Voting inertia...

In part three of his series called “Stop and think”, Thomas Sowell talks about what he calls voting inertia. Voting inertia is when a large block of voters continues to vote a certain way regardless of the ill effects it may have on them. Sowell notes that

Blacks have voted for every Democratic candidate for President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Al Gore… There is probably no group that has been hurt so much when they voted by inertia. The reason is that the Democrats' most influential constituencies have interests and agendas with major negative impacts on blacks.

Sowell goes on to cite examples of core liberal policies that work directly against Blacks. I won’t recount them; it’s a short column; you can read it for yourself. What I find interesting is why a group would continue to act against its own interests in election after election.

The image that keeps coming to mind is that of a herd of cattle stampeding off the edge of a cliff. Blacks, I think, have fallen into a similar trap. It begins with fear and panic, stoked by “Black leaders”—those whom Booker T. Washington dubbed the “Problem Profiteers”--who traffic in racism. The natural response to panic is flight. And so the charge begins, away from the perceived threat and toward the promise of deliverance. Movement is mistaken for progress, and it matters not that the threat is largely illusory, or that the destination itself is suspect.

I wonder if certain groups are more susceptible to this phenomenon than others. Of free peoples, we can make a rough division between those who fought for their own independence and those whose freedom was won by the efforts of others. As a nation, Americans are members of the former group. What we have, we won through our own labors. We fought for our land, our freedom, our very right to exist. We are a self-made people, whose emergent character is one of confidence and self-reliance.

Can the same be said of American Blacks as a sub-group? Having been brought here against their will, placed into slavery, and then freed of that servitude by the blood and goodwill of others, American Blacks, to a large extent, have been “granted” their circumstance, and by extension their disposition. Though they have been much empowered by their subsequent struggle for equal rights, even that effort came with no small assistance from the host culture.

How can such a history not have given rise to sentiments of resentment, dependence, and self-doubt within the American Black culture? Indeed, I suspect that within the dynamics of the “black pride” movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s was some degree of shame at having to have been rescued. Sadly, we’ve yet to learn the lesson, as we continue to compound the problem with programs like Affirmative Action which promise to “empower” Blacks.

The truth, of course, is that it’s not possible for one group to empower another. Empowerment comes from within. The gravest injustice inflicted upon the modern American Black is not the residue of slavery. Nor is it the lingering racism and discrimination that accompanies it. The greater injury, the lasting damage, visited upon Blacks in America is that they have been robbed of their political autonomy. We have instilled in them a sense of dependency, and have perpetuated a Culture of Victimhood.

This has resulted in a particularly insidious brand of Group Think and voting inertia that Blacks are only beginning to challenge. We would have done well to heed the advice of Booker T. Washington when he argued nearly a century ago that the best way to “help” the Negro is to simply leave him alone and let him make his own way.