An obituary for Clintonism (but zombie political ideas die hard)

Charles Blow has a column revisiting Bill Clinton's Presidency from a perspective I wish more Democrats - including then-Senator Joe Biden - had taken in real time, Democrats Repent for Bill Clinton New York Times 03/14/2021. Blow writes of Bill Clinton:

He was a gifted politician, a once-in-a-generation kind of prodigy, and many liberals adored him for it.

But Clinton’s record, particularly with respect to Black and brown Americans and the poor, was marked by catastrophic miscalculation. It was characterized by tacking toward a presumed middle — “triangulation,” the administration called it — which on some levels, abandoned and betrayed the minority base that so heavily supported him.

Two major pieces of Clinton-signed legislation stand out: The crime bill of 1994 and the welfare reform bill of 1996. [my emphasis]

Both were part of the larger project of neoliberalism, the crime bill being part of the cultural/social part and the welfare reform part of the larger economic and social program.

It's worth remembering that Jerry Brown was Clinton's strongest competition in the 1992 Democratic primaries. And he advocated a distinctly more New Dealish orientation. His campaign centered the problem of de facto corruption view private campaign financing. The problem has grown to enormously greater proportions since. And still isn't solved.

As Kalena Thmhave reported in Reforming Welfare and Controlling the Poor on how Trump was happy to continue the "welfare reform" trend, The American Prospect 02/15/2018. It was only the Republican Party that enabled what became Trumpism.

And the "moderate" political strategy behind it didn't even work well. "In the 1990s, an influential group of political actors argued that, by reforming welfare and making aid recipients 'play by the rules,' the Democratic Party could shed an electoral liability, free poverty politics from the crippling effects of racial resentment, and create a public opinion environment more favorable to antipoverty efforts," wrote Joe Soss and Sanford Schram (Welfare reform as a failed political strategy Focus 24:3, Fall-Winter 2006). In poli-sci jargon, that explain that actually reforming the supposed welfare problem didn't remove "welfare" a a political issue, because to conservatives, "welfare" symbolized something that was largely independent of the real existing welfare programs:

The primary problem, we argue, is that progressive revisionists focused on the visibility of welfare for Americans without attending to the fact that this policy had little proximity to the lives of most Americans. Regardless of this visibility in public discourse, policies may be distant from citizens’ everyday lives as a result of geography (as with some foreign policies), the patterning of social relations (as with an income-targeted policy in a class-segregated city), or time (as with policy effects that will be felt personally but only at some remote date). When highly visible policies have proximate, tangible effects on peoples’ lives, mass publics will experience them more directly and, hence, will gain greater ability to evaluate them through “individual observation rather than mass response to others’ cues.” By contrast, when highly visible policies exist primarily as distant objects of perception for mass publics, they may elicit rapt attention and powerful emotion, but they will lack concrete presence in most people’s lives. In such instances, claims and beliefs about policies cannot easily be tested against experience. As a result, public perceptions will depend more heavily on elite rhetoric, media frames, and widely held cultural beliefs.

Welfare reform, in our view, offers a paradigmatic example of the politics that surround distant-visible policies of this sort. As Jacob Hacker points out, AFDC was “a fiscally tiny program with … a clientele that never exceeded 6 percent of the population,” yet it became “liberalism’s symbolic beachhead and conservatives’ poster child for everything wrong with American social policy.” Details of the AFDC policy design mattered greatly for recipients but very little in most Americans’ lives. “Welfare,” on the other hand, symbolized to large numbers of Americans a deeply felt sense that government was giving special favors to a group of undeserving others. It evoked an image of easy living on government largesse, in contrast to the experiences of “normal, hardworking Americans.” [my emphasis]

The infamous crime bill also didn't bring the political benefits conservative Democrats projected for themselves in supporting it. As former North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller writes (Confessions of a Tough-on-Crime Progressive The American Prospect 07/13/2020):

There was little political reward for the tough-on-crime legislation that Democrats enacted. Republicans just said we should have been much tougher. “Three strikes and you’re out,” which gave a life sentence to defendants convicted a third time of a violent crime, should have been two strikes. We should have double- and triple-bunked prisoners, they said, without mentioning the existing federal court orders against overcrowding and disrepair of North Carolina’s prisons.

