With the indispensable “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander now occupies a place among the top black social writers in the history of the country. The book is an exhaustive look into peeling back the mass incarceration problem that has plagued the black community for years. She found that there are both exploding prison industrial complex and a school-to-prison pipeline problems that can be traced to legislation written during the Clinton Administration during the 90’s.
She argues clearly that much of the relentless suffering in the black community of the past couple of decades specifically comes from the brutal policies of President Bill Clinton, with a surrogate assist from Hillary.
During the Clinton presidency, Bill and Hillary succumbed to the RW propagandist notion that it was bad black kids who were making our nation less safe, and not poverty, broken families and limited access to the portals of society. They helped sound the alarm, with their RW counterparts, that what we needed was more “law and order” and “tough on crime” policies.
Hillary went out on behalf of her husband’s campaign, calling young black men “super predators” who “need to be brought to heel” (to heel, like dogs?) The administration brandished a whole host of other harsh and unsavory blame tactics, which were designed ostensibly to quell the fears of scared middle class white people who were all too ready to place the ills of American society on the heads of the already chronically besieged black community. And Hillary bought right into the public relations sloganeering. Bashing welfare was also a chief component.
In the “game” of politics, that’s how you do it. It wins votes, and for some “winning” is everything. And that is what the Clintons seem to care an awful lot about. Winning. Votes result in power. Power acquires access, and access leads to money.
Enter the Neoliberal, or as Michelle Alexander called them, “New Democrats,” who is “tough on crime” and much more comfortable with accepting Wall St money and influence.
From the latest issue of the Nation, Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote:
From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted—and Hillary Clinton supported—decimated black America.
(italics mine)
On the campaign trail, Bill Clinton made the economy his top priority and argued persuasively that conservatives were using race to divide the nation and divert attention from the failed economy. In practice, however, he capitulated entirely to the right-wing backlash against the civil-rights movement and embraced former president Ronald Reagan’s agenda on race, crime, welfare, and taxes—ultimately doing more harm to black communities than Reagan ever did.
We should have seen it coming. Back then, Clinton was the standard-bearer for the New Democrats, a group that firmly believed the only way to win back the millions of white voters in the South who had defected to the Republican Party was to adopt the right-wing narrative that black communities ought to be disciplined with harsh punishment rather than coddled with welfare. Reagan had won the presidency by dog-whistling to poor and working-class whites with coded racial appeals: railing against “welfare queens” and criminal “predators” and condemning “big government.” Clinton aimed to win them back, vowing that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he.
Alexander goes on to describe how they parlayed this “tough on crime” stance into electoral victory twice. As we all cheered their “liberal” triumph, tens of thousands of families and communities all across America were being torn apart by the Clinton’s draconian legislative and penal policies, targeted directly at black folks. The article goes into a litany of oppressive legislation that basically tore apart the fabric of black family home life, a few which are excerpted here:
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. Clinton did not declare the War on Crime or the War on Drugs—those wars were declared before Reagan was elected and long before crack hit the streets—but he escalated it beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible. He supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine, which produced staggering racial injustice in sentencing and boosted funding for drug-law enforcement.
Clinton championed the idea of a federal “three strikes” law in his 1994 State of the Union address and, months later, signed a $30 billion crime bill that created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and the expansion of police forces. The legislation was hailed by mainstream-media outlets as a victory for the Democrats, who “were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own.”
While she stops short of endorsing Bernie, Alexander does make a very damning case for why Blacks should not vote for Hillary. On that subject, she concludes that Bernie has made the right decision on the War in Iraq and opposing the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill, and that “there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.”
If you listen closely here, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key. She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie’s rhetoric because we must be “pragmatic,” “face political realities,” and not get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When politicians start telling you that it is “unrealistic” to support candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages, universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system, it’s probably best to leave the room.
Of the many things I love about Alexander’s clear-eyed activism, brilliance and fearlessness is that sees the bigger picture and is not afraid to stand up and make radical conclusions about it.
