[rad-green] South Carolina, Neoliberalism's Stranglehold, and the Mystique of the 'Black Vote'

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/04/south-carolina-neoliberalisms-stranglehold-and-mystique-black-vote
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/04/south-carolina-neoliberalisms-stranglehold-and-mystique-black-vote>Common
Dreams          March 4, 2020South Carolina, Neoliberalism's Stranglehold,
and the Mystique of the 'Black Vote'How do we make sense of what seems to
be the disconnect between people's concerns and how they voted?by Adolph
Reed Jr., Willie Legette*

[image: Charles Brave, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, speaks
during an "I'm a Medicare for All Voter" campaign press conference in
Charleston, South Carolina on February 24, 2020. (Photo: Medicare for All —
South Carolina/Twitter)]

*Charles Brave, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, speaks during
an "I'm a Medicare for All Voter" campaign press conference in Charleston,
South Carolina on February 24, 2020, just days ahead of the state's primary
contest. (Photo: Medicare for All — South Carolina
<https://twitter.com/M4ASC>/Twitter)*

Many progressives hoped that South Carolina black voters, who have
consistently expressed strong support for Medicare for All and other
components of Bernie Sanders' political program, would counter the
conventional wisdom that the "black vote" is tightly aligned with the
Democratic party's establishment wing and deliver a Sanders victory on
Saturday. Of course, those hopes didn't materialize. Black voters were 56%
of the Democratic electorate here, and Biden received an estimated 61-64%
of their votes. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the only other candidate
embracing a reasonably honest version of Medicare for All, received 17% and
5% respectively. That was the not so good news on February 29.

The much better news, though, is that exit polls showed
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/04/%20https%3A//www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/29/another-win-south-carolina-primary-medicare-all-four-four>
half
of Democratic primary voters in South Carolina supported "replacing all
private health insurance with a single government plan for everyone."
Roughly 40% of voters indicated that they saw health care as the most
important issue, and fewer than one in ten agreed that the economic system
"works well enough as it is." Indeed, 53% of those voters agreed
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/exit-polls-2020-south-carolina-primary/>
that
the American economic system "needs a complete overhaul." South Carolina is
one of 14 states that refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care
Act, and medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the
state; so it's not surprising that Democratic voters would be so open to
transformative political change in principle.

Yet, of those in South Carolina who support replacing private health
insurance, 44% voted for Biden, 29% for Sanders and 8% for Warren. Of those
who said that the economic system needs a complete overhaul, 49% voted for
Biden, and 22% for Sanders. A similar pattern emerged on Super Tuesday as
well
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/04/every-super-tuesday-state-exit-polls-majority-democratic-voters-support-eliminating>.
So how do we make sense of what seems to be the disconnect between people's
concerns and how they voted?

"Since 2016 the black punditry has converged around a narrative that
Sanders has difficulty appealing to black voters, even as polls have shown
repeatedly that his program is more popular among black Americans than any
other group."

Several factors account for it. One is likely confusion or uncertainty
fomented by conservative Democrats and the corporate media.  Some voters
believed erroneously, for example, that Buttigieg or other opposing
candidates supported Medicare for All. In addition, the anti-Medicare for
All industry front group, Partnership for America's Health Care Future,
spent $200,000 on non-stop ads that directly attacked Medicare for All,
including during the Charleston debate.

A reason for that disconnect that we want to focus on in particular has to
do with the complexities of what is called the "black vote." Nationally,
black voters are more likely than others to support a single-payer health
care system at 74%, compared to 69% among Hispanics and 44% among whites.
And there is little reason to assume that black support for Medicare for
All in South Carolina differs substantially from the national data. Our
experience in the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute's Medicare for All-South
Carolina campaign certainly comports with the national findings. Between
December 2019 and the primary, our "I'm a Medicare for All Voter
<https://www.facebook.com/M4ASouthCarolina/%20>" initiative gathered more
than 10,000 pledge cards from South Carolinians, largely black, who
indicated that they would vote only for candidates who support Medicare for
All.

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.

That 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
<https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/19/clyburn_endorses_clinton_there_are_no_free_lunches_so_there_will_be_no_free_education.html%20>."
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
<https://www.postandcourier.com/health/clyburn-has-taken-more-than-million-in-pharma-money-in/article_62b10180-d956-11e8-9122-4f50316f66fa.html>
.)

Almost exactly four years ago, political scientist Cedric Johnson published
a very important *Jacobin*  magazine essay—titled "Fear and Pandering in
the Palmetto State
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/sanders-clinton-south-carolina-primary-black-voters-firewall/>"—prompted
by the, if anything, more disappointing outcome of the last South Carolina
primary. In rejecting the interpretation that black South Carolinians had
voted against their interests in supporting Hillary Clinton, he also
rejected the idea of a singular "black vote." He insisted that "some black
people did vote their interests, as they understand them, which shouldn't
be a revelation if you see black people as a group who hold multiple,
shifting and conflicting interests." He then laid out a variety of
scenarios under which black South Carolinians would reasonably have voted
for Clinton, noting that it's also important to take into account that
their "impressions, preferences, and expectations have been formed in a
conservative state in uncertain times."

Johnson problematizes "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 an 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.