Because of the overcrowding, prisoners were often paroled after they served a small fraction of their stated sentence. We enacted “truth in sentencing” legislation, as did many states, which required prisoners to serve almost their full stated sentence. (Prison officials said some reduction for good behavior was necessary for discipline.) The stated sentence for many nonviolent crimes was reduced to match the actual sentence, and to make more room in prisons for violent criminals. Republicans ran saturation ads that we reduced sentences for those crimes. The explanation that we reduced the stated sentence but not the actual sentence was too complicated.

In the 1994 midterms, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time since Eisenhower was president. In North Carolina, we lost 25 seats in the 120-member House, and control. My seat was one of the 25. Democrats in the state Senate clung to 26 seats out of 50. There were other factors, of course. Democratic voters were dispirited that the Clinton administration had been unable to enact health care reform. But it seemed just not possible to be tough enough on crime.

Bad policy and bad politics: the sweet spot for establishment Democrats for three decades.

Maybe they are finally learning something. Hope spring eternal. Or is it, hope dies last? I'll go with the former because I have a foolishly optimistic streak.

Should Democrats pursue a duck-and-cover strategy on race-related issue in 2019-20?

Paul Starr provides kind of flashback to the Democratic politics of 1991 and the years of the Clinton Presidency in Reparations, Really? American Prospect 04/24/2019. It's a column basically saying the Democrats should never ever have publicly considered the idea of reparations for slavery.

He does talk about issues related to reparations in the context of insisting that the Democrats should discuss only "race-neutral" proposals.

Reparations for slavery is a complicated issue. And, aside from the political marketing worries, I've yet to be convinced that legally and admistratively that the US would be able to design a program that obviously reasonable and fair. Or maybe I should say, "obviously reasonable and fair in the view of Republicans." Because they don't even want black people to be able to vote. They might not want to roll back the 13th Amendment. But they're not so thrilled with the 14th and the 15th.

In fact, the 14th Amendment includes this provision, "neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."

If reparations continue to be a live issue, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Republicans demand that this portion of the 15th Amendment be changed so that the US Treasury can pay the debts of the Confederate States of America. As long as it benefits mainly the already wealthy, of course.

Because the Republicans have finally morphed into a white nationalist party headed by Donald Trump, the President who regards neo-Nazis as "very fine people". They accuse the whole Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin of being socialists who want to give white people's money to undeserving blacks and Latinos. And they're not likely to stop any time in the future.

But that doesn't mean the Democrats should hide under the bed rather than discuss serious ideas and proposals, including reparations for slavery. What Paul Starr argues that duck-and-cover is the best approach on this issue. And he partly expressses it in vintage 1991 terms:

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon must be smiling from ear to ear and celebrating their good fortune whenever they hear one of the Democratic presidential candidates endorsing a bill to establish a commission to study reparations for descendants of slaves — a proposal that everyone will take as preliminary to support for financial reparations. It's the sort of idea Trump and Bannon can work with, to expand and lock down Republican support among white voters next year.

Not every idea with a moral justification has a political justification in an imperfect world. If Democrats fail to win the 2020 election, Trump will have an opportunity to bring about deeper and more durable change in his second term than in his first. For one thing, he’ll likely be able to add two more conservatives to the Supreme Court, replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and a 7-2 right-wing Court could radically alter legal doctrine in every sphere, including civil rights.

