Dean's World

T-Steel is very annoyed with Democrats.

Baldilocks has a roundup of similar messages from other black bloggers.

Something I've said many times is that the American system has been set up from day one (for over 200 years I mean) in such a way that there can only be two parties. The third parties will always get their issues stolen by one of the two big parties. That's the way the system works, and unless you plan on rewriting the Constitution in very fundamental ways that's the way it will always work.

This is not as bad as some people make out though. The two parties wind up very big and having many interest groups within them.

But here is the danger: no matter what your interest is, or ethnicity, or whatever, you are always making a major miscalculation if you align yourself with only one party. Because then the fate of your issue rises and falls with the fate of that party. Black people need to start realizing this: Democrats do not respect them, and Republicans don't bother with them. And believe it or not, it is not because either party is racist. It's a simple matter of pragmatism: Democrats know they don't need to do anything but play the "rah rah" game to win black votes, and Republicans have learned through difficult experience that nothing they do will get black votes anyway.

As I've mentioned before, George W. Bush spent more time and more money campaigning in black communities and advertising on black radio than any Republican in history--and got compared to a lyncher and the lowest percentage of black voters in decades. You can say all you want about this, that or the other thing in the last few decades that seemed racist, the truth is you can find things just as bad done by Democrats. Fact is Republicans have learned through hard experience that no matter what they say, no matter how much money they spend, black people will not vote for them. So why try?

And why should Democrats ultimately really care what black voters want, so long as they know black people feel like they have nowhere else to go?

Gay voters need to learn the same lesson too. If Republicans know they can never get your vote, then quite seriously, why do they care what you think? I mean, other than to be nice? If you'll never support them, what motivation do they have to care what you think? About anything?

And you know, it really doesn't help much when the few blacks who do vote Republican get called Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs and sellouts.

You know, when Condoleeza Rice's dad first tried to register to vote in Alabama, voter registration was done by the parties. The Democrats made black people guess the number of jellybeans in a jar and if they guessed wrong (almost always) they wouldn't register them. Republicans didn't play that game, which is why her father, and eventually her, became Republicans. So to sit around and say "well the Republicans did this, that, or the other thing that was racist in the past" is a fool's game, you can find bad stuff on both the parties. Hell, the Democrats were the party of the KKK for decades. But that's in the past, and involves people who (with a couple of exceptions) are all dead now.

I have long maintained that it is simply not healthy for anyone--not Republicans, not Democrats, not black people, not America as a whole--that one party owns the black vote and the other can't get black votes no matter what it does.

Because, again: neither Democrats nor Republicans have much reason to care what black people think. They know how you're going to vote anyway, so why should it matter to them?

* Update * I suppose this would be a good time to resurrect an old piece of mine: Rosa Parks Laments.