For decades, black voters have been wed to the Democrat party.  They are its most fervent supporters.  They're the ones who, quite understandably, voted for Obama in 2008, but irrationally voted for him again in 2012, after he'd trashed their economic standing with a stagnate economy and a decided preference for illegal aliens who competed with blacks for jobs.  As a New York Times opinion piece shows, what's most ironic about this obsessive fealty is that the Democrat party has been nothing but bad for blacks.

Conservatives have known for a long time that the Democrat party doesn't exist to help blacks, to elevate them, to enrich them, to uplift them, or to do any other positive thing for them. Instead, the Democrat party views blacks as votes. It's efforts for decades have been to do one thing: To make blacks so dependent on government that they are incapable of voting for any party other than the one that shovels government funds in their direction.

The tragedy of this, as conservatives have also long known, is that the Democrats' non-tender, non-loving, narcissistic, manipulative approach to blacks has destroyed them economically and socially.  That's why it was surprising to see The New York Times publish an opinion piece by Shaylyn Romney Garrett and Robert D. Putnum that details the disaster that 55 years of the Great Society have been for blacks:

In measure after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after. For example,

• The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest. And by 1995 the life expectancy ratio was the same as it had been in 1961. There has been some progress in the ensuing two decades, but this is due in part to an increase in premature deaths among working-class whites.
• The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity. College completion followed the same trajectory until 1970, then sharply reversed.
• Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed. It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.
• Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970. However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968, 50 years earlier. Even taking into account the emergence of the Black middle class, Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.
• The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed. The racial wealth gap is now growing as Black homeownership plummets.
• Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation. What data we have on national Black voter turnout indicate that nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.

The reason the Times published this honest assessment of the great society is that the authors do not draw the obvious conclusion, which is that, as Frederick Douglass long ago said, the best thing that can happen to blacks is for the government to leave them alone so they can thrive.

Instead, Garrett and Putnam know where to place the blame for black stagnation: "white blacklash" and the death of the pure early 20th-century Progressive movement that was a time of incredible virtue until Republicans killed it.  These conclusions are what intellectual dishonesty and stupidity look like.

To begin with, the Progressives were the ultimate racist eugenicists.  It was the Progressives, under Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal civil service.  Hitler copied the Progressives' racial laws.

With that truth in place, what we see is that blacks thrived when the government was not giving them welfare, reparations, social justice, etc.  And blacks stopped thriving right when the government turned its gimlet eye upon them.  That's the truth, and until blacks admit it and stop demanding that whites fix them, they will forever be caught in their destructive dependency cycle doled out to them by Democrats who do not wish them well.

Image: Frederick Douglass.  Public domain.