We Should Still Defund the Police

Defunding the police is the first step in a longer process that may culminate in the end of policing in the United States. The repeated failure of meaningful reform have made concepts like “defunding” and “abolition” part of mainstream conversation.

September 5, 2020 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor NEW YORKER

https://portside.org/2020-09-05/we-should-still-defund-police

This summer’s uprising has forced a reckoning within the United States about the deep imprint of racism on our society. The public lynching of George Floyd pierced the veil of segregation that typically shrouds the realities in which millions of African-Americans live—straining under the mounting weight of Black death. Tens of thousands of African-Americans killed by the rapid spread of covid-19, the taped execution of Ahmaud Arbery by two white men in Georgia, the reports of Breonna Taylor’s brutal killing by Louisville police, and then Floyd’s horrifying murder in Minneapolis brought home for a broader public the police state that exists in Black America.

By June, the persistence and duration of the protests had produced historic changes in white people’s perceptions. A national poll recorded an unprecedented shift in opinion: seventy-one per cent of whites said that they think racism and discrimination are a “big problem” in the United States, and fifty-five per cent said that the anger of the protests was fully justified. In a different poll, sixty per cent expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement. This sea change in opinion was mirrored by a wave of public gestures of racial reconciliation, as a host of corporate executives acknowledged—if not accepted genuine responsibility for—their roles in sustaining regimes of racial inequality.

Nascar renounced the flying of the Confederate flag at its events. Juneteenth, long an informal day of celebrations among some African-Americans, was suddenly institutionalized as a paid holiday. Former President George W. Bush condemned “systemic racism.” At one level, the rapid, reflexive default to offering symbolic recognition of racism was quite typical. No other country engages in the cavernous nothingness of the fake apology as frequently as the United States. In the case of Black Americans, it is most recognizable in the form of big-sounding civil-rights legislation that is eventually, as the historian Leon Litwack has written, “compromised, deferred and undone.”

It is clearly a craven gesture when multibillion-dollar corporations claim that “Black lives matter,” even as they refuse their Black workers hazard pay, paid time off, or a living wage. Nevertheless, these élite searches for absolution from the sin of “systemic racism” have reaffirmed that racism is not only about burning crosses and the N-word: it is also present in the housing market, in institutions of higher education, in the job market, and most certainly in policing and the criminal-justice system. In this moment, when both the coronavirus pandemic and the uprising are laying bare structural flaws in U.S. society, there has been a renewed discussion of structural remedies. This is why “defund the police”—a demand that only a marginal handful dared to put forward just months ago—has become a central slogan of the reëmergent B.L.M. movement.

The echoes of the nineteen-sixties’ freedom struggles are easy to find. Then, as now, Black revolutionaries, including Martin Luther King, Jr., countered racist claims that poverty and social marginalization were the products of domestic dysfunction specific to Black families. In doing so, they made room for a deeper interrogation of the Black condition in the United States. Then as now, radicals stepped into that space and linked Black poverty to pervasive racial discrimination from public schools to employment opportunities to the availability of good housing. They also showed that there were financial interests that benefitted from maintaining Black inequality. Black radicals described the financial plight of ordinary Black people as evidence that their segregated communities were “colonies” within the U.S. “Internal colonialism,” as some referred to the particular oppressive conditions faced by Black people, could be found in white landlords charging exorbitant rents for rat-infested apartments and in rent-to-own stores demanding unconscionable interest rates, all because African-Americans were a captured market, isolated by relentless residential segregation.

In response to this organized theft, the Black radicals Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton coined the term “institutional racism” in their seminal book “Black Power,” published in 1967. Carmichael and Hamilton distinguished between “individual” acts of racism and the dispassionate “institutional” variety, in which the attitudes of the perpetrators were less important than the outcomes in the lives of ordinary Black people. They describe institutional racism as “less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life.” Carmichael and Hamilton went on to describe how institutional racism kept “black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative landlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.”

The recognition of institutional racism as the controlling factor in Black inequality, rather than some pernicious “culture of poverty,” pointed to the need for institutional solutions. This was the backdrop to the Johnson Administration’s vast expansion of the federal government. From 1963 through 1968, Congress, at the President’s urging, passed nearly two hundred pieces of legislation as part of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. From the Department of Housing and Urban Development to Head Start to food stamps and Medicare, these programs created a bottom through which average citizens could not fall. Spending on anti-poverty programs grew by tens of billions of dollars during the nineteen-sixties, producing dramatic declines in the number of people living in poverty across the country. By the early seventies, the poverty rate had dropped to eleven per cent, from a high of twenty-two per cent in 1959, when the federal government began keeping track.

The big spending of the era was not limited to eradicating poverty. By the mid-sixties, crime rates had begun to tick upward for a variety of reasons, including how crime was counted and reported. Black uprisings against racism and police brutality contributed to the rising rates, as did the continuing Black migration into cities that offered no meaningful employment opportunities. The rising rate of crime also meant a greater police presence, creating a greater likelihood for police abuse and violence. By 1964, even as Democrats were celebrating the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the legal end to Jim Crow in the South, frustrations in the epicenters of northern Black life began to boil over. That summer, Harlem and Philadelphia exploded in revolt against unemployment, low-paying jobs, poor housing, and ever-present police brutality. There were hundreds of arrests and millions of dollars in property damage, announcing a new stage in the movement for Black rights inside and outside of the South. As the rebellions against urban conditions accelerated, President Johnson turned to law enforcement to regain control of imploding cities. More and better trained police, both Democrats and Republicans believed, was a solution.

On March 8, 1965, the day after the historic “Bloody Sunday” march on Selma, Alabama, led by the late John Lewis, Johnson introduced new legislation that was aimed at using federal dollars to beef up law enforcement across the country. Despite the nationally televised brutal beating of civil-rights activists by Alabama state troopers a day earlier, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Johnson focussed his comments on crime in cities. “No right is more elemental to our society than the right to personal security, and no right needs more urgent protection,” he said.

By the end of the sixties, the Johnson Administration and the incoming Nixon Administration had converged on a depiction of the Black, urban rebellions as Black lawlessness that would require more professionalized police and intense law enforcement. As the historian Elizabeth Hinton pointed out in her 2016 book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime,” even as liberal local and national leaders decried the root causes of crime, they also relied on the expanding powers of law enforcement to quell the protests that erupted in response to the lack of meaningful opportunities in cities. Even the Kerner Commission—which advocated for a vast expansion of government programs in order to remedy the racial inequality that was fuelling the uprisings, in a report that was the quintessence of big-government liberalism—called for the exponential growth of police forces in urban areas, warned that Black youth were the source of a pending crime wave, and advised methods of riot control. Declarations of “Law and Order,” which had been the white South’s bellicose response to “Freedom Now,” became the establishment’s rejoinder to “Black Power.” But, more importantly, Nixon bemoaned the riots as the spawn of the Great Society and the root of a disintegrating social order. His 1968 speech accepting the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination pulled these different strands together. “Tonight, it is time for some honest talk about the problem of order in the United States,” he said. “Let those who have the responsibility to enforce our laws, and our judges who have the responsibility to interpret them, be dedicated to the great principles of civil rights. But let them also recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence, and that right must be guaranteed in this country.” He continued, “We have been deluged by government programs for the unemployed, programs for the cities, programs for the poor. And we have reaped from these programs an ugly harvest of frustration, violence, and failure across the land.”

Johnson’s, and then Nixon’s, descriptions of the Black insurgency as lawless disorder pivoted the national focus away from systemic racism and toward crime. As the political scientist Naomi Murakawa has pointed out, “the United States did not face a crime problem that was racialized; it faced a race problem that was criminalized.”

