Some pundits have speculated that the Baltimore riots may benefit Republicans in next year’s elections. On the other hand, Joan Walsh of Salon and MSNBC thinks that the unrest has yielded an opportunity for liberalism.
In a two-part series, Walsh argued that one lesson of Baltimore is that Democrats' Bill Clintonesque center-left “approach to race, crime and inequality” has proved inadequate, and that the party now must confront “the big structural issues driving poverty and rising inequality, not the behavior of the poor.” Meanwhile, sniped Walsh, when it comes to those problems the GOP is “still race baiting” and “still stuck in the 1980s.”
“While [the Democratic] party grapples openly with the limits to the legacy of [its] most influential politician,” Walsh wrote, Republicans can’t or won’t “acknowledge that the man who shaped their domestic agenda, Ronald Reagan, is long dead, and a lot of his ideas should have died with him. 2016 will offer the nation a starker choice on these issues than any election in recent memory, and that can only be good for the country.”
From Walsh’s Tuesday piece (bolding added):
Clinton…cared about civil rights and poverty. He saw the way Republicans had used both issues against Democrats since the 1960s and he tried to fight it, even if he had to wade into the swamp of white backlash politics…
His notorious “Sister Souljah” moment during the 1992 campaign; his crime and welfare reform policies; his railing against “big government;” all were tailored to reassure white people that Democrats had heard their concerns about the excesses of the war on poverty, and would incorporate the politics of personal responsibility into future efforts to promote equality…
…[O]n Obama’s watch, we’ve come up hard on the limits of the ’90s approach to race, crime and inequality…
…[O]ur first black president continues to preach the importance of personal responsibility in improving black lives, even as police murder black men on camera. His opponents don’t care: they continue to stereotype Obama as a lazy, criminal-coddling, poverty pimp of old…
…Just as the Los Angeles riots opened the era of Bill Clinton liberalism, the trouble in Baltimore, despite years of Democratic leadership, should mark its close. [Hillary] Clinton, [Martin] O’Malley, [Bernie] Sanders and perhaps others will grapple with this changed landscape.
They have one big advantage over Republicans. The GOP is still stuck in the 1980s, trying to reanimate Zombie Reaganism for the 21st century.
And from her Wednesday article (bolding added):
Republicans cling to a warmed-over Reaganism that blames poor people for their poverty.
…[T]he moderate establishment “front-runner,” Jeb Bush, lazily cited author Charles Murray as his go-to read on the issue of poverty just last week, as Baltimore continued to boil. Murray, you’ll recall, was…the “scholar” who justified Reagan’s persuasive lie that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won”…
So while one party grapples openly with the limits to the legacy of their most influential politician, Bill Clinton, the other refuses to acknowledge that the man who shaped their domestic agenda, Ronald Reagan, is long dead, and a lot of his ideas should have died with him. 2016 will offer the nation a starker choice on these issues than any election in recent memory, and that can only be good for the country…
It wasn’t just whites who were disturbed by the excesses of crime and disorder in the ’70s and ’80s, it was African-Americans too. Clinton and other reformers of the era could walk through any inner city neighborhood and find people who applauded what came to be called the “broken windows” approach to policing: Why should poor black people put up with vandalism, garbage, graffiti and petty crime that a white middle class neighborhood would never tolerate?...
The new “zero tolerance” strategies did help bring down violent crime...[which] in Baltimore fell more than in any other city on O’Malley’s watch. But this approach, which ironically focused on “quality of life” crimes, did not improve the quality of life of many of these men, who are now under the control of the criminal justice system – even if it kept them alive…
But the chaos in Baltimore didn’t merely show the limits of ’90s approaches to crime. It reminded us that Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform effort didn’t do a lot of what it was intended to, either…
Those 1990s policies helped create a poverty trap, where workers labor in low-wage jobs indefinitely, and government subsidizes their employers and ameliorates their misery...
Clinton’s approach to race and poverty allowed Democrats to advance at the time, but it certainly didn’t take those issues away from Republicans. They’re still race baiting, just as if welfare reform never happened; remember Mitt Romney falsely claiming in 2012 that President Obama had gutted the work requirements Clinton had imposed on welfare recipients? Or Newt Gingrich calling Obama “the food stamp president?”…
…Sanders might actually make Americans realize that Republicans are liars when they call Clinton and Obama socialists – and force a real debate on economic inequality. It will be a great relief to see a Democrat who’s unapologetic about the role of government in creating a more inclusive economy…
[Hillary] Clinton…knows that the party must move beyond its ’90s approach to race, crime and poverty for moral and pragmatic reasons – but also political ones...
…Unlike her Republican rivals, she is vying to govern the country that is, not the country that was. Like her husband, she believes she can do well politically by doing good. Only this time it means tackling the big structural issues driving poverty and rising inequality, not the behavior of the poor.
