This past spring, at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black, all-men’s college at the heart of the city which delivered Georgia to Democrats in 2020, President Biden gave a highly publicized commencement address on the themes of “manhood” and democracy. This speech was widely interpreted, along with political and symbolic moves involving menthol cigarettes and state dinners, as signaling a renewed Democratic focus on black Americans after two years of diminished attention: a “testament to the centrality and urgency of [the Party] consolidating support [among]…and…mobilizing Black voters.” Today, this centrality can only have increased: As questions about Biden’s political viability appear to be paralyzing the Democratic Party, ensuring the turnout of one of its most reliable voting blocs is more crucial than ever before.
Yet neither the current Democratic president nor his Party writ large are allies to the black community on questions of manhood or democracy. From the 1970s to the 1990s, as a senator from Delaware, Biden himself was crucial in promoting legislation expanding national government power in the name of fighting a “war on crime” that sent black men to prison and broke black communal and political life. In 2020, the progressive left and the New York Times criticized him for this record. But neither activists nor institutionalists took its full measure, which amounts to a startling indictment of both Democrats and the national institutions they have strengthened for 60 years.
The War on Crime that Biden along with establishment Democrats and neoconservative Republicans backed between 1970 and the 2010s was not just a policy agenda or a publicity play, featuring at least nine bills passed to the self-generating political acclaim that greets the perception of a problem being solved in Washington, D.C. From its inception in the 1960s by academics and policymakers in the Kennedy Administration, it served as the punitive part of a broader project: the white-collar institutionalizing of American life at the expense of the laborers and associations that shaped this country’s politics from the War for Independence through the Civil Rights movement. In the process of this project’s development, race moved from being an issue to a marker. In the Eighties and the Nineties, it was used to rack up political points for toughness against “hard-core” youth or “super-predators.” In the 2000s and 2010s and after, it was used to police the language of opposing politicians and silence anti-Washington dissent in the name of fighting racism and then “white nationalism.”
All the while, the situation of black Americans declined from a peak of political and economic empowerment in 1970, as they saw their positions undermined by the white-collarizing agenda of establishment Washington. The reality of this shift, the slow erosion of on-the-ground communities by centralizing institutions, has been obscured by political rhetoric. But its broad outlines should be familiar to populist Republicans who have stood up for displaced white working class voters and are increasingly interested in arguing that President Trump’s attack on Washington power structures will benefit the black community.
The specific history of this shift, which has not been set out, provides populist Republicans with powerful ammunition to make their case. It also builds new links from the black working class to the white working class. Not only did national policies affect both groups in the same ways over time, but Washington’s mobilization against inner-city black Americans from the 1960s to the 2000s was a template for its mobilization against white populist Americans beginning in the 2010s.
The War on Crime, the first major “use” of the black community by establishment Washington, grew from a problem Washington itself created in the 1940s. Black Americans urged North by the government to produce the armaments to fight World War II had been reduced by locally restrictive laws to living in ghettos while being shut out of factory work after the war. In one sense, aspects of this issue were already being addressed, since laboring jobs were opening up to black men thanks to the Civil Rights Act pushed on the reluctant administration by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). What’s more, decades-old local voluntary organizations founded by black Americans in places like New York’s Lower East Side were helping prevent delinquency there, replaying a tradition of on-the-ground associating alive in the republic since the early 1800s.
But the administration was determined to address the problem it had identified, and its angle was altogether more top-down and abstract. It aimed to prepare black Americans for integration in an essentially white collar labor force with seminars on “items like smiling and Emotional Maturity” delivered by “well-adjusted, middle-class professionals” who bragged of achievements like creating “a middle class environment in a slum neighborhood school.” In the view of one perceptive observer, these government-funded, university-educated social workers imported to neighborhoods like Harlem and Watts “seem to be smiling themselves out of any meaningful communication with their poor.”
The Kennedy-Johnson administrations’ response was part of a bigger, less publicized, power-oriented push by academics, consultants, and administrators to move America from a blue collar economy dependent on states and localities to a white collar one directed by national institutions, in the name of diversity, efficiency and progress. It was a far more aggressive continuation of the agenda that had begun with the rise of the administrative state after 1945 and its funding of corporations and universities to fight the Cold War. After the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, it would be adopted with different emphases by the Republican neoconservatives and Democratic neoliberals who dominated much of each party until the 2010s. Its policies included outsourcing union jobs to Mexico in the name of public health and education; attacking union corruption in the service of clean government; and “white-collarizing” “left behind” groups like blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and rural whites in the name of “civilization.”
But there was another side to this program. Those members of the “left behind,” particularly urban blacks, who didn’t adjust their values and their lives were labeled “hard-core” reprobates and subjected to the increasingly heavy stick of nationalized, militarized law enforcement.