Crime was used as a political tool to deflect attention away from the causes of the riots; at the same time, it was also a reality in the lives of the Black working class. In the early seventies, the long postwar economic boom gave way to an economic downturn, causing more suffering and desperation. From 1972 to 1975, Black unemployment rose from ten per cent to nearly fifteen per cent. During that same brief period, federal statistics suggest that there were nearly four million more violent crimes committed, which led to a palpable desire in Black communities for more to be done—including, as the legal scholar James Forman, Jr., has explained, more policing. Funds that were siphoned from the dwindling Great Society could have mitigated the worst aspects of the recession that lasted from 1973 to 1975, including rising rates of crime. Numerous polls taken in the aftermath of riots indicated that a majority believed that better jobs, housing, and opportunities were a remedy to inequality—and that crime was one of its key expressions. However, as the affluence of the sixties turned into recession and stagnation in the seventies, the politics of racial resentment gained new traction and defined solutions to ongoing social crisis.

The turn to the politics of punishment was not a political gimmick that would change from one Administration to the next. It marked a transition in all of U.S. politics. This turn could be measured in the growing reluctance of Democrats to embrace social welfare and the “root causes” explanation for crime. It could also be gauged by changing spending patterns across the entire criminal-justice system.

From 1977 to 2017, state and local spending on police increased from forty-two billion dollars to a hundred and fifteen billion dollars, adjusted for inflation. This skyrocketing increase continued even after crime rates began to fall in the early nineties. Today, the Center for Popular Democracy found, Chicago, Oakland, Houston, Minneapolis, Orlando, and Detroit each spend at least thirty per cent of their general, or discretionary, fund on their police departments. Police-spending figures do not include the hundreds of millions of dollars paid by municipalities across the country to settle lawsuits connected to police violence. ABC News reported that, in the last year alone, lawsuits against police cost the public more than three hundred million dollars. For many city leaders, it has sadly become the cost of doing business.

The Democratic Party has spent forty years governing in fear of the accusation that it is “soft” on crime. As a result, in both national and local politics, the Party has championed “tough on crime” policies that prioritize police budgets over other programs that are essential to the fulfillment of racial justice. It is no coincidence that Philadelphia, which has the highest poverty rate of any major U.S. city, has had no public hospital since 1977. Meanwhile, the city spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on its police force, even as crime has gone into decline.

In the days after the uprising boiled over into the streets of Philadelphia, Mayor Jim Kenney had planned to go ahead with a nineteen-million-dollar increase in funding to the police department, despite the fact that he also planned to make three hundred and seventy million dollars’ worth of cuts to the city’s budget. Kenney’s proposed cuts included a twenty-one-per-cent reduction in anti-violence initiatives and an eighteen-per-cent cut to the Police Advisory Committee, which oversees complaints about police brutality. He also planned to axe millions more from affordable-housing programs, even as covid-19 has created enormous housing precariousness for poor and working-class Black renters and owners.

But the uprising in Philadelphia stopped the Kenney administration in its tracks. On June 6th, tens of thousands of people jammed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in Center City, for a hastily organized demonstration against the budget under the banner of Black Lives Matter. The largest protest in Philadelphia in years, it forced the mayor to rescind the police-budget increase and to restore some cuts to youth programs. But even with these changes the Philadelphia Police still walked away with seven hundred and twenty-seven million dollars, the largest chunk of money in the municipal budget, and no layoffs, even as hundreds of city staffers lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Kenney claimed to be in solidarity and sympathy with the demonstrators, but it is in city budgets that you can really see if “Black Lives Matter” to the people who govern them.

The Floyd uprisings have created new urgency in the struggle for genuine safety in working-class Black communities, highlighting the need for well-resourced public services, good and plentiful jobs, and secure and beautiful housing without the menacing presence of the police. But creating this other world is complicated by the reality of crime and violence in the existing one. As the uprising erupted, so did a dramatic rise in gun violence in Black communities across the country. In Philadelphia, shootings are up nearly thirty per cent from a year ago; twenty-three people were shot over the course of twenty-four hours during the Fourth of July weekend. In Atlanta that weekend, thirty-one people were shot in eleven different incidents, leaving five dead. In New York City, there were sixty-four shootings during the Independence Day holiday, and ten deaths. In Chicago, the shootings began almost simultaneously with the anti-brutality rebellion in the streets. Six days after the murder of George Floyd, on May 31st, eighteen people were murdered in Chicago, most of them Black. Never before in the sixty years during which such statistics have been kept had that number of people been killed by gun violence in a single twenty-four-hour period.

Black Chicagoans and African-Americans elsewhere who suffer the brunt of gun violence have been marching, organizing, and speaking out against the crime that threatens to devour their neighborhoods. Their efforts are typically ignored, because they don’t fit with the conventional “law and order” wisdom. Instead, Donald Trump and a host of right-wing bigots have twisted the scale of Black death in Chicago into a racial slur. For them, the pain in Black communities from reckless gun violence is secondary, if it registers at all. Trump and his Republican Party cohort don’t actually care about the life and death of Black people in the United States—that much has been obvious for many years. Trump once described Baltimore as a “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess,” where “no human being would want to live.” The tenor of that statement made clear that any city with a sizable Black population could be inserted for Baltimore. For more than fifty years, Republicans have been the chief champions of policies that increased the tribulations that have become synonymous with Black life. But most African-Americans know this—which is why, when the Republican Party lectures Black America with the stench of white supremacy on its breath, its speech falls mostly on deaf ears.

Beyond the exploitation of Black death for cheap political gain by the right, the rhetoric of “Black-on-Black crime” muddies the important distinction between interpersonal violence and state-sanctioned violence. To clarify this difference is not to minimize the deep despair and loss that accompany the senseless murders causing fear in the Black neighborhoods of Chicago and other cities. Instead, calling attention to the police’s presence and behavior in these communities underlines the violence and intimidation that pervade them in every respect.

Police brutality has been the single most important political rallying cry across Black communities for decades, because it is the most visceral evidence of the second-class citizenship of poor and working-class African-Americans. When the police can stop and question you, frisk and beat you, potentially arrest and occasionally murder you, then you are not an equal citizen. The consequences of Black encounters with the police and the broader criminal-justice system are life-altering and often life-shattering. Of course, the loss of a loved one from gun violence is also catastrophic, but it comes without one element that is specific to encounters with state violence: the abrogation of fundamental human and social rights.

This is not hyperbole: it is the lived experience of ordinary Black Chicagoans, among others. The Chicago Police Department has a notorious history among African-Americans in the city, from its participation in the assassination of the Black Panther Fred Hampton, in 1969, to the police torture scandal that spanned the nineteen-seventies through nineteen-nineties, for which city officials finally took responsibility in 2016, when reparations were paid to the men who survived. The legacy of racism and brutality continues today. Consider the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force report, from 2016, which was commissioned by the mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, after the killing of a seventeen-year-old named Laquan McDonald. According to the task force, McDonald’s death


exposed deep and longstanding fault lines between black and Latino communities on the one hand and the police on the other arising from police shootings to be sure, but also about daily, pervasive transgressions that prevent people of all ages, races, ethnicities and gender across Chicago from having basic freedom of movement in their own neighborhoods. Stopped without justification, verbally and physically abused, and in some instances arrested, and then detained without counsel—that is what we heard about over and over again.

The investigators came to this stunning conclusion: “CPD’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”

It has become easy for those on the right, and for many of the Democratic Party leaders in Chicago, to reduce the issues of crime and violence to bad actors, even including an occasional police officer. It is much harder to acknowledge and address how Black communities have been strangled by racial segregation, housing discrimination, and other exploitative real-estate practices for more than a hundred years. From one administration to the next, Chicago’s city government has done nothing but make a bad situation worse. From closing public schools to detonating public housing to shuttering mental-health clinics, the city’s leaders have abandoned the Black poor and working class. About thirty-two per cent of Black Chicagoans live under the official poverty line—a number that has scarcely changed in more than fifty years, and which is six points higher than the national poverty rate for Black people. Chicago is a wealthy city, but its spoils do not go to those who need it most.

