Pundits are demanding a "Sister Souljah" moment from Joe Biden

It's fascinating how much of the 2020 political narrative in the US seems stuck in 1969, when the Nixon Administration was using "law and order" rhetoric to promote hatred and fear of civil rights and antiwar protesters. And Vice President Spiro Agnew was promoting Bircher-type rhetoric including holding up the broadcast and print media as hostile to ordinary Americans. I don't recall him using the phrase "enemies of the people" in that context. But the Republican Party at the highest trying to discredit actual news reporting began long before Donald Trump became head of the party.

I've been joking about how Mark Shields and David Brooks this year have been sounding like pundits who recently came through a time warp direct from 1969. They were in full 1969 mode on Friday about all the scary, scary black people demonstrating against police departments across the country arbitrarily murdering black people. Shields and Brooks on Trump’s RNC message, the politics of protests PBS Newshour 08/28/2020 (Transcript here):

Here are excepts from the transcript, in which Mark and Bobo both agree that the Democratic Party urgently need to denounce the antiracist protesters.

[Bobo:] I think that was revealed in the Trump speech, that he was just all over the map, because there's no core idea at the center of the thing. They may be on the course of gravitating toward law and order as their central argument. But I wouldn't say they have got there yet. They're just kind of scattershot. ...

But I would say, if you measure the mood both in the Democratic and Republican camps, Democrats are a little more anxious and Republicans are a little more confident.

And so I think that has something to do with the conventions. It has something to do with what's happened outside of the conventions, Kenosha, and this sense of rising crime and violence.

And I do think — the Democrats, I think, have come to understand, they somehow got on the wrong side of order. And they got somehow attached, even though Biden is not actually attached to it, to the idea of defunding the police.

And they need to somehow make some gesture to show they understand the insecurity of the American people. The country has been through an anxious time, with the pandemic, economic turmoil. There's just this great sense of fear, of fear and a sense of unsafety, physical unsafety, from the pandemic and everything else.

And somehow they have to address that. Now, a lot of law and order talk is code word for racism. There's no question about that. But I think a lot of it is not.

And I think Democrats would be making a mistake if they just said, oh, you're all just a bunch of cryptoracists. I think people have legitimate concerns about expressing their opinion safely, about living safely.

And so I think Biden really would do well by himself to somehow address this issue and say, no, we're for policing, we want to reform policing, but we will keep you safe.

This is just an elemental issue of politics stretching back 3,000 or 4,000 years.

It's always good to have Bobo share the wisdom of millennia with us.

[Mark Shields:] I mean, I think that Portland remains a festering boil for Democrats, that what went on in Seattle and has been reported by The Times and other news organizations is really just unacceptable in a civilized society, in a law-abiding society. And Democrats cannot be appear to be indifferent.

It's Donald Trump's opening. I mean, Donald Trump's going to run on law and order. He has no doubt — no question about that.

It was interesting that there was so heavily populated with African American speakers in his behalf at the convention, which I think was, more than anything, a political gesture and initiative to reach out to suburban, particularly women voters who have been turned off by the Republicans.

So, it's — race is a — race remains the constant in American politics. But I think David makes a good point.

[Bobo:] The Times, my newspaper, had sent out two reporters to Wisconsin after Kenosha. And they interviewed a series of people who were leaning toward Biden, and had second thoughts because of a sense of rising insecurity.

And whether that's anecdote or data, we will find out in a few days. So, I still think it's in the mix.

But political correctness was a big issue for Republicans and for Trump in 2016. And the sense that you can't speak freely, the sense that — you look at pictures of Rand Paul, for example, Senator Rand Paul leaving the White House, and getting brutally verbally assaulted, these pictures are not good.

Most people are not on Twitter, and they're not seeing them. But, for those on Twitter, those who are seeing them, those in the Facebook conservative sphere, it's become the dominant story, at least in that world.

