The Democratic Party is not enough against White nationalism

By Dayvon Love

Trump utilizing national law enforcement in Washington, D.C., is another example of the underlying White nationalism that undergirds the political worldview of the MAGA movement. It is consistent with Richard Nixon’s call for a war on drugs, which sought to criminalize Black people as a political strategy to catalyze White resentment. This resentment is rooted in a “silent majority” of White people who believed that the social movements of the 1960s sought to give Black people too much.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an appearance on MSNBC’s “All in with Chris Hays” a couple of months ago said it best. Coates said Trump realized that “Willie Horton is the thing.” In this quote, Coates is referring to the idea that Republicans use to try to be subtle about their racist dog whistling, but Trump figured out that racism is resonant with the base of his party. 

The Willie Horton reference is to a Black man who was on a prison furlough program where he was released for a weekend, didn’t return and committed violent crimes. The story and Horton’s image was used in the 1988 presidential election by George H.W. Bush and the Republican Party to cast the Democratic Party as soft on crime. The use of individual– and often isolated– incidents of violence in order to project a narrative of a “crime problem” is central to White nationalist propaganda to enliven an electorate that has been conditioned to see Black people as inherently criminal.

The pushback from Democrats on Trump’s law enforcement policy in D.C. has been swift and vigorous. This reflects the fact that the base of the Democratic Party, much of which is Black and Brown, is most vulnerable to the abuses that have historically taken place against them at the hands of law enforcement. Much of the underlying pushback has focused on the historic declines in violent crime in D.C. and in places like Baltimore. While it is important to refute the racist, crime-centric propaganda of Trump’s claim that there is a rampant crime problem, there is a glaring omission from mainstream Democratic Party leaders’ commentary about Trump’s policy that reflect the overall problem with the Democratic Party. That omission is about the brutality from military personnel and federal law enforcement that has historically been committed against working class and poor Black people. 

You don’t have to look further than the 2016 Department of Justice’s pattern and practices report on the Baltimore Police Department, where incidents of strip searches, robbery, excessive force and more were committed on a routine basis. This tracks with a wide range of reports over many decades that documented the extent of police violence against working class Black people. 

While reports are still coming in, largely on an anecdotal basis at this point, there have been reports of homeless people being abused, people being arrested for using cannabis (which is legal recreationally in D.C.). There has been excessive use of force against people like Afeni Evans, who was brutally attacked by Metro Transit Police for a minor offense. Many Black youth– particularly Black men– are being arrested for minor offenses. As a person committed to Black liberation, the lack of emphasis on the violence from law enforcement against working class Black people reveals the unseriousness of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Donald Trump. 

If there is going to be effective resistance to Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s law and order strategies, the Democratic Party has to mobilize voters who have traditionally abstained from politics. Many of these voters have watched the Democratic Party sell them out– whether it is the Clinton 1994 crime bill or Martin O’Malley’s early 2000s mass arrests policy in Baltimore city, NAFTA which exacerbated access to living wage employment, or the relative silence on Sinclair Broadcasting and their racist propaganda. There are those who have observed my support for the work of building radical political parties to the left of the Democratic Party as political idealism. 

There are some formulations of this argument that deserve legitimate engagement, but the bottom line analysis is that Democrats have too much of an interest in the political status quo to truly represent the interests of working class Black people. Even in this moment of a dangerous expansion of the police state under the Trump administration, many mainstream Democrats are focusing too much on making the case of crime being down and not enough focus on the Black masses and the violence that they are exposed to as a result of increased presence of law enforcement. A focus on those voices would bring the Party in the direction of radical politics that would alienate the coveted White moderate suburban voters that the establishment of the Democratic Party feels more comfortable with. This is why the work of building alternative political parties is so important, because building viable alternatives to the Democratic Party are the only political formations that will speak forcefully on behalf of the masses of our community. 

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.