It's My Party (15 page)

If for a change the Republican Party were actually to make a concerted effort to appeal to African-Americans, what should
it do? Justin Adams provides a clue.

If his parents imparted one value to their children, Justin told me, it was the importance of education. Justin’s parents
went over their homework with Justin, his brother, and his two sisters every night. During the summers, when the neighborhood
white children were playing games in the street or spending days at Disneyland, Justin’s parents made their own children continue
their studies. “My parents bought a big chalkboard to drill the four of us children over the summer,” Justin says. “It’s still
in the house.” His parents so impressed on him the importance of education that Justin feels compelled to get just as much
education as his abilities permit. This is why he’s working on his doctorate. The fat jobs in high tech will have to wait.

Although Justin’s family took matters further than most—Justin’s older brother got an MS in electrical engineering while his
younger sister received a doctorate in molecular biology—polls indicate that black people across the country place the same
importance on education. Yet a disproportionate number of black children are consigned to the country’s worst public schools.
Force people who value education to send their children to bad public schools, and what do you get? Support for vouchers.
Almost half of African-Americans support vouchers—one of the highest proportions of any ethnic group.

How do vouchers work? Each year parents receive a check—that is, a voucher—for roughly the same amount that it costs to educate
each of their school-age children in a public school. The parents may spend that money enrolling their children at the school
of their choice—a public school, a charter school, a religious school, a technical school, or any other school. Vouchers face
bitter opposition from teachers’ unions, which in turn represent an important constituency of the Democratic Party. Indeed,
teachers’ unions have fought voucher initiatives so fiercely—when a voucher initiative appeared on the California ballot in
1993, the California Teachers Association spent some $10 million campaigning against it—that voucher programs have been put
into effect in only a handful of communities.

In 1992, during his first campaign for mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, the Republican Bret Schundler went door-to-door in
his city, explaining vouchers to parents, many of whom were African-American. He told them that a public school education
for each of their children cost $9,000 a year. Then he asked if they believed they could get a better education for their
children if they were simply given the money and permitted to spend it on any school they chose. “Not one parent said, ‘I
don’t understand,’ ” Schundler has written. “Instead they replied, ‘Thank God.’ ”

Supporting vouchers would permit the GOP to prosper, gaining support among middle-class African-Americans while helping children
who would otherwise attend bad public schools. Yet Republican politicians have tended to shut their eyes, imagine the ferocious,
well-funded opposition from teachers’ unions that voucher plans would engender, then surprise themselves with the number of
other proposals they can come up with instead. Bret Schundler has found it impossible to get a voucher plan through the New
Jersey legislature—a body controlled by Republicans. The only voucher plan a Republican has managed to enact was signed into
law last year by Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. According to Bush’s legislation, vouchers will be given to parents whose children
attend the state’s worst public schools—but only after the schools have failed to meet certain standards in two out of four
years.

The GOP might never give vouchers the support they deserve. Never underestimate the ability of Republicans to miss an opportunity.
On the other hand, who knows? In their heart of hearts, in my experience, a surprising number of Republicans would actually
like to do some good.

David Brady was raised in Kankakee, Illinois, one of six children in a Catholic family of Irish, German, and French descent.
His father worked at the General Mills factory. His mother sent all the children to parochial schools, and every Sunday she
scrubbed them, dressed them in their best clothes, and walked them—the family couldn’t afford a car—to church. Both David’s
parents were Democrats. I asked David over lunch if his family took its membership in the Democratic Party seriously. David
replied with a story.

“My mother was one of fourteen children,” David said, “so the kids in our family had a lot of aunts and uncles. But the one
we loved best was our uncle Ray. He’d fought in the Second World War, and he’d come home with a lot of loot—a couple of Japanese
guns, some Japanese helmets, stuff like that. He’d show that stuff to us kids, and we loved it. Then Uncle Ray did something
bad. He voted for Eisenhower. He said he liked Ike as a general. I can remember lying in bed and overhearing the grown-ups
arguing about it. For a long time, nobody talked to Uncle Ray—even a kid like me wasn’t allowed to talk to him. It was like
he’d been excommunicated. Hell, yes, we took the Democratic Party seriously.”

