(The American Conservative)
Today up to 95 percent of African-American voters are aligned with the Democratic Party, and the GOP has largely abandoned its legacy of civil rights activism.
It’s tough to assert being the party of Lincoln while some Republican legislators court Neo-Confederates and other ethnic nationalist movements. They further distance themselves by advocating for voter ID laws, which disenfranchise primarily low-income and legal minority voters. (There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud by illegal or ineligible voters, let alone a single example of when such voting has actually turned an election).
It is similarly difficult for Republicans to trumpet their role in passing Civil Rights Acts while the Republican National Committee is spearheading efforts to dismantle affirmative action (Former GOP chairman Michael Steele struck a good balance on this). And perhaps most importantly, the conservative emphasis on personal responsibility sounds disingenuous to many blacks when Republicans refuse to acknowledge the profound and continuing effects of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation—let alone the persistence of overt racism, institutional and systemic discrimination, and unconscious racial bias.
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