Blacks Promised False Liberty

Excellent article by Ron Miller on how the Democratic Party lured Black voters away from their traditional alliance with the Republican Party.

From Regular Folks United: 

This is a case study of what happens to a people who are willing to sacrifice true liberty for the false hope of a utopian equality of wealth that has never existed in human history and never will.

Modern day liberals will lay equal claim to liberty based on the concept of "freedom from want," a concept first articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 in his famous "Four Freedoms" speech. This was not a freedom espoused by the founding fathers and, in fact, it had more to do with the international socialist movements of the day that elevated state-enforced economic equality above individual liberty, and appealed to class envy over the principle that all men are created equal and have the right to possess whatever their labors and skills allow them to produce.

This philosophy is illustrated in modern liberalism's approach to people they've deemed as disenfranchised by American society, typically minorities and women. Ironically, the political party generally accepted as the standard-bearer for modern liberalism, the Democratic Party, has a long, ugly and bloody history of racism, while the Republican Party was founded to fight slavery and led the fight for equal justice under the law for more than a century.

The historical support of blacks for the Republican Party began to turn during the era of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the first of two major transfers of power in the 20th century from the people to the federal government, and was essentially lost by the time of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.

Policies built on preferential treatment and forced income redistribution due to real or perceived structural inequalities won over most black Americans, who feared that equal justice under the law was insufficient to correct centuries of disadvantage brought about by slavery, legalized discrimination and a more nebulous presumption of systemic racism.

The Republican Party that had championed the cause of liberty for blacks since 1854 was abandoned because of its belief that, with slavery and legalized discrimination defeated, blacks were now on a level playing field and could compete and advance on their own industry and merits.

The Democratic Party strongly discouraged that notion within the black community as a matter of rhetoric and policy, and continues to do so today. Anyone who attempts to argue for equality of opportunity over outcome is quickly branded as racist, the universal insult of modern liberalism.

They are particularly vicious to those of us in the black community who object to their condescension and false paternalism. We quickly learn they haven't forgotten the techniques of intimidation, demonization and isolation they perfected during their racist past, even encouraging other blacks to attack us using the same reprehensible tactics.

We are their most reliable voting bloc and the naked hypocrisy of using racist words and actions to condemn those of us who dare to challenge them is a small price to pay to keep us "uppity Negroes" (I hesitate to use the actual term that comes to mind) in line.

The iron grip the liberal elites have on the black consciousness in America has, in my opinion, contributed to many of the pathologies that plague our community today, especially the breakdown of the black family, ripped from the moorings of self-sufficiency, hard work, personal responsibility and accountability and an unyielding faith in God that sustained us during the hardest of times in years past.

Modern liberalism positioned the federal government as not only our protector but also our provider, replacing community institutions for which it is a wholly inadequate substitute.

As a result, we have exchanged the physical chains of slavery and the legal chains of Jim Crow laws for the less apparent but more insidious bondage of permanent dependence on a single political philosophy and their allegiance to government's power over the individual.