The Swing Vote: The Leverage We Refuse to Use
A vote that is guaranteed is a vote that is worthless.
Black American Party · Identity
True Black Americanism
Not conservative. Not progressive. American - and specific about what that means.
The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
Not conservative. Not progressive. American - and specific about what that means.
True Black Americanism is the recognition that Black Americans are a distinct people with a distinct history inside the American nation, whose interests are best served by full participation in the American project on our own terms rather than by adopting either existing faction's programme wholesale.
It is patriotic without being naive, and critical without being alienated. Both halves are required. A politics that cannot love the country produces exile; one that cannot criticise it produces servility.
From the conservative tradition: the family, enterprise, self-reliance, constitutionalism, sound money, and a suspicion of dependency. From the progressive tradition: the insistence that structural injustice is real, measurable and worth legislating against.
It refuses the conservative pretence that the playing field is level, and it refuses the progressive proposition that Black Americans are best served by permanent client status. Those refusals are what make it a third position rather than a blend.
Black Americans are not guests in this country, not a problem to be managed, and not a constituency to be rented. We are founding contributors with an unpaid account and an unbroken claim on the promise of the founding documents.
What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans. That sentence is the whole doctrine, and it is meant literally - a country in which its most historically disadvantaged people are prospering as owners is a country working as designed.
The position that Black Americans are a distinct people within the American nation whose interests are served by full participation on their own terms - patriotic without naivety, critical without alienation.
It takes family, enterprise and constitutionalism from one and the reality of structural injustice from the other, while refusing the pretence that the field is level and the proposition that Black Americans should be permanent clients.
A vote that is guaranteed is a vote that is worthless.
The mechanics are public, unglamorous and entirely achievable. Most people have simply never been told them.
A PAC is how a constituency speaks in the language the political system actually listens to.
We keep producing extraordinary leaders and no machinery. Then we lose the leader and start over.
The two-axis map of American politics was not drawn with Black American interests in mind.
Black American political attention is confined to a narrow band of subjects, and the confinement is not accidental.
$10 a month for the private members network, business referral and local organizing.
Become a member →Twelve chapters and 200+ cited lessons. One-time $40, one year of access.
Enroll now →