Blacks who aspire to achieve the American Dream for themselves and their community should support conservative political candidates and policies, because these are the leaders and laws who have enabled the greatest number of people of all walks of life to achieve that dream.  Free-market capitalism, the rule of law and private property rights have created more prosperity for more people of all races than any other system anywhere in the world at any time in history.

Where are African-Americans suffering most in America today?  In inner cities like Detroit; Chicago; Baltimore; Los Angles; and Washington, D.C.  Who runs these cities?  Democrats, socialists, and mafias.  Say what you will about a dysfunctional Republican Party, but there have been more Elvis, unicorn, and Tooth Fairy sightings in this country than sightings of Republicans in the vicinity of Detroit City Hall in the last three generations.  What does the average black have to show for fifty years of prostrate loyalty to the Democratic power elite?

Today the black youth unemployment rate is double that of whites, and the percentage of children born out of wedlock to high school dropout girls is north of 70%.  The rate at which young black gangsters murder other young black gangsters is off the charts.  And the thing is, this was not so fifty years ago.  For all of the advances that educated and married middle-class blacks have made in the last two generations, for too many blacks, the stark reality of their lives is worse than it was for their forebears even before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  For much of the 20th century until the mid-1960s, the unemployment rate for young blacks was lower than the rate for young whites.  The illegitimacy rate was much lower, and economic advancement was occurring across the board, not just for a handful of fortunate people.  The retrogression is correlated with the socialist welfare state constructed by Democrats, which took off after 1965.

Education is an indispensable key to economic advancement.  But Democrats militantly refuse to permit low-income African-American parents to have any choice whatsoever in where they send their kids.  Stuck in a failing school?  Too bad; the interest of the elite leadership of the teachers unions takes precedence over the welfare of your child.  Money that should be put directly into the hands of parents is instead siphoned off by the Democratic-public employee union machine.

Liberals and Democrats believe that blacks are incapable of succeeding in America unless they are treated like children, with the federal government caring for them and feeding them all along the way, while restricting their actual freedom to act or even think for themselves.  Conservatives believe that blacks can advance along with all other Americans if they are given the opportunity and embrace the responsibility of liberty, free markets, private property, and capitalism that has been the source of all of America's prosperity.

We believe that African-Americans can compete and succeed because they have proven time and time again that they can, in highly competitive and merit-based fields like sports, entertainment, the arts, business, and the military.  Certain independent all-black high schools in Washington, D.C. have produced world-class doctors, lawyers, scientists, artists, judges, and generals.  In the middle of the last century, a high school in Harlem came in second place when compared to three other high schools in working-class white neighborhoods on New York's Lower East Side.  Things have gotten worse, not better, where Democrats hold the power.

Conservatives are deeply and actively concerned about uncontrolled illegal immigration, the effects of which hurt entry-level blacks particularly hard.  The Democrats are pursuing an irresponsible and destructive immigration policy because they think it benefits them politically.

But let us praise Democrats for one thing: they are supreme communicators.  They have convinced millions of American minorities that Republicans are racist bigots, in spite of Republicans voting in greater numbers than the Democrats did for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in spite of the Ku Klux Klan members being all Democrats, in spite of conservatives' support for the freedom of education to be had through school voucher programs.  The fact is, the Republican Party, for all of its warts, has the superior record on civil rights and bestowing the blessings of liberty on blacks from the present day all the way back to the party's founding in the 1850s for the purpose of ending slavery, which it accomplished through the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln.

Conservatives celebrate Frederick Douglass (Republican), Booker T. Washington, and Harriet Tubman along with every American who has achieved great things against great odds.  In our day, this includes Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas (who was recently maligned once again in a Hollywood hit piece), Allen West, Ben Carson, Larry Elder, Jesse Lee Peterson, and one of the world's (not just the black community's) leading living economists and philosophers, Thomas Sowell.  These are not "Uncle Toms," "sellouts," or otherwise mascots whom whites pat on the head and give affirmative-action participation awards to; these are leaders who would be leaders no matter their race or ethnicity, whom millions of people, white, black, brown, yellow, and red, look up to and seek to emulate.  We call them leaders because they have earned our respect, not because they flatter us.

The Democratic Party, to which I once proudly belonged, was once liberal in the best sense of the word, valuing liberty, education, and equality before the law, and opposing tyrannies like communism.  The high water mark of that brand of liberalism was 1963, with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on the Washington Mall.  But later that year, a communist assassinated our last great liberal president, and by 1968, the radical left acquired its stranglehold on the party, taking over our universities, the press, the administrative agencies, and eventually the White House.  That radical left has favored and promoted rabble-rousers and separatists over legitimate achievers and unifiers ever since, threatening anyone who dares question their orthodoxy with the vile and dreaded label of "racist."  It's time for Americans across the rainbow to reject this lie and take their liberty back.

Howard Hyde is author of the book Escape from Berkeley: An EX-liberal progressive socialist embraces America (and doesn't apologize).