Will Jack Ciattarelli Repudiate Last Week’s National Republican Racism Triad?

Almost exactly a year ago to this date, I authored a column on how racism had become the core message of the Republican Party.  At that time, although I had total factual support for my contentions about the GOP and racism, I had no cogent explanation for why my former party, the party of Lincoln, had descended into this quagmire of anti-African-American hatred.

I found an answer in the 2022 landmark work, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, by Vanderbilt Professor Nicole Hemmer.  As explained by Hemmer, up through the years of the Reagan administration, the paramount ideology and message of Republican conservatives was anticommunism.  With the end of the Cold War, anticommunism became inoperative as a viable conservative message.

As noted by Hemmer, the gap was filled by Pat Buchanan, who emerged as the ideological godfather of Republican conservatism.  The Buchanan substitute for the anticommunist message was overt populist racism and nativism.

Last week, the following triad of events occurred, proving beyond any reasonable doubt that racism continues to be the essence of the Republican appeal to American voters:

1.  In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott announced his intention to pardon a White US Army sergeant convicted of the murder of a White protestor at a 2020 Black Lives Matter rally.

2.  In Tennessee, two African-American Democrats were expelled from the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives as a result of their gun control protest on the House floor in the aftermath of a deadly school shooting.  A third protestor, a White woman legislator, was not expelled.

3.  In New York, Ohio US Senator J.D. Vance made a flagrantly racist attack against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, as did Donald Trump himself.  This is the same Donald Trump who refuses to apologize for demanding the electric chair for the Central Park Five, five Black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted in 1989 and subsequently exonerated of sexually assaulting a white woman in New York’s Central Park.

It is small wonder that the African-American vote has gone overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party during the last decade.  To African-American voters, the Republican Party can best be described by the initials BLDM: Black Lives Don’t Matter.

In the 2024 and 2025 state and national election cycles, in addition to the negative factor of Republican racism, there will be a powerful positive reason for the continued allegiance of African-American voters to the Democrats.  During the Biden administration, in the month of March, 2023, the Black unemployment rate hit a record low.

In New Jersey, the Republican Party is unable to win a statewide election, primarily due to the pathetic inability of the Republican Party to obtain more than an abysmally low share of the African-American vote.  Accelerating Republican national racism has made the Republican brand totally toxic among  People of Color throughout the state, a far cry from the 1985 reelection campaign of incumbent Republican Governor Tom Kean, in which he won over 50 percent of the African-American vote.

Republican 2021 gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli has been a major victim of the toxic nature of the Republican brand in the New Jersey African-American community.  He is not in the least a racist.  In fact, he has a genuine concern about the problems facing the African – American community in New Jersey.  Yet in spite of his surprisingly effective campaign against incumbent Democratic governor Phil Murphy in 2021, he was defeated primarily due to his landslide losses  in African-American communities throughout the state.

Last week’s national Republican racism triad is an example of the continuing problems facing Ciattarelli with African-American voters.  He cannot get more than an insignificant share of the African-American vote, unless he repudiates the racism of Republicans exhibited in the triad.  Yet he probably will totally fail to address it.  He appears to be paralyzed by fear that repudiation of the racism of Donald Trump and Republican racist triad participants described above will result in his total rejection by MAGA voters in the 2025 New Jersey GOP gubernatorial primary.

So expect Jack Ciattarelli to continue to maintain his silence about appalling Republican racism.  Expect that his silence will enable him to win the 2025 Republican gubernatorial primary.  Yet it will be a worthless nomination, as African-American voters in the general election once again repudiate Jack Ciattarelli, as a symbol of a Republican Party they deem to be adversarial in the extreme to People of Color.

Alan J. Steinberg served as regional administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush and as executive director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.

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