Preference cascades are tricky things.
A preference cascade occurs when a group of people who have long felt strongly about something they felt they couldn’t express suddenly find out that there are a lot of people who feel the same way. It happened in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, when the rise of Solidarity started a series of shocks to the decaying edifice of communist control that made people realize that just about all their fellow citizens hated living under communism just as much as they did.
Now a similar preference cascade may be taking place among black Americans willing to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party.
For years, Black America’s absolute fidelity to the Democratic Party has been one of the bedrock assumptions of political calculations in the United States, with Democratic Presidential candidates regularly receiving some 90% of the black vote every four years. The pattern was so pronounced that neither Republicans nor Democrats felt the need to aim campaign pitches at black Americans, Republicans because they felt it was useless and Democrats because they felt it was unnecessary.
During the same period, cities across American enjoyed uninterrupted Democratic Party control and uninterrupted decay. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia: None has had a Republican mayor in the last half century. Black Americans voted for Democrats in near-monolithic numbers since 1964 only to see the cities they lived in continue to get worse.
Now, thanks to President Donald Trump, that may all be changing:
The black community is not owned. They’re free Americans with free minds, talents, and ideas and deserve to practice and perfect that level of autonomy just like everyone else does.
However, the Democrats have more or less forbidden anyone from the black community from reaching across the aisle or considering any ideas that break from their approved ideological boundaries. Being a black person and a Republican will cause the Democrats to suddenly turn on you in vicious ways. They’ll lob racist names at you like “Uncle Tom” or worse.
They’ll even arbitrarily decide that you’re not really black.
It’s a brave thing to step out of line and disagree with a large group at the best of times but this is a time when political tensions are at their height. Any political or ideological disagreement could result in your entire life being destroyed by the mob.
For a black person in America, I can only imagine how difficult it is to stand up and say that you’re not going to go along with the approved behavioral codes set for you by the mainstream social guidelines. It will result in a backlash, but the black community knows how to endure, and little by little, they’re enduring the hate and anger thrown at them for reaching across the aisle and shaking hands with the man you’re not supposed to ever even look at without scorn.
It started with Kanye West hugging President Donald Trump and talking about how much he likes him. Maybe they thought that was the end of it. West is a massive talent but they could write him off as loony.
But then recently, Ice Cube thanked Trump for all the things he’s doing for the black community. Cube is a legend, and calling him crazy wasn’t going to fly in this case.
Lil Pump also came out with his own profanity ridden endorsement of Trump.
Now, as my colleague Alex Parker recently wrote, Lil Wayne did the exact same. He sent out a tweet containing a picture of him smiling with Trump and thanking him for the work he’s doing on criminal justice reform.
Democrats are incredibly upset and it’s not hard to understand why. These endorsements will have an effect. If they don’t outright turn people to vote for Trump, then they’ll do something even more horrifying. They’ll make reaching across the aisle a normal thing to do, and the distrust and prejudice against Republicans that the Democrats have built and fostered for so long will begin to dissipate.
Unapproved ideas may begin to creep in and delusions will begin to melt. The Democrat party will lose its hold on the black community and the vote they took for granted for so long will begin to lessen.
Perhaps the Democrats didn’t see this coming, but perhaps the world should have.
The black community isn’t a community known for being friendly with the establishment. They have a lot of reasons to be distrustful or resentful of it as you can imagine. Trump is anything but the establishment. He came in as an outsider whose political experience was a few failed campaigns and some meetings with politicians in the past.
When Trump hit the scene it was clear he wasn’t a part of the Washington machine. He wasn’t a politician and he didn’t care much for their rules. It was clear they hated him for it from the word “go.”
Trump began getting to work for the black community, bringing their unemployment levels to all-time lows. He lowered their taxes and opened up opportunity zones. He began channeling money to black colleges. He’s also been doing a lot for criminal justice reform, which was overdue for change.
The black community began to wake up and see what was happening. The Democrat party hadn’t been on their side for a long time. It was using them. Little by little that became apparent, and soon you had black people switching parties.
