THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 13
COMMENT
THECYNICISMVOTE
E
arly in last week’s Democratic Pres-
idential debate, in Las Vegas, just
before it began to seem as if Michael
Bloomberg’s cutman might rush onto
the stage during a commercial break,
carrying a spit bucket and an ice pack,
the former mayor of New York made
an observation about the candidates. “If
we took off this panel everybody that
was wrong on criminal justice some-
time in their careers,” he said, “there’d
be nobody else up here.”
He was almost right. A crude way
of summarizing the remaining viable
contenders in the Democratic field is
to note that voters have a choice of: a
former mayor who championed stop-
and-frisk practices that targeted Afri-
can-American and Latino men; an-
other former mayor, who fired a black
police chief after he recorded phone
calls in which senior white officers made
racist comments; a former prosecutor
who may have helped send a wrong-
fully accused black teen-ager to prison;
a former Vice-President who co-wrote
the 1994 crime bill; a democratic so-
cialist who voted for and defended that
bill; or Senator Elizabeth Warren, who
has held office only since 2013, and has
no comparable stain on her record. In-
dividual politicians often face liabilities
with particular segments of the elec-
torate. It’s unusual, though, for so many
in one field to be susceptible on such
a similar theme; a now entirely white
Democratic slate is being asked to ex-
plain past positions on criminal-justice
issues, and, specifically, the effects of
those positions on people of color.
How did the Democrats end up
here? Part of the problem dates to the
1994 crime bill, which Joe Biden spear-
headed, as the chairman of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, and President
Bill Clinton signed into law. The bill
was a response to alarming rates of vi-
olent crime—and to Republicans’ ac-
cusations that Democrats were soft on
the issue. It included an assault-weapons
ban and the Violence Against Women
Act, but it also imposed harsh federal
sentences and mandatory “three strikes”
rules. Even so, no one in the Demo-
cratic leadership then could have pre-
dicted that criminal-justice reform
would factor quite as it has in current
politics. Hillary Clinton held public
office from 2001 to 2013, but it wasn’t
until 2016 that she was called out for
a remark she had made in 1996, about
“superpredators,” saying that “we have
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
to bring them to heel.” Before this elec-
tion, Biden was rarely challenged on
his role in the crime bill. The problem
isn’t just the bill but the cultural dev-
astation of mass incarceration that it
seemed to engender, and that cloud has
hung over the Party, creating vulnera-
bilities even for younger, more progres-
sive, and nonwhite Democrats. Sena-
tor Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign was
hounded by concerns regarding her
years as a prosecutor, and Senator Cory
Booker dropped out before questions
were widely raised about oversight of
the Newark Police Department during
his tenure as mayor.
In an unimaginable irony—it seems
that nearly all our current ironies were
unimaginable not long ago—the situ-
ation has provided an opportunity for
Donald Trump. The President fre-
quently appears challenged by the En-
glish language, but he is fluent in cyn-
icism. In 2016, he both proclaimed that
he was the “law and order” candidate
and asked African-Americans, “What
do you have to lose?” In fact, almost a
million fewer African-Americans voted
that year than in 2012. Some portion
of that drop reflected the fact that it
was the first election in eight years with-
out a black candidate at the top of the
ticket; another part may be attributed
to voter-suppression tactics. But it also
stemmed from a perception that Hil-
lary Clinton was no different, or at least
no better, than Trump on matters of
race—and that perception was driven
by concerns about criminal justice. In
2016, Trump won just eight per cent of
the black vote, but he got a surprising