The city spends more per capita on police today than it did fifty years ago, but Black Chicago is not any safer—and the toll of interpersonal and state violence is being borne out in a crisis of mental health. A small 2017 study found that twenty-nine per cent of Black women in one South Side neighborhood were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, while another seven per cent were found to have many of its symptoms. A more recent study in Chicago has shown that the overlapping effects of police violence and community violence increase social isolation, loneliness, and hypervigilance. All of these untreated factors add to the stress and unhealthy conditions that have made African-Americans susceptible to the worst outcomes of covid-19. Meanwhile, Black suicides in Chicago in 2020 have already exceeded the total number of such cases from 2019. Instead of policing, these communities need treatment and care and the resources to recover from decades of racism and institutional neglect.

Successive city governments have done little to make Chicago more livable for ordinary Black people, and instead each new administration adds its new twist on the old formula of investing in police instead of the neighborhoods that need it. The failure to address the desperate need in Chicago’s Black working-class communities has pushed people to leave. Between 2000 and 2016, more than two hundred thousand Black Chicagoans fled the city on net. Against the conventional wisdom that they are trying to escape “Black-on-Black” crime, consider that, of the Black people who left between 2012 and 2016, sixty per cent of them did not have jobs.

The coronavirus pandemic revealed, and the Floyd uprising has confirmed, that big, structural interventions are the bare minimum for making Black lives matter in the United States. The call to defund the police captures both the enormity of the crisis and the need for an enormous response. It draws attention to the continuity of police funding even as other parts of the public sector have been depleted. Cities across the country are a living testament to this, with privatization and other market-oriented solutions summoned to fill the gaps. Public housing has been replaced by for-profit housing; public schools and hospitals have been closed and turned into condos; library hours have been reduced to the bare minimum. Youth and jobs programs are from a distant era. And, all the while, police departments remain almost entirely immune to layoffs and austerity that all other public workers are subjected to. In fact, the cuts to public services that might mitigate poverty and promote social mobility become a perpetual excuse for more policing.

When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested that a crime spurt in New York City might have to do with the financial strain of the pandemic, she was greeted incredulously. She continued, “Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent, and so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don’t have money, so they’re put in a position where they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night.” She went on to say that “the idea that violent crime is somehow immune, or totally separated, from the economic situation that people are going through right now, I think that’s mistaken.” She continued, “It’s true, the desperation, even if we’re not talking about petty theft—there is a ladder that escalates into violent crime that is very much connected to the economic situation of a given community.”

Naturally, Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks caused a frenzy on the right. The White House took the opportunity to denounce the demand to “defund the police,” while calling Ocasio-Cortez “preposterous.” Representative Ted Yoho, of Florida, confronted Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps, claiming that she was “out of her freaking mind” for linking poverty to crime. He called her a “fucking bitch” as he walked away from her, channelling the misogyny that is typically tightly bound to the hatred of the poor. But it isn’t just the right wing. The Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, also chimed in, saying that it was “factually impossible” to blame the crime wave in the city on fears of evictions. Cuomo seemed to think that because there is a moratorium on evictions in New York, poor people no longer worry about how they will pay their rent.

Making matters decidedly worse, many consequences of poverty have been turned into crimes, including sleeping in cars or public places, panhandling for money or food, public urination, shoplifting, and many other things that poor people do when they do not have the privacy and discretion of their own residence. The criminalization of poverty deepens its inescapability by putting the poor into direct contact with the police.

These developments have outsized impacts on African-Americans, who are far more likely than whites to be poor. Arrest records and felony convictions entrap African-Americans, in particular, in a suffocating chamber of low-wage or illegal work, underscoring a sense of meaningless that pervades the Black Lives Matter generation. In Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, “Men We Reaped,” she describes her younger brother’s fruitless efforts to carve out a life on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi as a “cycle of futility.” Ward writes,


He never got a legitimate job, perhaps dissuaded by the experiences of the young men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked until they were fired or they quit because minimum wage came too slowly and disappeared too quickly. They sold dope between jobs until they could find more work as a convenience store clerk or a janitor or a landscaper.

Her brother was killed by a drunk driver at nineteen. Ward concludes, “He saw no American dream, no fairy tale ending, no hope.”

Ward’s memoir follows the life and death of her brother and four other young Black men, all trapped in similar cycles of futility that ultimately lead to their untimely deaths. When this elemental hopelessness contributes to premature deaths among white people, it is universally viewed more empathically. When trying to understand the phenomena leading to the recent decline of life expectancy among ordinary white men and women, social scientists coined the term “deaths of despair.” These deaths, most immediately caused by opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, have come to be understood as related to deepening personal instability and insecurity amid a social crisis. Compared to an earlier era of cocaine use and addiction, opioid addiction today is more likely to be regarded as a public-health problem, and the public discussion surrounding the addiction often emphasizes treatment over imprisonment.

Some elected officials mischaracterize the need to shift funds away from the police, saying that resources must be redirected to social services because police are being asked to respond to crimes stemming from drug abuse, homelessness, and mental illness. Representative Karen Bass, a Democrat from Los Angeles and the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who described “defund the police” as “probably one of the worst slogans ever,” recently asked, rhetorically, why “police officers have to clean up society’s problems.” She continued, “Why doesn’t a city deal with its social problems so not so much money would have to go to law enforcement?” But it is simply not true that police have become caretakers, mental-health professionals, and social workers. To make such a claim degrades these professions, which require years of studying and training for the purpose of improving people’s lives. Bass’s mischaracterization also sows confusion about what the police are generally doing in such cases—which is arresting people who are in crisis or just poor. They are not intervening for the sake of reducing harm.

Meanwhile, the despair that clouds the lives of ordinary Black people is ignored or pathologized. The second leading cause of death for Black children and teens aged ten to nineteen is suicide; their suicide rate is rising faster than that of any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. From 1991 to 2017, suicide attempts rose by seventy-three per cent for Black adolescents of both sexes. Black people have rates of drug abuse and alcoholism that are almost on par with white Americans, yet the alienation that typically underlies their drug use rarely gets the sympathetic portrayals afforded to white America. Even in sickness and sadness, Black people are viewed and treated differently. Instead of investigating the underlying causes of a spike in shootings that overwhelmingly affects young Black men, we revert back to simplistic and ultimately racist explanations that dwell on the defective Black individual. In doing so, our society renders many young Black men and women invisible and ultimately disposable. There is no empathy, only policing and punishment.

The political fusion of race and crime plays a critical role in manufacturing racist ideology here and abroad. The overwhelming presence of police in presumed Black spaces—from typical police patrols in neighborhoods to officers’ menacing and intimidating role in public schools to their offices in public housing—mark these places as sites of disorder and therefore in need of the hard hand of the law. This hyper-surveillance of Black communities then produces a disproportionate number of arrests, which legitimize calls for even more aggressive policing and more punishment. These are the daily policing practices that conflate race and crime, thereby criminalizing African-Americans. This is what makes policing institutionally racist in the United States.

In 1960, James Baldwin wrote that “the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.” He went on to write, of policemen,


Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt.

The practice of intimidation is so deep in the marrow of American policing that it exists whether the administrator or officer is Black or white. Perhaps the most significant change in U.S. policing since the nineteen-sixties era of reform has been the recruitment and training of thousands of Black officers across the country. But the multiracial character of post-civil-rights policing has not meant less racism, brutality, or arrest. Instead, it has coincided with the rise of mass incarceration and the explosion of Black Lives Matter.

Implicit-bias training and other kinds of “cultural competency” are utter failures in stopping rampant police racism and the objective of social control. All the training in the world cannot change the deployment of police in some neighborhoods versus others. It cannot transform the cultural assumptions about who commits crime. Previous encounters with the criminal-justice system already mark people in ways that make them vulnerable to even more encounters with police. In her book “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander states that, in Chicago, “an astonishing 80 percent of the adult black male workforce” have a felony record. It is as if only Black people commit crime. But it only looks that way when the police are deployed in certain neighborhoods to surveil people who fit the composite of a criminal. These arrests, and eventual prosecutions, constitute what Alexander means by the phrase “New Jim Crow”—widespread social death, as the wholesale exclusion of the formerly incarcerated is legitimized.

