Early in last week’s Democratic Presidential debate, in Las Vegas, just before it began to seem as if Michael Bloomberg’s cutman might rush onto the stage during a commercial break, carrying a spit bucket and an ice pack, the former mayor of New York made an observation about the candidates. “If we took off this panel everybody that was wrong on criminal justice sometime in their careers,” he said, “there’d be nobody else up here.”
He was almost right. A crude way of summarizing the remaining viable contenders in the Democratic field is to note that voters have a choice of: a former mayor who championed stop-and-frisk practices that targeted African-American and Latino men; another former mayor, who fired a black police chief after he recorded phone calls in which senior white officers made racist comments; a former prosecutor who may have helped send a wrongfully accused black teen-ager to prison; a former Vice-President who co-wrote the 1994 crime bill; a democratic socialist who voted for and defended that bill; or Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has held office only since 2013, and has no comparable stain on her record. Individual politicians often face liabilities with particular segments of the electorate. It’s unusual, though, for so many in one field to be susceptible on such a similar theme; a now entirely white Democratic slate is being asked to explain past positions on criminal-justice issues, and, specifically, the effects of those positions on people of color.
How did the Democrats end up here? Part of the problem dates to the 1994 crime bill, which Joe Biden spearheaded, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and President Bill Clinton signed into law. The bill was a response to alarming rates of violent crime—and to Republicans’ accusations that Democrats were soft on the issue. It included an assault-weapons ban and the Violence Against Women Act, but it also imposed harsh federal sentences and mandatory “three strikes” rules. Even so, no one in the Democratic leadership then could have predicted that criminal-justice reform would factor quite as it has in current politics. Hillary Clinton held public office from 2001 to 2013, but it wasn’t until 2016 that she was called out for a remark she had made in 1996, about “superpredators,” saying that “we have to bring them to heel.” Before this election, Biden was rarely challenged on his role in the crime bill. The problem isn’t just the bill but the cultural devastation of mass incarceration that it seemed to engender, and that cloud has hung over the Party, creating vulnerabilities even for younger, more progressive, and nonwhite Democrats. Senator Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign was hounded by concerns regarding her years as a prosecutor, and Senator Cory Booker dropped out before questions were widely raised about oversight of the Newark Police Department during his tenure as mayor.
In an unimaginable irony—it seems that nearly all our current ironies were unimaginable not long ago—the situation has provided an opportunity for Donald Trump. The President frequently appears challenged by the English language, but he is fluent in cynicism. In 2016, he both proclaimed that he was the “law and order” candidate and asked African-Americans, “What do you have to lose?” In fact, almost a million fewer African-Americans voted that year than in 2012. Some portion of that drop reflected the fact that it was the first election in eight years without a black candidate at the top of the ticket; another part may be attributed to voter-suppression tactics. But it also stemmed from a perception that Hillary Clinton was no different, or at least no better, than Trump on matters of race—and that perception was driven by concerns about criminal justice. In 2016, Trump won just eight per cent of the black vote, but he got a surprising thirteen per cent of the black male vote.
It is pedestrian, at this point, to note that there were differences between Trump and Clinton. Big ones. Trump’s racial cynicism reached a zenith with his signing, in December, 2018, of the First Step Act, which sets out to redress the disparities of federal sentencing guidelines. But he is no reformer. He pushed his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to crack down on low-level drug offenders. Sessions also instructed U.S. Attorneys to seek the death penalty in some drug cases, and halted programs that sought to reform chronically troubled police departments.
Nonetheless, Trump is courting the black vote. He regularly touts a record low unemployment rate among African-Americans (while declining to point out that it is sixty-seven per cent higher than the national average). In September, he told leaders from historically black colleges and universities that his commitment to them was “bigger and better and stronger than any Administration by far.” In October, he hosted a photo-ready gathering of black conservatives at the White House. At this year’s State of the Union address, he introduced people of color who were recipients of his beneficence—schoolchildren, veterans, a single mother—even as he slipped a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh. Most pointedly, his campaign aired an ad during the Super Bowl that featured Alice Marie Johnson, a black woman who had served twenty-two years of a life term for a nonviolent drug offense, before Trump commuted her sentence, at the behest of Kim Kardashian.
He still has a ways to go. Last month, the Washington Post reported that eighty-three per cent of African-Americans believe that Trump is a racist, and sixty-five per cent think that this is “a bad time” to be black in America. His strategy, though, seems designed to persuade black voters not so much that he is better than they thought but that the Democratic nominee will be worse. (Given the latest news reports, we can expect this reasoning to feature in Russian social-media disinformation campaigns, as it did in 2016.) The no-difference argument will still be false, regardless of who the Democrats’ eventual nominee is, on every issue—criminal justice, health care, education, gun control, immigration, climate change—that disproportionately affects people of color. And no Democrat will ask Hollywood to bring back movies like the racist classic “Gone with the Wind,” as Trump did at a rally last week.
It is undeniable that Trump stokes the fury of voters who support him; less recognized is his clear hope to induce despair in those who do not. The imperative for Democrats is to defeat not only Trump but also the cynicism that abides him. One calculation for his reëlection isn’t how many African-Americans will vote for him. It’s how many will be dissuaded from voting at all. ♦
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February 23, 2020 at 06:01PM
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How Did the Democrats End Up Here? - The New Yorker
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