This stick was embedded in the legislation that deployed the missionaries of emotional maturity to Watts, Detroit, the Bronx, and elsewhere, including the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965, as well as the Safe Streets Act of 1968. According to scholar Elizabeth Hinton in her recent book From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, the acts mandated that, to receive funding, “employment initiatives, public schools, and grassroots organizations [would] partner with juvenile courts, police departments, and correctional facilities,” in a schema in which police officers were the “frontline soldiers” of a “war on crime.” They also, in Hinton’s recounting, “made tens of millions of dollars available to public organizations, private companies, and individual researchers who could develop technology, hardware, and theories that would help the federal government prevent future crime.” Not surprisingly, “consulting firms and corporations emerged to reap the benefits of such funding” and “the result was widespread corruption,” creating a number of Washington-linked players with interests in continuing what fast became an anti-crime boondoggle.
During the 1970s, this fallout from this boondoggle fell disproportionately on black men being laid off thanks to labor outsourcing: last hired after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and thus first fired as blue collar jobs diminished. Abandonment of families became some of these men’s retreat, in a direct replay of non-earning white men during the Great Depression, and petty crime or drug trafficking eventually became their commerce of last resort. This wasn’t a new phenomenon in America: in the early 1900s, hard-luck Irish, Italians and Jews had joined the mafia in cities where law enforcement was discerning about the laws it enforced. But seven decades later helicopters and militarized police made neighborhoods into war zones and discernment a thing of the past, eradicating the slow path to respectability that earlier generations of minorities had enjoyed under state and city governments.
The result was a Washington-created problem that Washington politicians continued to gain political capital from purporting to solve. This meant a series of bills passed in the 1980s and 1990s to combat what neoconservatives like President George H.W. Bush’s attorney general called “urban terrorism” and neoliberals like Hillary Clinton called “super-predators” who had to be brought “to heel.” Fronted by formerly segregationist senators like James Eastland and Strom Thurmond, members of a dying political breed who occupied powerful congressional committee posts, these Washington initiatives framed policies that expanded national power as parts of a war against immoral opponents which brooked no middle ground. Not coincidentally, this was exactly the rhetoric that would be used to justify the government boondoggle that became the war on terror in the 2000s, and was supported by many of the same players.
Rather than solving the underlying problems plaguing the black community, these national expansions increased them. Some legislative provisions allowed local police forces to access information, air surveillance, equipment and training from defense and intelligence agencies and the military. This created fields of “urban surveillance” and “social control,” which further alienated the people living inside them. Other provisions allowed juveniles to be tried as adults as well as introducing mandatory minimums for possession of small amounts of crack cocaine even as possession of powder cocaine, used by middle class whites driving the demand for drugs, was punished less severely. Still others provided states with funds for prison construction, creating the incentive to continue arrests in pursuit of federal funds.
The effect of these policies was predictable. Between 1980 and 1997, the numbers of people serving prison time for non-violent drug offenses went from 50,000 to 400,000 people, disproportionately low income black users or dealers. Between 1995 and 2005 the incarceration rate rose from 411 people per 100,000 to 491, with black inmates representing 40 percent of inmates with a sentence of more than one year. This “boom” also gave low-level, unsteady employment as prison guards to black women, many of them single mothers, now supervising the black men the government had drained of working dignity and then put away. Meanwhile, communities these men left behind became “opportunity deserts” off the steady stream of drugs, incarceration, outsourced labor and union decline. In this sense, they were later-stage versions of those white working class communities soon to be mobilized by Trump.
During this time, a small number of black Americans gained access to institutional power at the hands of the Democratic Party, which used this shift to move race from an issue of law and order to one of identity politics. The Johnson Administration had begun the process, but it was the next eight-year Democratic presidency, of Bill Clinton, when the push began in earnest. The Democrats’ 1992 platform stated that “as the party of inclusion, we take special pride in our country’s emergence as the world’s largest and most successful multiethnic, multiracial republic.” And in 1993, the incoming Democratic president set a record for Black appointees in his cabinet. By 2000, African Americans were an unprecedented 14 percent of the Administration’s appointments and more African American judges had been appointed than ever before. This push continued during the Obama presidency, and was presented as an explicit part of the progressive promise of American life.
But, in practice, the main political function of race became language policing the other side, as “racist” increasingly replaced “hard-core” and “super-predator” as “the” establishment term of moral condemnation. Some of this language policing found its way into status-quo politicking: the Daily Show featuring recordings of racist private calls or establishment papers featuring accusations of implicit racism. Other policing created a new boondoggle around the threat of “white nationalism” not much different than the one around the threat of “urban terrorism” and Muslim terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s.