* * *

We are dealing here with white Catholics—that is, Catholics who are neither African-American nor Hispanic. (African-Americans
and Hispanics are so distinctive that they have to be dealt with separately, African-Americans above, Hispanics in a later
chapter.) The Irish and Germans got here first, beginning to arrive in large numbers in the 1840s. The Irish came to escape
the potato famine. The Germans came for a variety of reasons, but their desire to escape being pressed into military service
by one or another of the petty German principalities should not be underestimated. Virtually all the Irish were Catholics.
Most of them remained in cities as laborers. (Some of the few who became farmers, as it happens, settled near my grandfather,
who was a farmer himself. He also operated a water-powered sawmill that, each fall, with the rearranging of some belts and
pulleys, became an apple press. Good teetotaling Baptist that he was, my grandfather pretended he didn’t know that when the
Irish brought him their apples to press, they intended to use the juice to make hard cider. “What did he say they were going
to use it for?” I once asked my mother. She replied, “Gallons and gallons of vinegar.”) Like all urban laborers, the Irish
became Democrats. If anything set them apart, it was the aplomb with which they did so, simply transferring the animosity
they felt toward the English lords who had oppressed them for centuries in the Old World to the WASP Whigs, and, after the
formation of the GOP, WASP Republicans whom they found looking down on them in the New. (David Brady, who thinks of himself
as mostly Irish, retains this animosity toward WASPs in a remarkably pure form. If you want to get off to a bad start at a
meeting with David, show up dressed like a preppie. You’ll have to endure his gibes about penny loafers and Brooks Brothers
clothes before you can get down to business.)

The German story is more complicated. Immigrants from northern Germany were Protestants. Identifying with the Protestants
they found here, they tended to become Whigs, and, later, Republicans. Immigrants from southern Germany were Catholics. Yet
many moved to the countryside to become farmers and often, once again, Whigs, then Republicans. German Catholics who remained
in the cities became, like the Irish, Democrats. Then they underwent a final subdivision at the time of the First World War.
Although they had been unhappy enough with Germany to leave, they were nevertheless aghast when the United States waged war
on their homeland. Seeing the conflict as a Democratic war—Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was president—many German Catholics
became Republicans. The remnant that in spite of the war against their homeland remained Democratic, it seems safe to assume,
remained very Democratic.

Nearly all the rest of the white Catholics arrived, along with additional Irish and German immigrants, during the great wave
of immigration between roughly 1880 and 1924—indeed, aside from the Jews, most of those who came during the great wave were
Catholics. Still poor newcomers during the 1930s, the Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and the most recent Irish and German
arrivals found themselves won over by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and, like Jews and African-Americans, gave their
allegiance to the Democratic Party, the party of the little man.

From the New Deal to the 1960s, white Catholics voted solidly Democratic with just one exception, the 1956 presidential matchup
between Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, when Catholics gave Ike 51 percent of their vote—David Brady’s uncle Ray wasn’t the
only Catholic miscreant that year. Catholic loyalty to the Democratic Party peaked four years later, when the Irish Catholic,
John Kennedy, ran for president against the Anglo-Saxon Quaker, Richard Nixon. Kennedy took 78 percent of the Catholic vote.
“I licked envelopes for Jack Kennedy,” David Brady says. “He was good-looking, he was articulate, he got into Harvard, and
he was one of us. What more could you ask?”

Since the election of 1960, the loyalty of white Catholics to the Democratic Party has tailed off. There are a couple of reasons
for this. One is that Catholics have changed. They used to receive less education than Protestants, perform blue-collar work,
and live in ethnic enclaves. Now Catholics are just as educated as Protestants, perform nearly as much white-collar work,
and are almost as likely to live in the suburbs. As Catholics have come to look more like Protestants, they have come to vote
more like Protestants, too. The second reason is that the Democratic Party has changed. It would have been unthinkable in
1960 for John Kennedy to have supported gay rights or abortion. It would be just as unthinkable in 2000 for Ted Kennedy not
to do so. For many Catholics, the Democratic Party has simply become too liberal.

