Peter Beinart has a pretty good article in the New Republic online about the vicious race-baiting in the recent Newark, New Jersey mayoral election. His analysis rings true. It's nice to see someone in his position starting to have second thoughts.

Beinart, as a pretty standard establishment lefty, seems almost stunned...

...to find himself seeing merit in longstanding GOP assessments of why blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic. He admits to having, in the past, dismissed GOP criticisms as condescending to black voters and cynical about Democrats who get involved in politics out of civil-rights idealism.

He seems either unaware or unwilling to mention the number of prominent Republicans who entered politics with the exact same idealism--including such hated conservative figures as Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. Many others, like Jack Kemp and Prescott Bush (the President's grandfather) shared and abundantly showed that same racial idealism during their entire political careers. George W. himself has echoed his grandfather's idealism, and has shown it abundantly. This seems irrelevant; civil-rights idealism is only real if you're a Democrat, apparently.

Beinart also might have mentioned that in poll after poll, even by Democratic pollsters, black voters are far more conservative than the rest of the Democratic party's base. In fact, on hot-button issues like guns, taxes, abortion, crime, the role of religion in politics, drugs, gay marriage, even defense, black voters are, as a rule, far more conservative than any ethnic group in America, including middle-class whites.

It seems to me that Democrats get black votes mostly because the Democratic party has historically had a lock on the politics of most large cities, and over the last 50 years blacks have migrated to those cities. This, therefore, is where most black politicians come from. Tie this to the fact that black America has, over the last couple of generations, embraced the mentality that society is keeping them down, and the Republican problem becomes obvious: since most black politicians are Democrats, they only see black politicians attacking Republicans. Thus, it must be Republicans who create all that racism, right?

Those of us who know history know that the Democratic party has a far worse history of racism than the Republican party; that is not even debateable. But most people, black, white or otherwise, don't know history--especially political history. Republicans have, over the last couple of generations, found themselves the jilted bride left at the alter by black voters.

Can that change in the near future? It's hard to say, but probably not until black America loses its obsessive belief that most of the black community's problems are caused by white racism. In the meantime, there's not much that Republicans can do about it, except to keep trying to get their message out, point out the misconceptions, and sincerely do whatever they can to win whatever black votes they can.

If a substantial portion of black voters lost their visceral loathing for Republicans and were willing to at least consider voting Republican some of the time, it would cause a monumental--and very healthy--shift in American politics. Republicans would be the short-term beneficiaries, of course, but that would be temporary. No party can keep a lock on political power in America. It would be healthy because it would help put an end to the racial strife, paranoia, and defensiveness that now afflict so much of the black community, and so distort our national politics.