In theory. But politics doesn't happen only in theory. And in the current American political reality, we have two political parties who in some important sense have collapsed. The Republicans are now the Bunker Boy party. Trump is driving the position and tone of the party, and he's generally incompetent at government and knows only demagoguery as a political strategy. And he's a serious authoritarian. Robert Reich puts it this way:
Trump is a fascist. https://t.co/E77DID8hiB— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 7, 2020
But in a country that has been through two weeks of a genuine popular uprising against white racism and militarized policing, this is man who is leading the Democratic Party. Joe Biden Warns Of "Predators On Our Streets" Who Were "Beyond The Pale" In 1993 Crime Speech America Rising PAC 06/18/2020:
Yes, that was 27 years ago. And Biden has enough sense to try to strike a different tone in today's political environment. We have to hope he does! Because trying to out-Republican the Republicans, or trying to sound moew authoritarian than the authoritarians, which is exactly what Biden was doing there, is not only a losing strategy for 2020. It also would leave the new Democratic President with no mandate but a Republican-but-not-Donald-Trump one.
It will be interesting to see if the Republicans and/or other pro-Trump groups will try to use this videa to depress Democratic turnout in some areas. Because this whole segment drips with racialized fear-mongering. He didn't need to be specific about the race of the incorrigible evildoers he was talking about her. This was a period in which violent crime really had peaked. But the political context was heavily racialized by blaming crime on dishonest and demagogic images of degenerate, conscience-less black young men - who came to be labelled by a pseudo-scentific label of "superpredators". So when Biden says in that clip after 2:50, those scary monsters need to be "in jail. Away from my mother. Your husband. Our families," he didn't need to hold up cartoon from a Citizen Council magazine to show people who he was talking about.
A sad contemporary documentation of this assumption around that time came from Thomas Edsall with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991). Allegedly taking a liberal perspective, Edsall argued that whichever party was seen as the most anti-black party would dominate American politics for the foreseeable future. The 1992 Presidential victory of Bill Clinton provided convicing evidence against that argument. But Joe Biden, working with the Clinton Admnistration, was still on that bandwagon.
The attractiveness of that position for the Democrats of that day was in no small measure a function of the fact that California at the was considered a safe Republican state in Presidential elections, and therefore Democrats needed to win votes from conservative Southern whites in national elections. Clinton and Gore actually carried California in 1992. And California Gov. Pete Wilson permanently tarnished his own reputation and made California a safe Democratic state by his successful passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. The law itself was overturned by the courts as unconstitutional. And it boosted Latino voting rates in California and shifted Latino voting preferences significantly more to the Democratic side.
So even the supposedly hardheaded, pragmatic calculation driving that brand of Democratic politics in the early 1990s was highly questionable.
And yet, here we are in 2020, with the Democratic Party still trying to sound as bland and accomodating as possible to Republcian positions. Of course, the Democrats still have a long list of policy positions they recite that makes the eyes of even the staunchest Democratic partisans glaze over after a few seconds. But the define their themes and images around a bland moderation rather than developing themes that build support for Democratic reforms.
For instance, Barack Obama did a "virtual town hall" last week. (Obama holds virtual town hall on policing and civil unrest PBS Newshour 06/03/2020) He was clear and comforting and thinks things have mostly gotten better over the last ten years on the white racism front. And talks about task forces. [Deep sigh!]
I've missed the protest signs saying, "We Demand a Task Force!" That's like a throwback to those long-ago days of, oh, a month ago when people were scandalized at talk about a "revolution" in the form of, well, national health insurance and higher voter participation.
The 1 1/3 hour-long event also features legendary freedom fighter and Wall Street lawyer Eric Holder. Who was Better Than Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. He quotes Richard Pryor saying that "you don't see many old fools". Does this guy not talk to anyone over 35? Did he pay any attention at all to the age patterns among white people who voted for Bunker Boy in 2016?
It also features Phillipe Cunningham, who sits on the Minneapolis City Council and who according to his Wikipedia profile "identifies as black, queer, and transgender." He gives a (to me) strangely chipper pitch about all the constructive things they've been doing to reduce police violence in, uh, Minneapolis. That same city council just passed what sounds like a bold "abolitionist" reform of their police forces. But after Minneapolis cops touched off a nationwide peaceful revolt by murdered George Floyd, I'm not sure how much they have to bring in the way of successful police reform ideas at theis moment.
The Democrats do seem to be using Obama as a major surrogate for Biden. Which is smart politics.
But we still need to be concerned about what a government can accomplish whose only political mandate is We're Not Trump. Rick Perlstein has this take on the moment (Michawel Finnegan, Biden vows police reform after sealing Democratic nomination to challenge Trump Los Angeles Times ):
Historian Rick Perlstein described Biden, a U.S. senator for 36 years, as a “bellwether politician” who — like Johnson before he ascended to the presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination — is not easily seen as a leader of major structural change in American society.
But the “interlocking catastrophes” of COVID-19, a historic surge in unemployment and now racial upheaval could well force Biden, should he unseat Trump, to rise to the occasion and pass laws as sweeping as the New Deal adopted under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to overcome the Depression, he said.
“The kind of sink-or-swim ideology of America is not going to cut it,” said Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” a book on the social turbulence of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States. “So it is in a lot of ways a New Deal moment, and it really demands a president who’s willing and able to build a coalition for structural change, or else we’re going to face all kinds of catastrophes like the ones we’re going through now.”
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