"The black political class, to put it bluntly, uses the status of
'representing' black people to accrue benefits for themselves and elite
strata among black Americans. In pursuing such interests, it is not unusual
for them to advocate anti-democratic positions."That perspective helps to
understand the vitriol with which Reps. Clyburn, Lewis, and Richmond
attacked the Sanders program in 2016. It stemmed from a turf-protectiveness
affronted by direct appeals to black Americans addressing concerns arising
from their discrete social positions. Such appeals are "irresponsible" not
only because they encourage black people to aspire beyond the constraints
of neoliberal hegemony but also because those appeals disregard the
brokerage role of the black political class and political-managerial class
opinion shapers.

The black political class, to put it bluntly, uses the status of
"representing" black people to accrue benefits for themselves and elite
strata among black Americans. In pursuing such interests, it is not unusual
for them to advocate anti-democratic positions.  In 2016 the members of the
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and other black elected officials offered
the strongest opposition to decreasing the role of Super Delegates at the
Democratic Party Convention. Unashamedly, they argued
<https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/23/democrats-superdelegates-overhaul-tensions-794977>
that
they as black representatives should not have to run against party
activists, and they should not be expected to support presidential
candidates that they did not have a role in selecting.

Since 2016 the black punditry has converged around a narrative that Sanders
has difficulty appealing to black voters, even as polls have shown
repeatedly that his program is more popular among black Americans than any
other group. This effort recently hit a comic plateau
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/the-root-black-agenda-2020-democratic-primary-candidates-warren-buttigieg-sanders>
when
the *The Root* produced a report
<https://www.theroot.com/every-democratic-candidates-black-agenda-ranked-1841959166>purporting
to evaluate the Democratic candidates in relation to a "Black Agenda." The
report, based on criteria crafted by anonymous "experts," ranked Warren
first with Biden, Buttigieg, and Steyer also ahead of Sanders. Tellingly,
Buttigieg and Steyer offered decidedly class-skewed racial programs
centering on entrepreneurship and business development, and Sanders was
graded down for having had the temerity to consider mobilizing a primary
challenge to "the first black president."

Another facet of this black politics is that, in reducing all of black
Americans' concerns to race, it undermines our abilities to organize the
majoritarian social movement response we need to combat the ever more naked
assertion of ruling-class power against all working people in the United
States. In 2018, we noted
<https://nonsite.org/article/the-role-of-race-in-contemporary-u-s-politics>—regarding
South Carolina in particular—that Republicans and Democrats shared an
interest in making race the most significant fault line in the state's
politics. We recalled political scientist V. O. Key's 1949 conclusion that
the state's preoccupation with race stifled political conflict and noted
the irony that Key's assessment of how race worked then largely holds
today, albeit in a different way because black Democrats are as committed
to that race reductionism as are white Republicans. Much as other Wall
Street Democrats clearly are more troubled by a Sanders victory than a
Trump re-election, the black brokerage stratum is ever more explicit that
its main objective is to undermine black Americans' participation in a
broad movement for social transformation along economically egalitarian
lines.

The CBC response to Trump's election brings this problem into clear view.
In 2016, candidate Trump challenged black elected officials and the
Democratic Party by asking black voters, "What do you have to lose" in
voting for him.  Responding to the provocation, the CBC presented a report,
"We Have A Lot To Lose: Solutions To Advance Black Families In The 21st
Century
<https://cbc.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2017.03.22_cbc_we_have_a_lot_to_lose_v5.pdf>"
(pdf), to President Trump. The Caucus followed this up with the "Jobs and
Justice Act of 2018.
<https://cbc.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=891>" Both
offered moderate neoliberal solutions to the salient problems confronting
the majority of black people.  After the press conferences both documents
were submitted to the dust bin of history. Such posturing expresses the
character of contemporary "black politics."

"Much as other Wall Street Democrats clearly are more troubled by a Sanders
victory than a Trump re-election, the black brokerage stratum is ever more
explicit that its main objective is to undermine black Americans'
participation in a broad movement for social transformation along
economically egalitarian lines."

This leads to our final observation regarding last Saturday's primary.
Johnson concludes his essay by stressing that our endgame

"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."

Now we should say: "two election cycles." As our opponents have made
strikingly clear in recent weeks, to whatever extent it wasn't already, we
won't and were never going to be able simply to elect our way into the kind
of just society we need and deserve. The struggle for the Democratic
presidential nomination and the room for debate it provides remain crucial,
of course. However, the South Carolina results, as well as those of
several—e.g., Virginia, where Biden bested Sanders  53-23, and 53% of
voters indicated preference for Medicare for All—of the Super Tuesday
states, underscore the need to dig in and build on the potential the
Sanders moment has provided us to take up the slow, unglamorous work of
building organically rooted working-class politics around issues that
connect directly with people's lives and concerns all over the United
States. That approach is what led us to undertake the Medicare for
All-South Carolina campaign, for which nonpartisan grassroots political
education directed toward the primary was only an initial phase.

We agree with Johnson, who is our friend and comrade, as well that the
South Carolina primary in itself is significant really only in relation to
the bizarre, disingenuous claim that winning the black vote in particular
is the key to being able to win the presidency. No Democrat will win the
South Carolina in November. And it is worth noting that the same is likely
true of several of the southern Super Tuesday states as well; outside the
southern states Biden and Sanders were basically competitive.

So here we are. The vaunted South Carolina primary has come and gone; the
work remains.
[image: Adolph Reed Jr.]
<https://www.commondreams.org/author/adolph-reed-jr>

Adolph Reed Jr. <https://www.commondreams.org/author/adolph-reed-jr> is
Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania
and an organizer for Medicare for All-South Carolina.


<https://www.commondreams.org/author/willie-legette>

Willie Legette is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at South Carolina
State University and Lead Organizer, Medicare for All-South Carolina.

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