This is pretty much the state in which the Democratic Party and Democratic leaders have been for decades. It's symptomatic of the kind of historical trauma Rick Perlstein discusses in his interview with Isaac Chotiner, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future New Yorker 01/10/2019. The "Clintonian" mode of the Democratic Party was to accept the broad Republican framing of issues but presentiong a more compassionate version of them. Or a least a less mean version. Not normally stated publicly but implicit in that approach was that black voters would have no place else to go politically.

But a signficant element of that was to try to show voters that the Democrats were not catering to black voters and were at least somewhat sympathetic to the concerns of whites racist. Bill Clinton presented a prototype version of this kind of performance with his "Sistah Soljah moment." (Rosie Swash, Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment tops year of political controversy Guardian 06/13/2011)

Here's a video of Clinton from Memoryretro at YouTube speaking in 1992 at a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition led by Jesse Jackson showing the actual Bill Clinton's Sister Souljah moment - JUNE 13, 1992:

I haven't heard the recording in a long time. And I'm struck at how crass and petty it comes across with Clinton attacking a young hip-hip artist that most white people in the US had never heard of at the time. It was a cheap shot. And not one against racist Republican politicians. There was no meaningful group of swing voters in 1992 who actually thought that Bill Clinton and the Democrats advocated randomly murdering white people, which the snippets from the singer's over-the-top words that Clinton criticized suggested. In fact, since most voters would never have associated Clinton with the hip-hop singer they didn't know existed ifl Clinton hadn't attacked her, I wouldn't be surprised if the effect wasn't to associate Clinton and the Democrats with her words in the minds of whites who wouldn't consider voting for Democrats anyway.

Here was Hillary Clinton in 1996, the next Presidential election year, continuing the approach (1996: Hillary Clinton on "superpredators" C-Span; uploaded to YouTube 02/25/2016):

Hillary there was speaking in support of the controversial Clinton Crime Bill, aka, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Jessica Lussenhop, Clinton crime bill: Why is it so controversial? BBC News Magazine 04/18/2016) In a contemporary account, Tony Poveda described how, compared to previous decades, the bipartisan support for the Crime Bill was largely a result of Democrats adopting Republican positions which the Democrats had criticized for decades (Clinton, Crime, and the Justice Department Social Justice 21:3; Fall 1994):

... what is even more striking [than the bipartisanship] about the crime policy debate of the 1990s is that it has considerably narrowed in terms of the range of policy options on the table for discussion. Liberals of the 1960s often called for an examination of the root causes of crime, the rehabilitation of offenders, and for procedural safeguards in the administration of justice. Conservatives of that period, like today, emphasized punishment and crime control in their crime agenda. These poles (crime prevention versus punishment and due process versus crime control) of the traditional liberal-conservative dialogue have largely disappeared, as measures emphasizing punishment far overshadow any consideration of crime prevention.

Instead, the major policy debate in the 1990s, at least in the congressional arena and in the media, centers on the punishment/crime control end of the continuum. Both conservatives and liberals attempt to outdo each other in their posturing and proposals to be increasingly punitive toward criminals.

While the Democrats may have been more supportive of civil rights generally, there was a huge racial component behind this crime policy. As Jessica Lussenhop writes, the 1994 Crime Bill wasn't the only cause of the mass incarceration of black men that has produced the current situation. However, "At minimum, says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, the bill reinforced the popular thinking that the solution to crime was harsher punishments." (Jerry Brown, who didn't hold public office at the time, was highly critical of the Crime Bill.)

The Sacramento Bee editorial board recalled those days in 2016. The "three strikes" refernce is to a type of mandatory sentencing laws that were becoming an unfortunate fad at the time:

Those “three strikes” Clinton talked about were well on their way to becoming law in California in 1994, when the Legislature and voters were galvanized by the murder of Polly Klaas. Proposition 184 passed overwhelmingly.

“The majority of both houses of the Legislature and the overwhelming majority of the public are in a mind to put people away forever for jaywalking, period,” said then-[California lAsembly] Speaker Willie Brown, one of only nine Assembly members to vote against the measure. “That is the mentality that is going to prevail.”