“Defund the police,” and even calls to abolish the police, seem like reasonable propositions when the institution appears immune to any more moderate reform. But in the immediate aftermath of the Floyd uprising, nervous liberals and smug conservatives agreed that “defunding the police” was a bridge too far for most Americans. The American Enterprise Institute pointed to polls declaring its unpopularity, especially a poll in which sixty-one per cent of Black voters said that they opposed “defunding” the police, even though the poll’s only question with that response rate asked about eliminating and replacing police departments. Yet in that same poll, sixty-two per cent of Black people and thirty-seven per cent of whites said that they favored “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services.”

This reflects the contradictory views of African-Americans, in particular, as well as the newness of this iteration of the B.L.M. movement. The political leaders of our country have spent the better part of fifty years trying to convince the public that the biggest threat to their lives is the possibility that they might become the victim of a violent crime. Those ideas will not just melt away in a matter of weeks.

The importance of social movements is that they force people to more deeply engage with an issue than they otherwise would. In the case of police brutality, the ubiquity and the duration of the recent protests have forced a much broader layer of society to grapple with the issues that Black people have been mobilizing around for more than a hundred years. Consider the transformation of opinion concerning the B.L.M. movement more generally. Today, several years after its formation, it is finally experiencing wide public support. Now that millions of white people understand the severity of police brutality against Black people, the possibility that they ultimately see the end of policing as a solution is hardly utopian, especially as each passing day seems to bring more visual evidence of the racism and brutality of police across the U.S.

We need to start over. No one should expect that to be a popular conclusion overnight. But neither should anyone conclude that it is unrealistic to defund and eventually abandon an armed layer of agents intent on maintaining a social order that is deeply racist, unequal, and violently deprives ordinary people, especially Black people, of the basic necessities of life.

Defunding the police is the first step in a longer process that may culminate in the end of policing in the United States. The repeated failures of substantive and meaningful reform have brought us to the point where concepts like “defunding” and “abolition” have penetrated mainstream conversations. Their suggestion does not mean that activists are impervious to the violence and crime that exist in working-class communities. Instead, the argument to defund the police begins with the recognition of the relationship between robust funding for police and the consistent lack of adequate funding for the programs and institutions that may have the most impact on improving the quality of life for poor and working-class Black people. In this case, robbing Peter to pay Paul can reduce crime, reduce violence, and reduce the harm that ensues. Bottoming out police budgets will not, on its own, create the resources necessary to build communities anew. But it would shift the balance away from the decades-long orientation on law and order toward treatment and care. The abolition of policing may seem farfetched to some, but, in effect, the racist batter of the police has already been baked. We cannot go back now and decide to take out this or that thing. The whole cake has to be discarded, starting with its most vile ingredient—the presumption of Black criminality and guilt. The reimagining of a just society has inevitably come into conflict with the racist barbarism of American police. We must begin again.

NYPD Caught In Blatant Lie Over Car That Rammed Into Protestors

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P01Ok8YJTP0

An Extraordinary Summer of Crises for California’s Farmworkers

The “essential workers” picking our food are facing fires, heat waves, and the pandemic, all at once. California’s farmworkers, many undocumented, and many without a choice, have been working through a summer of increasingly brutal conditions.

September 5, 2020 Alejandra Borunda NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

https://portside.org/2020-09-05/extraordinary-summer-crises-californias-farmworkers

Gonzales, California--Rosa Villegas woke up at two in the morning on a late August Monday to make her way to the lettuce fields in California’s south Salinas Valley, where she was scheduled to start bagging heads of romaine at 4 a.m. The sky overhead wasn’t its usual dark, star-dotted self as she walked to her car. Instead, it glowed a sickly red, colored by the fires burning on the flanks of the Santa Lucia mountains, just a few miles west.

“It was like a volcano,” she said in Spanish. “Like there was lava everywhere, so close.”

The fire snaked quickly through the mountains bordering the wide, flat valley, the self-proclaimed “salad bowl” of the world. By the next day, so much smoke hung in the air that Villegas couldn’t see the edge of the romaine field, let alone the mountains.

Villegas is one of the thousands of farmworkers in the state, many of them undocumented, who have been working through a summer of increasingly brutal conditions. A heat wave brought record-breaking temperatures to the western United States. Then, fires laced the air with lung-aggravating smoke. And underneath these stresses lurks COVID-19, which has infiltrated Monterey County’s agricultural communities at three times the rate of the rest of the state’s population and caused massive cuts in jobs and hours for people who are already living on the edge of poverty.

For many, there is no choice but to keep working. This is the height of the picking season for many crops and the time of the year when farmworkers earn the bulk of their income. With few legal, health, or financial protections, but an “essential worker” designation that forces them to choose between being fired and working and risking exposure to the coronavirus, many farmworkers face pressures far beyond what they’ve had to deal with before.

“There’s just no option to not work,” says Sarait Martinez, the organizing director of Californians for Pesticide Reform. Her parents are both farmworkers in the Salinas Valley. “In heat, COVID, or fires, you just have to keep working.”

Says Don Villarejo, a researcher who recently surveyed how California’s agricultural workers are weathering the pandemic: “I think this is the most difficult time I’ve seen in the 40 years I’ve been working with this community.”
COVID-19 and the disappearing demand for vegetables

In March, farmworkers and their advocates began sounding the alarm: Because of crowded housing, little access to health care and testing, and inability to self-quarantine, farmworkers were at extreme risk from the coronavirus. They also weren’t always getting the information they needed, often because of language barriers, says Genevieve Flores-Haro, an organizer for MICOP, an indigenous worker advocacy group in Ventura County.

Local nonprofits and individuals tried to fill that void. They coordinated with doctors and nurses to provide access to testing and health care, and suggested programs to provide housing for infected workers and cash for undocumented workers who were ineligible for federal stimulus funds.

But still, as feared, the number of COVID-19 cases rose. In a recent survey from the California Institute for Rural Studies, researchers found that agricultural workers in Monterey County were infected at rates three times higher than the population at large, even though most workers have taken self-protection extremely seriously, reporting that they are wearing masks and cleaning surfaces carefully at work and at home.

The pandemic is also devastating many people’s income as demand for vegetables has collapsed. The survey found a nearly 40 percent drop in employment among California agricultural workers during May, June, and July compared to previous years.

Maria Salazar lives in Gonzales, a primarily Hispanic and Latino town in the central Salinas Valley. She drives the tractor for a 28-person crew picking brightly colored cauliflower—purple, green, orange—that usually gets exported. Her bosses have slashed hours. By this time last year, she had made about $17,000, she says, but so far this year, she’s at only $10,000.

Numbers from California’s Farm Bureau echo her lived experience. The state lost billions in agricultural revenue and tens of thousands of jobs over the past few months, as demand for produce from restaurants, schools, and other institutional buyers plummeted.

And workers are being squeezed in other ways. Driving through the town, Gonzales’s mayor, Maria Orozco, points at building after building where her constituents—70 percent of whom work in agriculture, many undocumented—have told her that their rents have gone up in the past few months, even though the governor made rent increases and evictions illegal.

The extra financial pressures mean it’s even more difficult to stay protected from the virus. Taking time off to get a test is even tougher than it would have been, and even getting to a testing site costs money that’s even tighter than normal. For many undocumented workers, concerns about sharing personal information are high, as well.

A state-sponsored program that provides infected farmworkers with hotel rooms, daily meals, and medical assistance is helping some of those who’ve contracted the virus, says Orozco. But many more who may have been exposed and want to self-quarantine, can’t.

