The Deep State’s 60-Year War on Black Americans—and the 2024 Populist Opportunity

There are real reasons to believe that black Americans are ready to break with the left.

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. 

Read more at The American Conservative.