A lighter version of “three strikes” also became the centerpiece of Clinton’s federal crime bill. It was that 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that pushed the nation over the edge, one of a string of tough-on-crime measures that bloated the prison system and disproportionately decimated poor communities of color.

It’s what people, particularly young people who grew up in the lock-’em-up era, remember most. This is definitely true in New York, where voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick a nominee for president, and in California, where voters will have their say in June. [my emphasis]

The argument to sell Clinton-style "triangulation" to Democratic constituencies was the one Paul Starr uses in the quote above: Democratic Presidents are at least a little better than Republicans. So vote for (so-called) electable centrists even in the primaries because judges. Between 1994 and today, the Republicans have chosen a big majority of the current federal judges. They control the Senate and were crass about just blocking Barack Obama's last Supreme Court nominee on partisan grounds. Given that reality, it's hard to argue that the Democrats' longtime duck-and-cover centrist posture has protected the federal judiciary from become a Federalist Society colony.

Starr cites an article from The American Prospect itself from 1990 by William Julius Wilson (Race-Neutral Policies and the Democratic Coalition Spring 1990) that argued for the distance-yourselves-from-black-people approach of the Democrats. Starr notes that Wilson had by 2011 decided that affirmative action programs were okay, putting him at least as far left as the Nixon Administration in 1972. Starr quotes part of this passage from Wilson's 1990 piece:

Many white Americans have turned, not against blacks, but against a strategy that emphasizes programs perceived to benefit only racial minorities. In the 1990s the party needs to promote new policies to fight inequality that differ from court-ordered busing, affirmative action programs, and antidiscrimination lawsuits of the recent past. By stressing coalition politics and race-neutral programs such as full employment strategies, job skills training, comprehensive health care, reforms in the public schools, child care legislation, and prevention of crime and drug abuse, the Democrats can significantly strengthen their position. As [Party] Chairman [Ron] Brown himself has emphasized, reinforcing Democratic loyalty among minorities and reaching out to reclaim white support are not mutually exclusive.

Such a change of emphasis is overdue. In the 1960s efforts to raise the public's awareness and conscience about the plight of black Americans helped to enact civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. However, by the 1980s the civil rights strategy of dramatizing black disadvantage was backfiring. The "myth of black progress" theme, frequently invoked to reinforce arguments for stronger race-specific programs, played easily into the hands of conservative critics of antibias policies. The strategy reinforced the erroneous impression that federal antidiscrimination efforts had largely failed, and it overlooked the significance of complex racial changes since the mid-1960s. It also aroused concern that Democratic politicians' sensitivity to black complaints had come at the expense of the white majority. [my emphasis]

Yet Wilson also argued in that article, "while income inequality widened generally in America during the 1980s, it widened even more dramatically among black Americans." He recognizes that the "myth of black progress" was in significant part a myth. So how is it a good thing for Democratic politicians and activists to try to ignore the underlying reality? Especially for such an important part of their own political base?

There will always be conservatives warning Democrats to beware of the "white backlash," a term to which the history of slavery and segregation gives a grim double meaning. The problem is, there has been a significant number of whites "backlashing" since the moment Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The reality in 1990 and today is that Democrats can't successfully counter white backlash by adopting the "backlash" positions themselves. Or by pretending that the problems caused by white racism don't exist.

It would be more meaningful in 2019 to argue that the Democrats should be aggressive in addressing the problems affecting the base because judges. And because a lot more, too. But Starr argues instead that even suggesting that there's anything remotely substantive in the issue of reparations for slavery has practically doomed the Democrats' chances for 2020: "African Americans may or may not ever receive reparations, but the 2020 Democratic candidates who are moving in that direction have already given Trump and Bannon a priceless gift."

In other words, keep on with this version of the Democratic approach to fighting the Republicans. Or, too often, not fighting.