Dallas mayor Eric Johnson, a Democrat, caused shock waves in Texas and beyond when he announced he’s switching parties to become a Republican. “Next spring [2024], I will be voting in the Republican primary. When my career in elected office ends in 2027 on the inauguration of my successor as mayor, I will leave office as a Republican.” Johnson, who previously served in the Texas State Legislature, has been a lifelong Democrat. He’s also a Black man. Dallas, with 1.3 million people, is the nation’s ninth largest city. It is also, as the N.Y. Times notes, “a solidly Democratic city, and backed President Biden in the 2020 presidential election and the former congressman Beto O’Rourke in his failed bid for governor last year.”
Johnson cited as his reasons for bolting the party the “defund the police” movement that has captivated so many liberals in recent years, as well as the high taxes Democrats have imposed on the working class—although some Democrats have theorized his switch is due to ambition for statewide office in red-red Texas. Either way, Johnson’s abandonment of the Democratic Party comes at a time when the historic allegiance of Black voters to Democrats is under assault as never before. One example is the emergence of South Carolina Senator Tim Scott as a serious presidential candidate in the Republican presidential primaries. In Georgia, where the Black population is 31%, “Republican Gov. Brian Kemp more than doubled his support among Black voters to 12% in 2022 compared with 5% four years ago,” the Associated Press reported. “Republicans have made small, but notable, inroads with Black men during the Trump era,” Axios notes. “We're seeing culturally conservative Black voters more comfortable associating with the Republican Party.”
Many Black Christians believe the country has strayed too far to the left when it comes to LGBTQ issues (an irony, considering the Black community’s historic experience with exclusion). But another reason, possibly more influential, is crime. African Americans bear an increasingly large share of the harm from crime, and “African American offenders, meanwhile, are committing an increasingly large share of violent crimes.” As we’ve seen here in Oakland, particularly with the emergence of Seneca Scott as a factor in politics, our Black communities in many senses are leading the movement for more police and greater enforcement of the law. The Oakland chapter of the NAACP, which has called for the recall of Pamela Price, a Black woman, is a further example of how the Black community is turning against liberal or “woke” Democrats because of the perception that the latter are soft on crime.
If this trend for Black people to leave the Democratic Party is indicative of a greater inclination of Americans for more police, then I welcome it. Although I identify as a Democrat, it’s evident to me that my party has drifted away from its traditional support of public safety. Instead, “social justice”—a meaningless phrase—has become the Democratic Party’s mantra, and the result is the lawlessness and devaluation of the police we see in Oakland. In fact, the dividing line between “Democratic” values and “Democratic Socialist” values has becoming increasingly blurred. We have politicians, like Pamela Price and Carroll Fife, who may formally identify as Democrats but whose politics are more associated with authoritarian Socialism and Cuban-style Communism than the Democratic values of John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton or even Barack Obama.
Then, too, I fear that politicians such as Eric Johnson conveniently overlook the more sordid aspects of the Republican Party: its squalid marriage of convenience with violent, White Christian nationalists, its rejection of science in favor of superstition and rumor, its steadfast and hypocritical support of Donald Trump, its inherent ethnophobia and misogyny, not to mention its vile homophobia. The moment Eric Johnson, or anyone else, declares himself a Republican, that person by default embraces those evils, whether they admit it or not.
Still, it’s good that crime has become such a big issue in America. As long as voters are rightfully concerned about their safety, we have a chance to flush radical, anti-cop agitators like Cat Brooks out of our system and get back to protecting our people from the ravages of out-of-control crime.
Steve Heimoff