Conservatives, Liberals and Blacks

Over the past decade, a number of policy scholars have examined parallel bedrock constituencies in America''s political parties. On one side, the Republicans rely on the near-monolithic support of Christian conservatives, a fact that has been documented ad nauseam by political commentators and the mainstream press for more than 20 years. Less well understood, but equally important, is the role of liberal secularists in shaping the policies of the American left. These people are the religious and political inverse of Christian conservatives: They vote for liberal political candidates and hold left-wing views on issues like school prayer and the death penalty. But most saliently, religion does not play a significant role in their lives. As political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio recently demonstrated in the Public Interest (""Our Secularist Democratic Party,"" Fall 2002), liberal secularists are at least as influential in molding the platform of the Democratic Party as are Christian conservatives for the Republicans.

The differences in charity between secular and religious people are dramatic. Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions.
- Arthur Brooks (excerpted)
http://www.policyreview.org/oct03/brooks.html

Do religious people give more money to organizations that help the poor than non-religious individuals? The answer is a resounding "yes" according to a recent article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion by three sociologists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This should be no surprise given religion's history of helping the poor.
http://www.parkridgecenter.org/Page85.html

The type of compassion that modern liberals claim as their own peculiar virtue is really a form of pity, milder perhaps than that which lies at the heart of the socialist orthodoxies, but dangerous in its own right. David Hume called pity ""counterfeited"" love. It is the false compassion that results when men exercise their kindness by committee. It is the look in the eyes of the welfare clerk or the public housing official. To be pitied by another man is to stand humiliated before him; however well-intentioned programs grounded in pity may be, they always end by laying low their intended beneficiaries. Pity does not lead to a flourishing in the pitied, though it may provoke their resentment, even their rage; the act of pitying is always a kind of strength condescending to weakness. Love awakens; pity oppresses.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_conservative_compassion.html

Poverty Rates
A portion of the population has always been in poverty, sadly. It's instructive to see how that proportion goes up or down, during the liberal Carter and conservative Reagan administrations.
Hint: While Carter proclaimed he was helping the poor, their numbers increased. When Reagan began to get government out of people's way, the percentage of poor decreased. Coincidence?
Private Charitable Giving
Everybody has heard about the "greed and heartlessness of the Reagan era". But a look at what actually happened, tells quite a different story. During the liberal Carter era, charitable giving actually declined as people became accustomed to letting Government take care of the poor. Not until the conservative Reagan era dawned, even while rich and poor alike started to see increases in prosperity, did people begin to take on more responsibility to the poor, and charitable giving skyrocketed.
http://www.little-acorn.com/cvr01.htm

Worse than the practice of conrating culture, viewpoint, and skin color, Sleeper says, is the tendency of some liberal whites to hold blacks to lower standards. Sociologist Andrew Hacker, for example, tries to explain away black crime as a natural response to discrimination. But Sleeper argues that just as the early civil rights movement "invoked moral judgements in order to convict white segregationists of sin" so we all should hold ghetto residents to basic standards of behavior and not deny them moral agency. So too, in university admissions, if part of the argument for integration is to reduce prejudice, he says, all the more reason for blacks to be held to the same standards as whites. Surely, many blacks suffer from inadequate educational training, and consideration of class disadvantage is appropriate; but it is part of liberal racism, Sleeper says, to assume that even the most affluent and educated black family is somehow educationally
disadvantaged.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles

the egress to a higher quality of life for minorities in the US is to become as "white" as possible thru skin colour, dress, speech and mannerisms. this is manifest bigotry regardless of political persuasion of the party in power.

I'm curious if Dys or Walter or Edgar find anything specific in Williams essay that they think is in error and why?

Senator Kerry and others have criticized Bush for snubbing the NAACP convention. Here's my question to you. If you were president would you speak before a group whose president, Kweisi Mfume, said, "We have a president that's prepared to take us back to the days of Jim Crow segregation and dominance." or whose chairman, Julian Bond, who said, "[President Bush] has appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and has chosen cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."?

It's always been my contention that the conservative vision shows far greater respect for blacks than the liberal you-can't-make-it-without-us vision. For decades there have been buy-off-the-black-vote presidential appointments like secretaries of labor, health and human services, education, and housing. But it's been conservative presidents who have appointed blacks to top positions of responsibility and authority such as Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Republican presidents didn't make these appointments to buy off the black vote. They chose the best people around who just happened to be black Americans.

You need to reread your history on the civil rights movement. There were more republicans who voted for civil rights then there were Democrats. It was over 80% of reps that voted and just over 60% of dems that voted.

I would say the Republicans were the lead votes for civil rights not Democrats.

How old are you, Baldimo? B/c that's a pretty lame argument. It's not about "republican vs. democrat," but rather about legal segregation and disfranchisement of a people within the United States. http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/transition.htm

He seems to be forgetting that without the liberals willing to step up and protest laws of "separate but equal," there would be no Condeleeza Rices or Clarence Thomases out there in gov't appointments.