This boondoggle involved nonprofits such as the Southern Poverty Law Center establishing Washington administrative connections, then using their authority to label small government activists as harborers of racial animus: immoral opponents whose wrongdoing, per what was now the standard rhetorical construct, brooked no compromise. Not coincidentally, the same players who backed the wars on crime and terror, from Attorney General Merrick Garland, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Clinton Administration, to former George W. Bush Administration officials Frances Townsend and Liz Cheney, supported these moves as well.
All the while, the operators driving this policing were profiting off the black community in obvious ways. Hollywood producers like David Geffen who in the 1990s helped solidify the new Democratic Party of corporations, nonprofits, and racial sensitivity also profited off of mainstreaming hip hop: turning music expressing the reality of survival in vacuumed-out communities into an opportunity for white suburban high schoolers to wear their pants down. Neoconservatives like George W. Bush, who boasted of purging their party of racism, turbo-charged the outsourcing that was putting paid to black working life. Financiers like Herb Sandler who poured their fortunes into progressive nonprofits made those fortunes off the home ownership boondoggle, which increasingly targeted blacks and led to a mean wealth loss for black families of 31 to 34 percent after the implosion of 2008.
Matters have not improved since this insider club became explicitly multiracial after 2008. Democratic officials like Kamala Harris, who started their careers pushing tough-on-crime policies in their ground zero, California, have nonetheless run on racial identity while also allowing a potentially lasting electoral realignment based on demographic shifts off of unauthorized immigrants, at the expense of black Americans. Biden-linked operators like John Podesta pushing to secure voting rights for felons, many black, spent years supporting policies that eroded black communities and sending them to prison, seeding a new kind of political harvest: break lives, create dependency, answer a need, get the votes.
Caught between these shifts at the top and their consequences at the bottom are black Americans who have embraced the institutional promise, and not for power or publicity or political gain. These accomplished professionals try to bring the reality of black life on the ground to the attention of the establishment, but the effects of their insights and efforts seem limited. One of them is Princeton University Professor of African American Studies Eddie Glaude, who wrote in 2016 that the idea “that you can have black leaders representing the interests of all black people but who are not accountable to black constituents kills black democratic life.” It also “undermines mechanisms of accountability as black elites broker on behalf of black people whose interests are, so it is claimed, readily identifiable.”
Another is Pantheon Books’ former publisher, Lisa Lucas, who used the progressive emphasis on race in the 2010s and 2020s to put black life in America in new perspectives. This year, after a raft of resignations of black women executives, during a period when establishment players quietly moved race to the back of their playboard, Lucas was let go without warning, to the outspoken chagrin of the authors she had found. The day of her firing, she posted on X, mostly humorously, but also about the system which had invited her in then unceremoniously dropped her. Responding to a supportive tweet, “We all need you to end up in books,” she tweeted back, “This is up to corporate publishing and exactly five CEOS,” e.g. an industry driven towards bottom-line conglomeration by the same people purportedly supporting independent black writers inside it. At another point in the day, she tweeted, “In 2024, race is irrelevant. I’m learning the news!”
In this context, of an establishment for which race has existed for 60 years as a political marker, a populist movement helmed by an unlikely leader has an unusual opportunity. On an empirical read of the evidence, the three forces that have affected the black community most profoundly since 1970 are outsourcing, the war on crime, and the decline of on-the-ground political power at the hands of unaccountable institutions. All three of these underlying structural issues are ones that Trump’s Republicans have addressed or are in the process of addressing.
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Because outsourcing has done so much harm to the white working class voters who vote Republican, Trump’s party has done more to reestablish a push for blue collar work than any movement since before World War II. His party is also more accountable to popular voices on the ground, many of them religious, than any since the Republicans of the 1960s and 1970s, during Barry Goldwater’s and Ronald Reagan’s rise. Finally, it was Trump who, in 2018, took the biggest step to unwind the Washington-backed carceral state since its foundations were laid by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration 50 years before: reviving congressional progress on and then signing the First Step Act, which “combin[ed] new funding for anti-recidivism programs, the expansion of early-release credits for prisoners and the reduction of certain mandatory minimum sentences.”
Any effort to make these points about contemporary Republicanism will come up against Democratic claims about helping black Americans fight racist roads and voting laws; and championing affirmative action and black-owned businesses via funds from Washington. Yet these Democratic emblems of progress exist within the construct of an expanding national state helmed by educated administrators, and it’s this construct that has created most of the problems faced by black Americans today.
It’s also this construct that contemporary “Main Street” conservatism under Trump seeks to unwind, and, on this standard, the Republican Party has a real chance to appeal to a new constituency. At the very least, if a basic question in politics is ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Republicans can make the case that the Democratic project with black Americans since 1965 is less beneficial, and more insidiously harmful, than it might at first appear.