Minority Report

Then there is the dust jacket cover, a 1960 photo of a beautiful but nationally unknown African-American woman. (She happens to be Jewel LaFontant, the first female deputy solicitor general and mother of Barack Obama confidant John Rogers.) Why, conservatives may ask, such an anonymous image instead of one of the GOP’s black stars? Flip through the index and there is no reference to any of the high-profile contemporary black Republicans who belie the author’s suggestion of loneliness: Rep. Mia Love, for example, one of the most heralded freshmen in the 114th Congress, or Dr. Ben Carson, arguably the hottest name in grassroots conservative politics. There is a scant one-line reference to Sen. Tim Scott, the only black person ever elected to a Senate seat from the old Confederacy, and a brief mention of Condoleezza Rice, who requires no further description. 

Dismissal, though, would do a disservice to Leah Wright Rigueur’s interpretation of a political evolution that conservatives ignore at their peril. The Republican party she depicts, for much of the last century, had its share of black voters, and could claim to be an influential voice within the African-American community. But today it is a brutal fact of life that the Republican party is simply loathed by an overwhelming number of black Americans. To most, the source of that loathing is deeper even than their affinity for a black Democratic president, and it rests on a gut suspicion that the modern GOP is a comfortable enabler of white racial resentment. Rigueur’s implication is hard to refute. There are no sensible Republicans who view this as a good space, morally or politically, for a national party to occupy, and it is worthwhile to take a close look at how generations of Republicans tried, in vain, to avoid this moment.

To be sure, Rigueur lacks the pure storytelling skill that has allowed other authors to spin bestsellers out of some of the same material, and there is a denseness of detail that sometimes buries her larger points. But The Loneliness of the Black Republican is meticulous, well-crafted, and consistently astute about the fractious recent history of the Grand Old Party. If the Republican party in the Reagan through Obama era seems to divide over tactics but rarely over policy objectives, and almost all of its politicians operate within a relatively strict consensus, it has not always been that way—and a reader understands better what a divided GOP really did look like. 

Republicans should also appreciate how thoroughly Rigueur shreds some of the left’s demeaning tropes about black Republicans. Skeptical media invariably brand them as either cast-offs striving for a shorter line of advancement or empty vessels that shortchange their own history out of some misguided illusion of “colorblindness.” If they are granted the credit of sincerity, black Republicans are often depicted as sincere right-wing freaks. But as Rigueur describes it, the overwhelming majority of these men and women have been principled people who, in the language of insurgency, regularly spoke truth to power—often at the cost of reduced influence and access. They understood racism’s full force.  

Moreover, rather than being monolithic, they run the full political wingspan of the last three generations: liberals who distrusted the New Deal’s hypocrisies on integration; centrists trying to fend off both a Southern strategy in their own party and militancy rising in their own neighborhoods; economic nationalists who envisioned the black consumer class and its reshaping of the American marketplace; neoconservatives who made trenchant critiques about the risks of government dependency.  

What has bound these streams together is not opportunism but a coherent idea about equality of opportunity and the central place that principle must hold in the conservative (as well as the liberal) imagination. As Rigueur observes, the theme of individual dignity and empowerment that came to define black conservatives has been absorbed, at least partly, into mainstream thinking on poverty in both parties.  

But let’s be honest: The homage Rigueur pays black Republicans is not why this volume has a chance to exert influence on the national dialogue. Its relevance lies in the constant question she poses: Can the ideology of the Republican party be reconciled with the goal of broadening its appeal across racial lines? To paraphrase Reihan Salam, a conservative party is—well, conservative; is there a vision that is authentically conservative, in the way most Republicans prefer, and also open to the aspirations of black Americans, a people still wrapped in struggle?  

It would have helped if Rigueur had spent time answering this question in the context of current debates. In my experience, very few top-drawer Republicans assume a rigid tradeoff between outreach to blacks and securing the loyalties of other camps in the coalition. At least five potential presidential candidates are attempting to broaden their philosophical appeal to blacks. For example, Marco Rubio is taking the policy reform route by offering proposals to restore accountability to the anti-poverty bureaucracy. Rand Paul is channeling distrust in the black community over police overreach and punitive sentencing for drug offenses. Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ben Carson are courting the lingering traditionalism in the black community around the definition of marriage and angst over abortion on demand. 

But candor requires acknowledging the limits of these strategies. None of these contenders has fashioned anything resembling a comprehensive vision for how to attack the racial disparities that continue to undermine the ideal of E Pluribus Unum. Not one likely candidate has offered an initiative for the stunning levels of unemployment among black men under 30. None has separated himself from the dramatic reductions in food stamps that congressional Republicans have sought. None has outlined an alternative to the Affordable Care Act for insuring the working poor, a large number of whom are black. 

So the right struggles with a reality that will persist well after Barack Obama has left the White House. Rigueur correctly describes a tension—and the GOP needs to acknowledge it in order to address it—between the predominant African-American experience and the fiercely individualist roots of modern conservatism. A worldview that identifies personal drive as the hinge point for achievement wrestles with the conviction of most African Americans that discrimination is still entrenched and subversive. 

These dueling themes of responsibility are spilling into the streets: They animate the fault lines between black millennials, who are demonstrating against police shootings, and white conservatives, who are perplexed that such protests so infrequently arise in the context of black-on-black killings, and they drive the ferocity of the fight over Medicaid expansion. Yes, Obama liberalism has failed to transcend these chasms, but it has the advantage of shifting demographics. To win more black votes, and to govern without further splitting the country, Republicans will have to reconcile conservatism with the needs of distressed black Americans.   

In the short term, that challenge will only deepen. America is currently observing the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that helped produce a voting rights statute made possible by both Republican and (northern) Democratic votes. This is a noble legacy that, for many black Americans, is now engulfed in partisan politics. The charge will be made that Republicans are obsessed with restricting voting through ID requirements and that a conservative Supreme Court is unraveling some of the foundations of the Voting Rights Act. Any Republican, black or white, is a lonely character in a narrative that portrays today’s GOP as the inheritor of George Wallace’s jargon about federal tyranny and states’ rights. 

Shaking off that image, and refashioning a conservatism that is responsive to every American, is a project the Republican party would do well to embrace.

Artur Davis, who represented Alabama’s Seventh Congressional District as a Democrat during 2003-11, joined the Republican party in 2012.