Fundamentally, the situation is complicated because of a simple reality: Farmworkers don’t get paid if they’re not working. So the incentives to work through uncomfortable or dangerous conditions are high.
Smoke and heat

During the 2018 Thomas Fires, which ripped across almost 500 square miles in the Santa Barbara area and caused unhealthy air quality for weeks, farmworkers stayed in the fields through the worst of the smoke—in many cases without respirators, hazard pay, information in their own language, or any recognition that they should be protected.

“They were rendered invisible,” says Michael Méndez, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, who wrote a recent study looking at how undocumented immigrants were ignored during that disaster. “But they shouldn’t have been—that community has been there for decades, doing critical work.”

In response, their advocates pushed for more comprehensive protections. Last July, the state created a regulation requiring outdoor workers to be provided with N95 masks if the air quality index rises above 151, the EPA’s cutoff for “unhealthy” air.

In late August the index hit that threshold in many of California’s agricultural regions, including Monterey. The county agricultural commissioner collected 100,000 N95s, which bosses were supposed to deliver to field workers—of whom there are an estimated 91,000 in the two main agricultural valleys of the county. But it took time for those masks to trickle out to the workers.

On the first day of the smoke, Villegas got a headache after a day working without an N95—with just her cloth mask and a cotton face covering she’d sewed from an old embroidered pillowcase, its bright flowers encircling her brow. On the second, her boss showed up with a box of N95s for the crew but said a single mask would have to last for four days. “Take it home and wash it,” Villegas recalls being advised. Everyone had laughed, knowing the masks wouldn't hold up to water.

The following day, another boss showed up with enough masks for everyone to have one each day the smoke was bad.

“Our eyes were red and stinging, but we worked full days,” Villegas says.

A coworker of Salazar’s ended up in the hospital after smoke exposure irritated her lungs. Salazar’s own asthma flared up after a few days of exposure. Others report that they never recieved masks, or were told they'd have to pay for them.

“What we’re hearing from farmers is that they’ve never had to deal with this kind of smoke,” and certainly not so frequently, says Heather Riden, an agricultural researcher at the University of California, Davis. Some forward-thinking farmers are starting to think about what an even smokier future could entail, she says.
More to come

Scientists have estimated that climate change has nearly doubled the area burned by wildfires in recent years in the western U.S. The frequency of fires may increase by 25 percent in coming decades, and the big fires may get bigger.

Heat creates its own challenges. In California, the number of days over 90 degrees is predicted to increase by more than 30 per year by 2050, under worst-case climate change projections. In 2005, after a very hot summer during which several farmworkers died of heat exposure, the state passed a new law mandating that employers provide workers with more breaks, shade, and water access during hot days. More stringent requirements kick in when temperatures rise above 95 Fahrenheit.

In mid-August, as a record-breaking heat wave bore down on the western U.S, forecasters told California residents to do whatever they could to keep cool—find air conditioning or at least a fan, the recommendations said, and avoid direct sun or strenuous labor. Drink plenty of water.

Joselina Islas, a farmworker who's a member of Líderes Campesinas, an advocacy group that works with female farmworkers, belongs to a crew that picks and packs cauliflower in fields up and down the Salinas Valley. She heard those warnings, but couldn’t really heed them. Workers on her team wear thick rubber chaps to protect their legs from damp and the knives they use to cut cauliflower heads, these days covered in ash. They pull on hooded sweatshirts , several pairs of gloves, and plastic sleeves—layers that protect them from sun and work dangers, but leave them drenched in sweat.

“We just deal with it the best we can,” Islas says. “We try to take care of each other.”

In Gonzales, Orozco administers a fund to distribute donated money to undocumented farmworkers. Similar “Undocufund” projects exist in other communities across the state, attempts to fill the financial holes where state aid might otherwise fit. Smaller-scale mutual aid networks are spinning up in farmworker communities, too: a diaper and food distribution network in Gonzales, taco trucks donating food in Salinas, nationwide fundraisers for school supplies for farmworker children whose families have lost income.

Early in the pandemic, when Villegas’ crew realized their bosses weren’t going to provide them with COVID-19 protection, she called a friend in town who had been sewing masks from brightly patterned fabrics. The next day, the friend showed up at the romaine field, boxes stuffed with hundreds of masks that she handed out to the 28-person team. They’re wearing them to this day, layered in with the N95s.

Why is Trump worried about mail-voting?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2H5fjOUbQ

Trump’s Secretary of State Tries to Extort Cash from Struggling Sudan

Mike Pompeo’s trip to the Middle East and North Africa was a scandalous failure. His Sudan visit demonstrates just how degraded the United States’ foreign policy has become under Donald Trump, and with Pompeo at the helm of the State Department.

September 5, 2020 Mitchell Plitnick RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT

https://portside.org/2020-09-05/trumps-secretary-state-tries-extort-cash-struggling-sudan


Mike Pompeo’s Middle East trip during the Republican National Convention has turned into a tour de force of scandal and failure. In that sense, it mirrors well both his tenure as secretary of state, and his boss’s time as president.

Starting in Jerusalem, Pompeo made a mockery of his office by giving a political speech, which might have been a violation of the Hatch Act, and doing so from foreign soil, a breach of diplomatic tradition in the United States.

Pompeo also visited Bahrain, where his attempt to convince the king to join the United Arab Emirates in normalizing relations with Israel was firmly rebuffed, and wound up his trip in Oman. There, Pompeo is reported to have discussed the ongoing blockade of Qatar by fellow Gulf Cooperation Council members Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. It is notable that Pompeo did not say that he had discussed this issue with Bahrain or the UAE, as one would expect if he were trying to resolve the stalemate. Instead, he discussed it with Oman, which has long been leading efforts to repair relations between the Gulf states.

Pompeo also attempted to convince Oman to increase efforts to normalize relations with Israel. Omani leaders have met with Israeli officials, including a 2018 visit to the country by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But there is no indication that Oman is prepared to move further than it already has in normalizing ties with Israel for the time being, despite some raised hopes in both Jerusalem and Washington.

When he departed Jerusalem, Pompeo made the first-ever direct flight from Israel to Sudan. It was there that the secretary would demonstrate just how degraded the United States’ foreign policy has become under Donald Trump, and with Pompeo at the helm of the State Department.

Pompeo told Sudanese leaders that the United States would consider removing them from the list of state sponsors of terrorism — if Sudan pays us $330 million.

Let’s put this in context. In 1989, Omar al-Bashir led a bloodless coup and took over Sudan. He would rule for the next three decades, with an iron fist. Natural disasters, dictatorship, civil war, massive human rights violations, even genocide marked the history of Bashir’s rule. Sudan’s economy has been devastated many times, and it is one of the poorest countries in the world.

Last year, a popular, non-violent revolution forced Bashir out. The revolt’s leaders made a deal with the remaining military leadership to transition to a civilian and more democratic government. It’s a shaky arrangement, with many elements in the military government reluctant to cede power to civilian rule, and leading activists wary of the military. As University of San Francisco Professor Stephen Zunes described it to me after visiting Sudan in January, it is “a civilian-led government with a majority on the three main governing bodies, albeit with strong military representation.”

The transition has been difficult and uneasy, and it is complicated further by Sudan’s presence, along with only Iran and Syria, on the U.S. State Sponsors of Terrorism — or SST — list. Zunes told me, “The U.S. sanctions make it difficult for other countries and international financial institutions to do business with Sudan.”

Although many sanctions on Sudan were lifted in recent years, the country remains isolated from the global monetary system — the International Monetary Fund and World Bank — due to its SST listing. This prevents it from getting the capital it needs to recover from the devastation it suffered during Bashir’s rule, and the economic impact of losing much of its natural resources when South Sudan split off from the rest of country in 2011.

In other words, the Sudanese people desperately need to be removed from the SST list. Currently, about one in four Sudanese faces a shortage of food, and inflation in June was measured around 130 percent, a substantial rise over the African Development Bank’s already grave projection of 61.5 percent.