Oddly, they failed to discuss how most of the protests have been peaceful, and much of the actual violence has been generated by far-right, white supremacist opponents of the protests, or how the Trump Administration and many city police forces has deliberately tried to provoke violence from the demonstrators and encourage clashes between hostile groups of demonstrators. In some cities, it seemed obvious that at times police deliberately delayed responded to looting, even when it was occurring in a different part of town than the peaceful demonstrations, which (coincidentally or not) helps Republicans and white commentators like Marks and Bobo to blame protesters for looting.

Longtime conservative commentator and professional twit George Will, who is theoretically a Trump critic, is getting in on the 1969 nostalgia moment. He wrote in the Washington Post (Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment 08/28/2020):

Biden’s biggest advantage in the post-Labor Day sprint is that he has an even easier presidential act to follow than Franklin D. Roosevelt had running against Herbert Hoover in 1932. But this advantage could evaporate if rioting and looting continue, and millions of voters become convinced that Democrats are complicit in — because tolerant of — the shredding of the nation’s social fabric. Is or is not Biden disgusted by mob violence in the service of political nihilism? (“Let’s protest police injustices by torching an automobile dealership!”)

He needs a Sister Souljah moment. In 1992, this rap singer was pleased by the deadly Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Candidate Bill Clinton’s criticism, not of extremism in general, but of her explicitly, reassured temperate voters that he was not intimidated by inhabitants of the wilder shores of American politics [i.e., African-Americans].

Today, even more than 28 years ago, the Democratic nominee needs to display similar independence [i.e., black people and pretty much the whole Democratic voting base]. Biden’s response last week - 43 seconds of a tepid, 93-second video tweet - will not suffice. [my emphasis]

With allegedly Trump-critical conservatives like Bobo and Will presumably know at some level that they are trying to bait the Democratic ticket into upsetting their base by denouncing the current group of civil rights protesters, which is something that would suppress Democratic turnout without winning a single vote from a white person who is remotely inclined to vote for a white supremacist like Donald Trump.

One the other hand, our star pundits are heavily committed to some stereotypical scripts on politics, to which they stick long after they might have made some sense decades ago. And the conventional pundit notion that trashing black people is always a good idea for Democratic Presidential candidates. So it's actually believable that they could be making these comments seriously.

Ruth Marcus, who substitutes for Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour sometimes and whose most frequent comment is "I agree with David", didn't go as far with the Democrats-need-to-trash-black-people line, but she was impressed with the vote-getting potential of the bizarre Republican National Convention.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/how-biden-loses/615835/?fbclid=IwAR3AXO_tlZ0VdHvQUng7UmqPUg_A_phJk4Yora6x8-7Q1EhLo720Ozzrngc But the safely conventional George Packer is also on the 1969 throwback, bash-the-scary-black-people bandwagon in This Is How Biden Loses The Atlantic 08/28/2020.

White commentators are always comfortable blaming African-Americans for whatever problems arise. As the pundits cited here are showing us, if Biden loses to Bunker Boy in the Presidential elecition, they have a ready explanation all cued up: it's the fault of all those unruly black people whining because cops are killing some of them for no good reason, year after year after year.

But there are real, serious problems with policing in the US. The kind of racial politics that may have been effective in 1992 when California was not yet a "safe" Democratic state in Presidential elections and Democrats assumed they needed to compete for conservative white votes in Southern states won't fix either the real problems or whatever current dilemmas the Democratic Party may be facing around them. Even in California, Democrats are already trying to duck their duty and retreat into the duck-and-cover fetal position that is the Democratic establishment's first impulse when faced with Republican criticism, as the Sacramento Bee editorial board explains (Police reforms face defeat as California Democrats block George Floyd-inspired bills 08/27/2020):

So much for the moist eyes and feigned empathy some California Democrats showcased during the Black Lives Matter marches that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Despite performative emoting by powerful members of California’s ruling party, a slate of necessary police reforms may be headed for full or partial defeat in the California State Legislature.

The bills, which met strong resistance from law enforcement groups and some weak-kneed legislators, teetered near the brink of failure this week. [my emphasis]

Michael German reminds us again of how drastic police problems have become nationally, Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center 08/27/2020.