Maybe the Democrats thought they had the black community on lock, but the black community proved that they’re not owned by anyone.
The rapper endorsements were significant in a way that all those “Actors reunions for Biden” were not. Does anyone think the Seinfeld cast would endorse anyone but liberals?
Rap stars endorsing Republicans, especially a Republican President so hated by white political elites as Donald Trump, is just about unprecedented. Many black people may be low information voters, but they know their cities are broken, they know that Democrats run their cities, and most don’t think that rioting, looting and defunding the police are answers.
Seeing not just black celebrities endorsing Trump, but black celebrities whose entire images revolve around being “ghetto” endorsing Trump does carry novelty value. That’s the sort of thing that gets attention and breaks through to voters that never watch CNN or pick up The New York Times. That’s the way preference cascades start.
In the meantime, what #BlackLivesMatter seems to be accomplishing is getting black-owned businesses looted and burned and getting more black people shot.
New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to The New York Times. At 4 a.m. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.
Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.
Snip.
So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.
The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives.
Indeed, #BlackLivesMatter is not about saving black lives, but imposing a radical Marxist ideology on America that is making things worse:
Their stated goal—to achieve equality for blacks—masks a different agenda. In the “What We Believe” section of the BLM site, they highlight the work they do to “dismantle cisgender privilege” and their desire to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—a structure that many, including myself and Kanye West, believe is key to rebuilding black communities. The mission statement mires a message that should be about black lives in a slew of buzzwords and Marxist psychobabble. Not all the sentiments are bad, but none will create positive change in the black community.
That’s one reason why rapper Lord Jamer says that #BlackLivesMatter is “a movement that was given to us by, you know, George Soros and his f***ing boys. Because they saw how things were going and they didn’t want to go back to the 60s to where we started having our own organic movements. That was a big f***ing problem for them.” (The Black Panthers had many problems with radical Marxism of their own, but at least were not funded and controlled by Democratic Party billionaires.)
Democratic Party affiliation among young black people is at an all-time low. “Only 47% of [under-30 black voters] say that the [Democratic] party is welcoming to Black Americans, and only 43% say they trust Democrats in Congress to do what’s best for the Black community.”
81% of black Americans don’t want reduced police funding, because they know that less police funding inevitably results in more violence against innocent black people.
A lot of black people seem to understand that the biggest problem facing black America isn’t “systemic racism,” but Democratic indifference to their suffering and the breakdown of the black family.
The American economy was doing gangbusters before the overreaction to the Wuhan coronavirus hit, with black unemployment hitting historic lows. Some of that was due to the Trump Administration actually enforcing border controls against illegal aliens. Probably no demographic has suffered from wages suppressed by illegal alien labor than working class black Americans. But the Democratic Party, seeing “demographic transformation” as a key to permanent majority status, has not just turned a blind eye the illegal alien problem but has actually encouraged it, constantly pushing for more welfare for illegal aliens and blanket amnesties for illegals.
Now that we’re on the other side of the V-shaped recovery, the economy grew at a record pace in the third quarter. Biden tax increases would kill that recovery dead.
Here’s a very short video which points out why transactional politics should trump the personal for black voters:
I think this video sums up what Ice Cube did and the thought process that has to change amongst black people. pic.twitter.com/12aBjyLdI6
— Nick (@ThisAintNick15) October 14, 2020
This Trump billboard offers a succinct summary of the choice facing all Americans:
George Soros and the radical left have offered up #BlackLivesMatters as an AstroTurf movement providing sham leadership of black Americans to empower the hard left by cowing white liberals and to keeping black Americans voting for Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is offering real reform, a booming economy, and a very strong slate of black Republican candidates like Kimberly Klacik, John James and Wesley Hunt. And in Donald Trump, Republicans have a leader capable of closing deals others thought impossible. Is getting hosts of Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel any less impossible than getting black Americans to vote Republican?
President Trump seems within striking distance of closing that impossible seeming deal. All that has to happen is for black Americans to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party that’s ignored them for the last half century.