Sudan’s entire GDP was just $18.9 billion in 2019, and it is expected to drop to just $9.7 billion in 2020. That’s the country we are trying to extort $330 million from, a sum that would represent less than 0.00007 percent of our 2020 budget.

This is cruel and inhumane. It’s made all the more so by the fact that Sudan is being held responsible for crimes committed by Osama bin Laden, who was expelled from Sudan long before the September 11 attacks and, in any case, was only allowed in the country for a few years by Bashir and one of his aides, Hassan al-Turabi. Whether Sudan should be held responsible now that Bashir has been ousted is dubious but given the effects of the SST listing on the Sudanese people, it’s also irrelevant. A stable Sudan might be able to grapple with these issues and, if necessary, the costs. But extorting an impoverished country for what to it is a significant sum, but the U.S. amounts to less than pocket change is intolerable — especially as that country is actively trying to become more free and open.

Pompeo also tried to convince the Sudanese to open normal relations with Israel, something that had been floated this past February, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Sudanese General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the head of the ruling sovereign council, and hastily announced that Sudan and Israel would move to establish normal relations.

The angry response from the Sudanese people made Burhan back off quickly. Sudan’s Information Minister Fasial Saleh reacted similarly this week to Pompeo, stating “The transitional government does not have the mandate… to decide on normalization with Israel. This matter will be decided after the completion of the transitional authority.” In other words, come back to us when we have a permanent government, we can’t handle the disruption now.

In February, it seemed Sudanese leaders were testing the waters on warming relations with Israel, knowing such a move would please Washington and maybe convince it to remove Sudan from the SST list. Whether the Sudanese government transitions to democracy, reverts to a military dictatorship, or lands somewhere in between, its economy desperately needs the international assistance it cannot access while still on the infamous list.

The Trump administration need not have attached a price tag for Sudan’s long-ago dalliance with Osama Bin Laden. There is little to be gained by this maneuver except to extend the suffering of the Sudanese people and make it harder for the civilian, democratic forces in that country to prevail. But this is the nature and character of the Trump administration. If Sudan should finally find its economic and democratic balance, they are not likely to forget how the United States treated them as they tried to build their country.

Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War

How he lost and where we go from here.

September 5, 2020 Matt Karp JACOBIN

https://portside.org/2020-09-05/bernie-sanderss-five-year-war


One mild April afternoon in 2015, deep within the ideological dead zone of the second Obama administration, Bernie Sanders took a break from his Senate workday and stalked out to the lawn in front of the Capitol building. Unfolding a crinkled sheet of notes, the Vermont senator took less than ten minutes to tell reporters why he was running for president: Americans were working longer hours for lower wages, while the rich feasted on profits and billionaires ruled the political system. The country faced its greatest crisis since the Great Depression, he said.

Five years later, on an April morning in 2020, Sanders stood inside his home in Burlington, Vermont, and announced that he was suspending his second campaign for president. This race, like the contest four years earlier, had ended in defeat, and though Bernie gave an inspirational fifteen-minute speech — quoting Nelson Mandela and thanking supporters for their blood, sweat, tears, and social media posts — even a sympathetic viewer might wonder what, exactly, all this passionate effort had yielded.

Income and wealth inequality have soared to new heights; a billionaire sits in the White House, while the opposition party turns to its own billionaires for leadership; and the COVID-19 pandemic has left the United States not merely approaching its greatest crisis since the Great Depression but thoroughly immersed in it.

Sanders lost. He waged a five-year war against the billionaire class and the Democratic Party’s leadership — a war across six Aprils — and in the end, he was beaten on both fronts. Those of us who soldiered in Bernie’s beaten army must reckon hard with the nature and significance of this defeat.

The Sanders project was among the most significant left political events of the twenty-first century, linking for the first time minimal but foundational socialist demands to a base of millions in the nerve center of global capitalism. Its conclusive defeat this spring, amid an apocalyptic atmosphere of disease, depression, and unrest, offers enormous temptation for the Left to fall into despair.

Already, we have seen a range of broadsides against Sanders and the legacy of his campaigns, whether inflected by the far left, pleased to move on from a long detour into electoral politics; the liberal center, eager to submerge all possibility outside the present field of vision; or the traditionalist right, only too happy to proclaim a left-wing retreat from class to culture war.

The corporate press, meanwhile, has jumped at the chance to throw Bernie — and his insistent call for massive material redistribution, funded by corporate profits — straight into the dustbin of history. Even the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd somehow became an occasion for the New York Times to announce the end of the Sanders era. “Bernie Sanders Predicted Revolution, Just Not This One,” blared the headline, building off intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s analysis that “every corporation worth its salt” has now surpassed Sanders in the battle against “structural racism and anti-blackness.” Goodbye Medicare for All, hello Jeff Bezos clapping back against “All Lives Matter.”


These are all artifacts of defeat. Sanders lost, and both his fair-weather friends and his permanent enemies are now eager to consign him to the grave. But neither a defeat at the polls nor a shift in the discourse is reason to abandon the essence of Bernie’s struggle. Mass protests against police violence and racism can only begin to realize their aims if joined to a broader, Sanders-style democratic movement — large enough to shape national politics and determined enough to challenge capital — capable of winning the material concessions necessary for a truly free and equal society.

An accurate balance sheet for the Sanders campaigns must have at least two columns: first, an accounting of achievement, substantial on its own terms and unprecedented in more than fifty years of US political history; and second, a reckoning with limits, which now, in the aftermath of 2020, appear both larger and more intractable than at almost any point since 2016.

To this accounting we can add a third column, on the prospects for future struggle — foreshortened in the present, blurry in the near future, but possibly brighter in the decades ahead.
I. Bernie’s Achievement: Two Lessons

When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy in 2015, his press conference appeared on page A21 of the New York Times, far behind articles about the Obama presidential library, a testing scandal in Atlanta schools, and Martin O’Malley’s record as Baltimore mayor. This was no more than what was due for a candidate polling at 3 percent, in a newspaper that had not actually printed the words “Medicare for All” in the calendar year before Sanders entered the race.

From the perspective of 2020, it is difficult to remember the narrowness of the policy girdle that fitted American left liberalism in the years just before Bernie’s first campaign. As progressives like Keith Ellison, Michael Moore, and Susan Sarandon urged Elizabeth Warren to run for president, the Massachusetts senator appeared alongside Tom Perez at an AFL-CIO summit in January 2015. There, Warren won headlines for a “fiery” speech in which she denounced “trickle-down economics” and called for new financial regulations, the enforcement of existing labor laws, protections for Medicare and Social Security, and an unspecified increase in the minimum wage.

“The striking thing about this progressive factional agenda,” noted Vox’s Matthew Yglesias at the time, “is there’s really nothing on it that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would disagree with.”

Today, that 2015 reform package sounds a lot like the Joe Biden 2020 platform, and no one, outside of a tiny caste of professional propagandists, affects to call it “left-wing.” Bernie’s five-year war, even in defeat, taught the American left two fundamental lessons.

First, it demonstrated that bold social-democratic ideas, well beyond the regulatory ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can win a mass base in today’s United States. An uncompromising demand for the federal government to provide essential social goods for all Americans — from health care and college tuition to childcare and family leave — stood at the heart of the Sanders project from beginning to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls and conducting two presidential campaigns almost entirely on the strength of this platform, Sanders built the most influential left-wing challenge in modern history.

Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich also supported single-payer health insurance, but their campaigns did not end with polls showing a newfound majority of Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone massive supermajorities among Democrats and voters under sixty-five. Yes, leftists from Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long declared that a bipartisan corporate class rules America, but they did not turn that insight into a political movement capable of winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan, or California.