* * *

After graduating from high school, David Brady remained in his hometown of Kankakee to take a job in a furniture factory.
Then he mauled his hand in a belt on the assembly line. He had to spend months recuperating. The gruesome accident changed
his life—amazingly enough, for the better. Since he had time to spare and a little money in his pocket—the union made sure
he received disability pay—David spent a few days visiting a high school friend who was studying at Western Illinois Teachers’
College. “All he did was read books and go to parties,” David says. “I thought, ‘This beats working in a factory.’ ” David
dropped by the admissions office to find out what he had to do to get in. All he needed was a diploma from an Illinois high
school, “a requirement I had barely managed to meet.” The next fall David enrolled, beginning an academic career that would
make him one of the leading political scientists in the country and a full professor at Stanford University. Like millions
of other Catholics, David escaped the blue-collar enclave in which he was raised and ended up living like a Protestant.

If David illustrates the first reason Catholic loyalty to the Democratic Party eroded, that Catholics themselves changed,
he also illustrates the second, that the Democratic Party moved too far to the left. David being David, he reached this conclusion
circuitously. Studying for his doctorate at the University of Iowa, he became a Marxist.

“You?” I asked.

“Don’t look so surprised. Marxism was a serious intellectual endeavor, and at one point in my life I was a serious intellectual.”

Attempting to put his Marxism into practice, David joined the anti-war movement. During one protest, he was arrested, although,
since he was paying for school by working on construction sites and had therefore never grown long hair or a beard, he had
to beg the cops, some of whom were Irish, and who recognized a decent Catholic boy when they saw one, to drag him off to jail
along with the more bedraggled protesters. At first the protests in which David participated were peaceful. Then they grew
violent. When they did, David dropped out of the anti-war movement. “The kids were coordinating their movements with walkie-talkies,
smashing windows, serious stuff. During one of the protests some fat cop had a heart attack. I figured the Vietnam War wasn’t
his
fault,” David said.

Growing uneasy with what he saw of Marxism in practice, David began to wonder about Marxism in theory. “The idea was that
workers would all be brothers if only they were freed from class oppressors. It didn’t seem to be working out that way in
the Soviet Union. Ho Chi Minh wasn’t such a nice guy. Mao killed maybe 40 million people, maybe more. Stuff like that starts
to add up. You say to yourself, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s think this over again.’ ”

David read extensively in economics, finding himself impressed by the work of Milton Friedman. Then, pursuing his specialty,
the politics of government regulation, David realized that the more he learned, the more he concluded that government regulations,
no matter how well-meaning, distort markets so badly that they almost always do more harm than good. By the time he moved
to Texas to teach at the University of Houston, he was a conservative. “That’s what happened. I became a conservative first.
Turning into a Republican came second.”

It also came hard. On election day 1980, David stepped inside the voting booth intending to cast his ballot for Ronald Reagan.
It would be the first time in his life he had voted for a Republican. He put his hand up to the lever. He couldn’t pull it.

“I saw my father’s face,” David explained. “He was saying, ‘Son, what are you doing? You know you can’t vote for a
Republican
.’ ” A widely regarded political scientist, David walked out without casting a vote.

Four years later, in 1984, David once again stepped inside the voting booth intending to cast his ballot for Ronald Reagan.
But his father appeared to him again. This time when David left without voting, he got a pass that would permit him to return
later in the day. He figured all he needed was a couple of hours to get his nerve up. “I called a buddy in Washington who
was a pollster. He told me it was shaping up as a landslide for Reagan. Once I knew that—once I was
sure
Mondale was going to lose—I went back and voted for Mondale.”