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DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS, & BLACKS

One of the more surprising statistics of Presidential Election 2000 was the cohesiveness of the African-American vote: blacks supported Democrats with a percentage higher than any other voting block.

African-Americans voted for Democrats by a margin of 90 to 9 percent. Judging by such results, one could easily assume that blacks have a long tradition of support for Democrats. Such, however, is not the case.

Following a vote in Congress to extend slavery into the Northwestern Territory in May, 1854, twenty House Members coalesced themselves into a group they titled "The Republican Party." Its declared purpose was to support the original anti-slavery principles of the federal government.

The first Republican Platform (1856) therefore declared:

Resolved. That with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth that all men are endowed with the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . . That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing slavery.

(Significantly, six of the nine planks in the original 1856 Republican Platform condemned slavery or focused on securing equal civil rights for all.)

Now ask yourself has the Democrats delivered on the promise the Republicans made possible?

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Democracy vs. Republic - Which one are we?

The most common–and grossly incorrect–answer to this question is that we are a democracy. The right–albeit simplistic–answer is that we are a republic. A more sophisticated answer is that we are a constitutional republic. Why does this matter?