Nor is the partial success of the Sanders campaigns merely a hollow “discourse victory.” It has presented concrete evidence for a proposition that mainstream political observers scoffed at five years ago, and that the American left itself had grandly announced rather than demonstrated: that “democratic socialism,” driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule and dedicated to universal public goods, can win the support of millions, not just thousands. Across the last half century, any activist with a bullhorn could proclaim this to be true, but Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved it.

Of course, as Bernie’s defeat makes clear, there is a vast gulf between winning exit polls and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns illuminated American social democracy’s unknown political resources, they also revealed, in a dramatic fashion, the determination of their opponents. This is the second practical lesson of Bernie’s five-year war: the unanimity and ferocity of elite Democratic resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but to the essence of his platform.

In its general outlines, this has been visible since early in the 2016 campaign, when Democratic Party officials, TV pundits, and prestige print writers — across an ideological spectrum, from centrists like Claire McCaskill and Chris Matthews to liberals like Barney Frank and Paul Krugman — universally scorned the Sanders campaign and its agenda.

Yet in other ways, the depth of Democratic opposition to Sanders was not obvious until this year, either to Bernie’s friends or to his enemies. Throughout February, as Sanders won New Hampshire and lapped the field in Nevada, panicked centrist commentators called on the remaining Democrats in the race to unite behind a single anti-Bernie candidate. But their palpable angst betrayed a near-universal belief that this would not actually happen. For “a critical mass” of Bernie’s rivals to withdraw at the last minute, reported the New York Times on February 27, “seems like the least likely outcome.”

We all know what happened next. Just three days later, on the evening before Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar suddenly withdrew from the race and endorsed Joe Biden, joined by Beto O’Rourke, Harry Reid, and dozens more prominent Democrats and former Obama officials.

This great consolidation around Biden, following his victory in South Carolina, produced perhaps $100 million in “free” laudatory media coverage — more than Sanders spent on advertising all campaign long — compressed into a single weekend before the most critical election of the primary. The result was a Super Tuesday stampede for Biden, even in states where Sanders had led the pack only a week before, from Maine to Texas. It gave Biden a commanding lead that he never relinquished.

In retrospect, it may seem hopelessly naive for Sanders and his allies to have counted on an indefinite division of the Democratic field. Yet there is a reason that even Bernie’s most bitter enemies shared the same calculus, with dozens of party operatives telling the Times in late February that it might take a brokered convention to stop him.

After all, Buttigieg was proclaimed the winner in Iowa and finished a close second in New Hampshire; never since the birth of the modern primary system has a candidate with that profile quit the race nearly so early. Even as an ideological move to throttle the Left, the Biden coalescence had no precedent in its swiftness and near-perfect coordination. When Jesse Jackson briefly threatened to take the Democratic Party by storm in 1988, establishment rivals Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Paul Simon all remained in the running until the end of March, when more than thirty-five primary contests were complete.

This time, the core establishment forces managed to clear the field after just four primaries, leaving just a single centrist alternative to Biden, the vain billionaire Michael Bloomberg. (Elizabeth Warren’s persistence in the race only helped the anti-Sanders effort, since she was somewhat more likely to siphon votes from the left than the center.) And after Super Tuesday, of course, Bloomberg promptly quit and endorsed Biden. Warren, when she left the race, would do Sanders no such favor.

Though, in many ways, the Democratic Party of 2020 is much weaker than it was thirty years ago — it controls eleven fewer state legislatures, for instance — the current Democratic leadership, in its influence over party politicians, is stronger than ever. Buttigieg, who had campaigned hard in Super Tuesday states — on February 29, he held the primary’s single largest rally in Tennessee — did not drop out because of a predictably poor showing in South Carolina. (Even there, he still finished ahead of Warren for the fourth consecutive race.)

Buttigieg abruptly abandoned millions of dollars of advertising and perhaps thirty thousand Super Tuesday volunteers because Barack Obama told him to — and because he knew that his own career prospects, in today’s Democratic Party, depend less on winning popular support in his own name than on gamely joining the team effort to halt Sanders and “save the party.”

The speed and thoroughness of this elite consolidation — which also made Biden an instant donor-class favorite — makes a mockery of the implausible idea, floated by some reporters and pundits, that Sanders blew a golden opportunity to win over the Democratic establishment through better manners.

Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their corporate allies — never mind the consultants, hedge fund managers, and tech CEOs who built “Mayor Pete” — did not capriciously decide to close ranks against Bernie because he did not make enough polite, endorsement-seeking phone calls after Nevada. Their profound ideological opposition to the Sanders project has been plain for a long time; what we didn’t know is just how rapidly and effectively that private opposition could be translated into public fact.

This hard lesson is not only enough to prevent anyone in the Sanders camp from looking for meaningful concessions from the Biden campaign; it underlines the sharp limits of any institutional politics within the existing Democratic Party. Whatever Democratic voters think — and most of them like Bernie Sanders and his platform — the dominant bulk of Democratic officials oppose them both with an organized vigor they seldom bring to combat with Republicans.

In 2016, Sanders won more than 40 percent of the primary popular vote but earned endorsements from just 3.7 percent of congressional Democrats (seven of 187 representatives). Against a far more crowded field in 2020, Sanders won the first three contests and around 35 percent of the vote, but got the support of just 3.8 percent of congressional Democrats (nine of 232). That is not a marker of institutional progress.

Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), whose cochairs gave Sanders a splashy endorsement, furnished more support for Biden (twelve members) than for Sanders (eight) before Super Tuesday. In the brief two-way contest between March 3 and March 17, Biden racked up twenty further CPC endorsements, compared to just one for Sanders.

In this critical respect, the institutional Democratic Party did not really “move left” at all between 2015 and 2020. Yes, various elements of the Sanders agenda have migrated onto party platforms and campaign websites, and some left-leaning policies, like the $15 minimum wage, have even been introduced at the state level. But in national politics, the line guarding the party’s left flank — a steel barricade that separates Obama-style kludge politics from Sanders-style demands for universal public health care, education, and family support — is now more heavily policed than ever.

This hard-won knowledge itself is a weapon against liberal elites who usually prefer to obfuscate differences rather than fight over them. “Bernie Sanders’s ideas are so popular that Hillary Clinton is running on them,” gushed Vox in April 2015. Of course, Democrats will peddle this message again in 2020, but for the millions of Sanders voters who have just watched the party establishment spend five years suffocating a platform of Medicare for All and free public college, it’s a much tougher sell.

The major achievement of Bernie’s five-year war, then, is an invigorated and a clarified movement for American democratic socialism — newly optimistic about the appeal of its platform, yet intimately aware of the power of its enemies. Sanders has left the Left in a stronger position than he found it, both larger and more self-aware, and far less tempted by either the sour futility of third-party campaigns or the saccharine cheerleading of party-approved “progressives.”

Yet this is where the real trouble begins. The Left, after Bernie, has finally grown just strong enough to know how weak it really is.

The essential problem, after all, is not that the corporate establishment commands Democratic politicians — it’s that it still commands most Democratic primary voters. Given a clear choice between Bernie’s demand for another New Deal and Biden’s call for a “return to normalcy,” about 60 percent of the Democrats who went to the polls apparently picked Warren G. Harding over Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The harsh truth, proved harshly across these six Aprils, is that a social-democratic majority does not yet exist within the Democratic electorate, never mind the United States as a whole. Sanders has given the Left new relevance in national politics, but to make the leap from relevance to power, we need to build that majority — and this is not the work of one or two election cycles, but at least another decade, and maybe more.
II. A Closer Look at Defeat

In 2016, Bernie Sanders led the largest left-wing primary campaign in Democratic Party history, winning far more votes and delegates than Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, or even the victorious George McGovern. He entered the 2020 race as a serious contender, not a long-shot underdog. In the end, however, Joe Biden beat Sanders with a voting coalition that both resembled and subtly differed from the coalition that propelled Hillary Clinton to the nomination in 2016.

