The Democrats and racism

Since Lyndon Johnson's presidency and the civil rights revolution, the Democrats have been the beneficiaries of African American votes (that is, when they have actually been permitted to vote by increasingly discriminatory voter registration laws at state level, which resemble the period of Jim Crow). Since then, it has been apparent that the Democrats have taken the votes of African Americans for granted.

Of course, before LBJ the Democrats were the party of segregation and white supremacy. I hope that I need not mention Woodrow Wilson's support for D. W. Griffith and his notorious film, 'Birth of a nation' (shown in the White House), and Franklin Roosevelt's willingness to uphold segregation in order to ensure passage of his New Deal legislation through Congress. I am talking about the period, since the 1960s, when the Democrats were ostensibly supporters of racial equality. In the early 1970s, the Democrats started to turn away from their alliance with the American labour movement and New Deal policies of state intervention. This orientation, which could be described as 'social democratic', was symbolised by such figures as the union leader Walter Reuther and the politicians Hubert Humphrey and Robert Wagner. As the historian and political commentator Thomas Frank relates in his book, 'Listen, liberal', the Democrats consciously chose a more middle class base, thereby paving the way for the defection of the 'Reagan Democrats'.

Carter's presidency, following the lead of Ford, started the turn to de-regulation and neoliberal economics before Reagan's more full-throated endorsement (see Richard Abrahams, 'America transformed.') Although Clinton's presidency was marked by reductions in unemployment, which assisted African Americans, the advent of punitive 'workfare' policies also disproportionately impacted African Americans, as did Clinton's enthusiastic endorsement of incarceration and capital punishment. The disastrous deregulation of the financial sector, enthusiastically sponsored by Clinton, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, also disadvantaged African Americans. Confronted by persistent discrimination in the mortgage lending sector, many of them turned in desperation to 'subprime' mortgages with punitive repayment requirements. Defaults on these mortgages were important causes of the global financial crash in 2008. Obama's failure to ensure a universal health care system has had devastating consequences for African Americans,as we see during the current pandemic (his reforms, which were never more than a sticking plaster, have been rescinded by several states).

Biden's reactionary voting record, in particular with regard to African Americans, has often been criticised. His career, and his recent remark that those African Americans who vote for Trump were not really black, is typical of the Democrats' attitude to a constituency which they have viewed for too long in patron-client terms.