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“Aligning Black Policy Priorities Into the Game of Electoral Politics”
Professor Willie Legette
Political Systems Analyst and Organizer
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ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The coalition Democrats brought together in 2020 was enough to beat Trump—but it’s insufficient for the long-term fights ahead. If 2020 was, as Biden put it, a fight “for the soul of the nation,” the next task for the progressives is even harder: build a multiracial working-class majority big enough to win a transformative agenda that lifts America out of 2020s roiling crises and truly transform people’s lives. That’s how progressives win for the next generation.
We talk with Professor Willie Legette, political analyst, as to how we might resolve the conflicts and problems of voting for who we “like”, votes that are often divorced from policies that address our political, economic, and community needs. Are we voting electoral race politics and needing class-basis policies? Just how does the “Black vote” calculate? Though we think of ourselves as on a winning team, are we winning? Is there credence to what we call “ the Black vote”? What does it mean? A whole new way of thinking is required. That and a “resistance campaign” against voter suppression.
With his co-author, Adolph Reed, Legette writes that “The disjunction between candidate choices and issue concerns reflects how people are accustomed to making their short-term electoral calculations and how they understand the issues that affect their lives. People take different criteria to candidate selection than to their estimations of the issues that most concern them. In part that is the result of decades of bipartisan neoliberal hegemony in which electoral politics has been drained of serious policy differences. For more than forty years neither Republicans nor Democrats have sought to address Americans’ decreasing standard of living and increasing economic insecurity. Both parties have subordinated voters’ concerns to the interests of Wall Street and corporations. Therefore, in states like South Carolina Democratic party politics is fundamentally transactional, where people are habituated to making electoral choices based on considerations like personal relationships or more local concerns that do not center so much on national policy issues. In effect politics—or at least electoral politics—has been redefined as not the appropriate domain for trying to pursue policies that address people’s actual material concerns like health care, education, jobs, and wages, or housing.
Legette asserts that a narrow view of politics was on display regarding the “black vote” in particular in the runup to the 2016 South Carolina primary when Congressmen James Clyburn (D-SC), John Lewis (D-GA), and Cedric Richmond (D-LA) denounced calls for free public higher education as “irresponsible” because “there are no free lunches.” When Clyburn endorsed Biden in 2020, he took a swipe at Medicare for All, another issue with strong black American support, indicating that the choice this year is Biden vs. Medicare for All. (It may be worth noting that Clyburn, between 2008 and 2018, took more than $1 million from the pharmaceutical industry.)”
“. . . is not the election of a president but the transformation of the country into a place that is more egalitarian, just, and humane, a society where poverty is not possible and where real freedom is enjoyed by all… The kind of popular pressure we need to advance some of the best of Sanders’s platform—free higher education, postal banking, public works, a single-payer health care system, stronger financial regulation, and so on—cannot be built in an election cycle.” – Cedric Johnson, Jacobin magazine,” Fear and Pandering in the Palmetto State”
Johnson problematizes that “black politics” as a framework for understanding either black Americans’ electoral behavior or their class and political interests. He points out that “voting for a presidential candidate… is only a proxy for political interests, which are again multifaceted and shifting.” Black politics, in fact, is a historically specific phenomenon, as Johnson argues elsewhere. It is a label attached to the racialized black interest-group politics that consolidated after the great victories of the 1960s. It is thoroughly a class politics that rests on a premise—and one asserted with increasing intensity as class differences among black Americans become clearer in political debate—that all black Americans converge around a racial agenda defined arbitrarily by political elites and others in the stratum of freelance Racial Voices. We talk with Professor Legette about these assertions and more. As well, I continue to ask where is the Black political infrastructure to move us either in or out of the game?
ABOUT Professor Legette
Willie Legette is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, South Carolina State University; Lead Organizer, Medicare for All-South Carolina; Labor Party candidate for SC Senate;
Common Dreams contributor; journalist and activist.
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