agenda may
help struggling minorities. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Again, why try? So
strong is black support for the Democratic Party—well over 80% in every
presidential election since 1964—that it has become a subject of study among
political scientists who describe the black vote as “captured.”
One plausible
explanation for this loyalty is that black Americans vote their interests.
Franklin Roosevelt offered economic hope in the 1930s, and Lyndon Johnson
passed the civil rights acts in the ’60s. Republicans got dropped from blacks’
voting calculations, which haven’t changed in 50 years.
It’s hard to know
where Mr. Trump gets his political ideas, but worth noting is that he recruited
former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as energy secretary.
Recall that in July
2015, when running for the GOP nomination, Mr. Perry gave an extraordinary
speech imploring his party to campaign for the black vote and asking black
voters to recognize how little they were getting now for their support of
Democrats. “Why is it today,” he asked, “so many black families feel left
behind?” A year later, Donald Trump was asking the same question.
Barack Obama will
deliver his farewell speech in homicidal Chicago next week. The irony is hardly
worth noting, and Mr. Obama will make the best case for himself. Several
things, though, deserve mention before his departure.
For starters, urban
blacks aren’t particularly happy about how things worked out with the Obama
presidency. Reporting
done
on this has turned up disappointment with their progress.
In the eight years of
the Obama presidency, all the familiar inner-city problems—unemployment,
violence, underachievement—somehow got transferred to the issue of the police,
as if the cops invented poverty and immobility in Chicago, Baltimore or
Ferguson, Mo.
Less noticed, but as
telling, is how much time the Obama departments of justice and labor spent
filing lawsuits based on disparate-impact theory, which holds that
discrimination is discoverable using arcane statistical analyses of housing
patterns or lending practices.
If the party of
Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson is raising up black America with statistics a
half-century after the civil rights acts, it has run out of ideas on the way
forward.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The civil rights acts were championed by
Republicans in the 1860s and 1960s over the objection of Democrats. Details are
at: http://blackrepublican.blogspot.com/p/history-of-civil-rights-in-nutshell.html
]
Black turnout for
Hillary Clinton was down, but not just because she wasn’t Mr. Obama. It was,
for example, because her proposals for their schools—more federal spending on
building upgrades and teacher training—were familiar and for many of them,
failed.
Could Donald Trump be
the next FDR for black Americans? Choke down that gulp. Early Roosevelt was one
thing—a president offering work. So is this one.
Restoring economic
growth is the baseline. But for poor blacks it isn’t enough. Growth has passed
over them before. Also needed is deliverance on two Trump promises that precede
real jobs: “great education” and “safety.”
The potential in
education with nominee Betsy DeVos is directly proportional to her opposition
on charters and choice from the tongs defending the schools status quo.
Less noticed is Ben
Carson. This isn’t just another housing secretary. The Carson mission, made
clear in his primary campaign, is to challenge the idea that “structural
racism” explains the dead end on urban progress.
It’s a heavy lift.
Which is why presidencies drop it. These are the early days of a new presidency
when hope is no sin. The expectation here is that Donald Trump meant what he
said at that charter school in Cleveland.