She speaks more broadly to an uncomfortable truth for many. After last night’s crushing victory by Sanders, despite the entire Democratic Establishment with all hands on deck to try to rescue their status quo candidate, it’s clear there is an enormous insurgency erupting full blown to manifest into a new era of politics in America. And it may just tear asunder the false premise that democracy in America is limited to two-party rule. I’m excited by this, and it seems so is she.
The biggest problem with Bernie, in the end, is that he’s running as a Democrat—as a member of a political party that not only capitulated to right-wing demagoguery but is now owned and controlled by a relatively small number of millionaires and billionaires. Yes, Sanders has raised millions from small donors, but should he become president, he would also become part of what he has otherwise derided as “the establishment.” Even if Bernie’s racial-justice views evolve, I hold little hope that a political revolution will occur within the Democratic Party without a sustained outside movement forcing truly transformational change. I am inclined to believe that it would be easier to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.
Of course, the idea of building a new political party terrifies most progressives, who understandably fear that it would open the door for a right-wing extremist to get elected. So we play the game of lesser evils. This game has gone on for decades. W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent scholar and co-founder of the NAACP, shocked many when he refused to play along with this game in the 1956 election, defending his refusal to vote on the grounds that “there is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I do or say.” While the true losers and winners of this game are highly predictable, the game of lesser evils makes for great entertainment and can now be viewed 24 hours a day on cable-news networks. Hillary believes that she can win this game in 2016 because this time she’s got us, the black vote, in her back pocket—her lucky card.
She may be surprised to discover that the younger generation no longer wants to play her game. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll all continue to play along and pretend that we don’t know how it will turn out in the end.
It’s become ever more clearer to me, especially after last night’s historic victory for a Democratic Socialist candidate. We have entered an era of political transformation, in which an immovable fierce populist’s position, on everything from economic equality to corruption of Money in Politics to institutional racism, now represents the mainstream. The establishment is at a serious crossroads having been put on notice, and is unsure how to proceed. The media is also shell-shocked, and continue to feed us sensationalism instead of clear-headed analysis of what is happening all over the country.
And so I believe more than ever that the future of the Democratic Party resides in how it will conduct itself with respect to outside social movements, specifically with #BlackLivesMatter and Occupy Wall St, to force the hand of the powers that be inside. The rights of black people in this country to live dignified and humane lives, must be protected by an economic and justice system that honors all. As James Baldwin said, “"This is why those pious calls to ‘respect the law,’ always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.”
It’s always been this way; with power conceding nothing without a demand social movements from the Abolitionists to Women’s Suffragette to Workers’ Rights to collective bargaining and unionizing to the Civil Rights to Gay Rights have been the true agents of change. We just conveniently seem to forget these facts in favor of the quadrennial circus entertainment, sponsored by Wall St, corporate America and the flailing mainstream tv networks. That paradigm is all but finished, with a candidate not taking their money and “playing the game” as it’s used to being played. The people have take notice, and they like what they see.
If we blow this moment I think there’s very good chance the party could be rendered obsolete, which is where the Republican Party looks to be headed. The Democratic Party has showed little interest in these movements also, until they are forced to pay heed. But maybe that's exactly what needs to happen. Last night showed me it could very well be underway and it may already be too late. It remains to be seen if we’ll “muster the courage to join together in a revolutionary movement with people of all colors who believe that basic human rights and economic, racial, and gender justice are not unreasonable, pie-in-the-sky goals.”
The time may be now, as Alexander concludes:
”After decades of getting played, the sleeping giant just might wake up, stretch its limbs, and tell both parties: Game over. Move aside. It’s time to reshuffle this deck.”
And if it’s not now in this election cycle (I think it will be), it sure as hell is coming soon. To his enduring credit, Sanders has forced that conversation. He’s boldly stood firm in honoring the commitment of those on the ground and knows that’s the only way things have ever changed in this world.
(postscript)
More from the amazing Michelle Alexander: