The Bleak Future of Black Protest Movements on the National Stage
Local activists’ success in getting cities to cut funding for police departments contrasts with a national political environment that remains wary of Black movement politics.
Whether it’s Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory in 2016 or Joe Biden’s solid but smaller-than-anticipated defeat of Trump in 2020, Black protest movements have been blamed for the Democratic Party coming up short in presidential elections. For example, following a wave a Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2016, author Mark Lilla penned a notorious op-ed in the New York Times arguing that Trump’s strong backing by working class whites, once a reliably Democratic constituency, represented a backlash to liberal identity politics. Similarly, following the Defund The Police movement in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd this past summer, Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger reportedly chided her progressive colleagues for aligning themselves with anti-police rhetoric that nearly cost her her seat.
On one hand, these criticisms of Black protest movements don’t make a lot of sense. No prominent Democrats — certainly not President-elect Joe Biden — have embraced the movement to defund police departments. Moreover, Biden owes much of his November victory to turnout from the very group of voters that critics claimed would be spurned by anti-police sloganeering — college educated suburban whites.
And where defunding the police has been on the table, police abolition activists have begun to see some of the fruits of their labor. In Minneapolis for instance, the city council voted in December to shift $8 million in police funding to support community services. And in two Ohio counties, activists helped to elect judges and police officials that support another cause important to the abolition movement: ending mass incarceration.
On the other hand, the criticisms persist because they serve some other purpose than to explain Democrats’ lackluster electoral performance. There are no doubt real challenges for Democrats who seek broadly appealing messages being defined by the more narrow pursuits of activists in urban districts around the country. And Black protest movements aren’t beyond criticism or internal disagreement when it comes to actual policy demands.
But the real impetus behind criticisms of Black protest movements is not unlike the caricature of Georgia Senate candidate Raphael Warnock in Senator Kelly Loeffler’s run-off ads — where “radical” functions as a dog-whistle for all things Black. Critics across the political spectrum are threatened by the hyper-visibility and increasing elite buy-in from news media, local governments, and businesses to Black protest movements because they don’t trust Black organizers with having power in these institutions.
Thus even as police abolition activists find success at the local levels of power, the story at the national level is a mixed bag. Wide-reaching protests against police brutality have gotten activists the attention they wanted from those in power, but not the trust and prioritization of their agenda that they had hoped for just as much.
Democrats’ Discomfort with Racial Justice Demands
As I wrote last June, regardless of how one feels about the policy objectives of the movement to defund police, the movement is significant in that it provides left activists space to challenge the state in ways that the Democratic resistance to President Trump does not. Whereas resistance liberals mostly embrace the law and order arm of the state to fight Trump’s corruption and authoritarianism, left activists seek to take power away from those institutions being used to harm Black people.
To some extent, such fundamental differences over the role and value of law enforcement explains why left activists do not feel confident much will change with Democrats back in power. According to the Intercept, when civil rights leaders met with President-elect Biden in December to persuade him to take executive action on police reform and other criminal justice measures, Biden was reluctant to commit to anything that might hurt the party in future down-ballot races. “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police,” Biden asserted, recalling the big blow his party suffered in House and Senate races last November despite his own victory at the top of the ballot.
Former President Barack Obama also dismissed Defund The Police as “snappy” sloganeering that cost activists “a big audience” and will make it harder for them to get the changes they want done. But unlike Biden and Obama, police abolition activists aren’t so preoccupied with winning the battle of public opinion when, for them, the more immediate need is to save Black lives.
The movement to defund police is hardly the first movement to expose tensions between Democratic leaders and the left. The many cleavages between electeds and activists reared their head a few years ago on the subject of reparations for Black Americans. When support for reparations emerged as a litmus test for progressive bonafides in the early stages of the 2020 Democratic primary, some white progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, pushed back on what they viewed as a myopic set of priorities that ignored the real suffering Americans of all races were experiencing.
But what is unique about Defund The Police is the degree to which it revealed deeper and more widely shared distrust of Black activists and organizers having the power to command responses from those in power.
Solidarity Among White Moderates
Even with broad public support for last summer’s George Floyd protests, the belief that Democrats and the left have alienated large swaths of the country with race-based identity politics persists. What is equally striking about this line of criticism — that is, other than the lack of data to support it — is how widely held it is across the political spectrum. Conservatives, mainstream liberals like Joe Biden and their progressive detractors have all found some fault with Black protest movements and their prominence in national politics.
Again, criticisms of Defund The Police vary and aren’t all without merit, but columnist Damon Linker’s op-ed in The Week just one day after the November 3rd election (when it was still unclear which candidate would come out as victor) vocalizes the distrust of black-led movements that unites many critics of Defund The Police. Here’s Linker’s bleak outlook for the incoming Biden administration if Biden gives in to progressive demands to use executive power to get around Republican obstruction in Congress:
Some will demand that Biden push through progressive priorities by executive order. But every time he does — like every incident of urban rioting and looting, every effort to placate the left-wing “Squad” in the House, every micro-targeted identity-politics box-checking display of intersectional moral preening and finger-wagging — the country will move closer to witnessing a conservative backlash that results in Republicans taking control of the House and increasing their margin in the Senate in November 2022, rendering the Biden administration even more fully dead in the water.
In Linker’s mind, Black protest movements aren’t to be trusted because they have the potential to alienate non-Black people. And once they do, all bets are off. Whether it’s Trump giving a wink and nod to violent white supremacist groups during live television or the GOP refusing to accept the legitimacy of Democratic governance following an electoral defeat, White people’s responses to Black people making demands on the system are always deemed valid — even if they end up harming Black people.
Linker’s disdain for left, particularly the Black left and the progressive Democrats who have been responsive to the issues they care about, simmers beneath the surface of many Democrats who embraced the diversity and electoral organizing potential of the George Floyd protests. But when it comes to their leadership and policy demands, it’s clear Democrats do not trust Black activists and organizers to remake the just society they want. A lot will change with a Democrat back in the White House, but perhaps not the sort of change that will lead Black organizers to believe they have a real ally on the highest stage.