A look at local results from the two elections suggests that Sanders was defeated by three key factors in 2020: First, despite a substantial effort, the Bernie campaign struggled to make inroads with black voters, which turned out to be a far more intractable problem than it seemed four years ago. Second, and relatedly, despite considerable success in winning working-class support compared to 2016 — mostly with Latino voters — the campaign failed to generate higher participation among working-class voters of all races. Finally, above all, Bernie was swamped by a massive turnout surge from the Democratic Party’s fastest-growing demographic: former Republican voters in overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and well-educated suburban neighborhoods.

Let’s take each of these in turn.
Struggling to Win Black Voters

After the 2016 campaign, in which Sanders’s struggles with black voters cost him dearly, the 2020 campaign made a range of well-documented efforts to court African Americans, in both substance and style. The goal, as Adolph Reed Jr and Willie Legette have argued, was never to win a singular, homogenous, and mythical “black vote” — but in order to compete in a Democratic primary, Sanders did need to convince a lot more black voters.

In 2019, the campaign released an ambitious plan to fund historically black colleges and universities; supported by scholars like Darrick Hamilton and leaders like Jackson, Mississippi, mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Sanders railed against the racial wealth gap and delivered substantive plans to close it. His campaign poured resources into South Carolina, which Sanders visited more times than Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren; Bernie himself went on The Breakfast Club and said his 2016 campaign had been “too white.”


None of it seemed to make an appreciable difference. In South Carolina, where Sanders won 14 percent of black voters in 2016, exit polls showed him winning 17 percent in 2020. In the state’s five counties with a black population over 60 percent, Sanders increased his vote share from 11 percent to 12 percent.

It was no better for him on Super Tuesday and beyond. In the rural South, from eastern North Carolina to western Mississippi, Sanders struggled to break the 15 percent threshold in majority-black counties. In some black urban neighborhoods, like Northside Richmond and Houston’s Third Ward, he made small gains on his 2016 baseline, occasionally winning as much as a third of the vote; but in others, like Southeast Durham and North St. Louis, Sanders fared even worse. On the whole, Biden clobbered him just as comprehensively as Clinton had four years earlier.

After 2016, it was still possible to argue, optimistically, that black voter preferences reflected Clinton’s advantage in name recognition and resources, along with Sanders’s need to focus on the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. All the best survey data showed reliable and enthusiastic black support for the core items on Bernie’s social-democratic agenda. With improved messaging and a more serious investment in voter outreach, surely an insurgent left-wing candidate could breach the Democratic establishment’s “firewall” and win a large chunk of black voters.

Bernie Sanders was not that candidate, either in 2016 or in 2020. But after years of struggle, it is time to revisit the assumption that superior policy, messaging, and tactics are enough for any insurgent to overcome black voter support for establishment Democrats. After all, Sanders is far from the only left-wing candidate who has struggled on this front.

In the 2015 Chicago mayoral election, Rahm Emanuel beat Chuy García with huge margins among black voters; the same pattern was visible in gubernatorial races in Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York, where black voters overwhelmingly backed Ralph Northam, Phil Murphy, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo against progressive outsiders. In last year’s race for Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz barely edged past Tiffany Cabán with the strong support of black voters in Southeast Queens.

Nor have anti-establishment black candidates necessarily fared much better with black primary voters. Jamaal Bowman’s recent victory over Eliot Engel is a meaningful and inspiring win for the Left, but not many left-wing candidates have had the advantage of facing a severely out-of-touch white opponent in a plurality-black district. Far more often, under different circumstances, the result has gone the other way. In the 2017 Atlanta mayoral race, the business-friendly party favorite Keisha Lance Bottoms creamed Vincent Fort, who had been endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and Killer Mike. And in congressional contests from St. Louis and Chicago to Columbus, Ohio and Prince George’s County, Maryland, black progressive insurgent campaigns have failed to catch fire, with black voters ultimately helping establishment-backed incumbents coast to victory at the polls.

Black voter support for mainline Democrats is a broader trend in American politics — a trend approaching the status of a fundamental fact — and it cannot be explained with reference to Bernie Sanders alone.

After 2016, some argued that a clearer focus on racial justice and a concerted effort to woo activists might boost a left-wing campaign with black voters. But the 2020 race offered slim evidence for that proposition, either in Sanders’s performance or in the frustrations of the Elizabeth Warren campaign, whose platform included a prominent focus on black maternal mortality, grants for black-owned businesses, and targeted reforms to help “farmers of color.”

This rhetoric won black organizers in droves but hardly any black votes: among African Americans, exit polls showed Warren trailing not only Biden and Sanders but Bloomberg, too, in every single state, including her own. In North Carolina’s rural black-majority counties, farmers of color did not turn out for Warren, who actually received fewer votes than “no preference.”

Another popular view is that black voters have the most to fear from Donald Trump and the Republicans, and thus tend to favor moderate, conventionally “electable” candidates. But while concerns about electability surely played a key part in Bernie’s 2020 defeat, there is little evidence to suggest that it mattered more to black Democrats than white Democrats (if anything, polling suggests the opposite). Fear of general election defeat also cannot explain why black voters favored Joe Crowley over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon, or establishment leaders in other deep-blue areas where Republicans are banished from politics altogether.

Nor can the phenomenon be explained by actual ideological conservatism, or any real hesitance to get behind a politics of material redistribution. In fact, black voters support Medicare for All at higher rates than almost any other demographic in the country.

The institutional conservatism of most black elected leaders, on the other hand, continues to stack the deck against left-wing politics. Powerful black politicians like Jim Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries, as Perry Bacon Jr has argued, support the establishment because “they are part of the establishment.” The Congressional Black Caucus has not tried to disguise its fierce hostility to left-wing primary challenges, even when the progressive challengers are black, like Bowman and Mckayla Wilkes, and the centrist incumbents are white, like Engel and Steny Hoyer.

Overcoming the near-unanimous opposition of black elected leaders is difficult enough, but the problem for left-wing insurgents is even greater: it’s hard to win black voters by running against a party establishment whose preeminent figure is still, after all, America’s first black president. In the age of Obama, as Joe Biden’s primary campaign showed, black primary voters may well be moved more by appeals to institutional continuity than either personal identity (as Kamala Harris learned) or political ideology.

After fifty years of living in a system where profound material change seems almost impossible — and black politics, like many other zones of politics, has become largely affective and transactional as a result — that feeling is understandable. Black voters, of course, must be a critical part of any working-class majority. But as long as every black political figure with significant institutional standing remains tied to Obama’s party leadership, and remains invested in using that tie to beat back left-wing challenges, anti-establishment candidates will face tough odds.

If there is hope for the Left here, it is that black support for establishment Democrats remains tenacious rather than enthusiastic — strong support from a relatively small group of primary voters. Campaign boasts and press puffery aside, there was no black turnout surge for Joe Biden. Across the March primaries, even as overall Democratic turnout soared in comparison to 2016, it dropped absolutely in black neighborhoods across the country.

In Michigan, Democratic participation bloomed by more than 350,000 votes but wilted in Flint’s first and second wards, where turnout declined from over 25 percent of registered voters to under 21 percent. Similar declines from 2016 were recorded in Ferguson, Missouri, in North St. Louis, in Houston’s Kashmere Gardens, Sunnyside, and Crestmont Park, and in Southeast Durham — even as statewide Democratic turnout soared in Missouri, Texas, and North Carolina.

This follows a pattern already evident in the 2016 general election, in which poor and working-class black voters — like working-class voters generally — appear to comprise a smaller and smaller share of the active Democratic voting coalition.

That is no consolation for Bernie Sanders, whose campaign was premised on its ability to help generate working-class participation in politics. But it does suggest that in some ways, the Left’s struggles with black voters are a specific symptom of a more general disease. The Sanders campaign, in both its remarkable strengths and its ultimately fatal weaknesses, illuminated the larger problem that has plagued left politics across much of the developed world: a failure to mobilize, much less organize, the majority of workers.




To read the rest of this article please go to: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/bernie-sanders-five-year-war