I don’t really disagree that white supremacy is a huge part of it, but also the issues of lesser evilism and white supremacy are interrelated. I’m not one of those people who reduces everything to class. At the same time, history shows that race and class are inextricably linked going all the way back to Bacon’s Rebellion and the Virginia Slave Codes.
If we accept the fact of white supremacy, then how do we overcome it? The incentives are such that the Democratic Party has more reason to pander to white middle-class racists than it does to fight for BIPOC or working people in general (see the Clinton-Gore Confederate Flag buttons or Biden’s speeches bragging about how Delaware was a slave state.)
Do we fight white supremacy by constantly making concessions to it? That is essentially what Joe Biden embodies. It’s been the one consistent aspect of his career, going back to when he joined with Strom Thurmond to draft a drug bill that provided for different penalties for crack and cocaine. Biden was named as vice president primarily to make Obama more palatable to white racists.
When the fight against white supremacy comes into conflict with the interests of capital, the Democrats will compromise the former before the latter. The nominally “socially progressive” capitalists that make up the Democratic Party donor class are willing to allow progressive reforms to the extent that they do not affect their own class interests. In practice, that means they’ll support things like criminal justice reform but not policy that addresses racial wealth inequality, housing or healthcare if it means raising their taxes.
For example, JP Morgan was able to prey on BIPOC for decades. Then came the financial crisis, and they got a slap on the wrist because Obama’s treasury secretary was best buddies with JPM’s executive Jamie Dimon. They subsequently paid of their fines for predatory lending … with predatory lending. Now Dimon himself is on the shortlist to be Biden’s treasury secretary.
Obama won big in 2008 because he mobilized a lot of traditional non-voters with bold promises of transformation, but Clinton couldn’t maintain the Obama coalition in part because his administration fell short of those promises.
Now, I’m not about to make the case that “economic anxiety” made whites vote for Trump. Trump’s base was significantly wealthier than average. Poor whites by and large didn’t vote. Poor people in general vote a lot less. Even in 2008, a 40-year high in turnout, only 40 percent of people in the bottom income bracket voted. Last election 110 million didn’t vote, but if they did vote, given what we know about voting behavior based on income, the majority would vote Democrat.
What I’m getting at is that if white supremacy is to be defeated, it’s going to require a cross-racial class-based movement that mobilizes non-traditional voters. This is the essence of what Dr. King hoped to accomplish with the Poor People’s Campaign. This was also the basic philosophy behind Bernie Sanders’ platform, i.e. to run on universal programs that have broad support across the working class.
But this was unacceptable to the Democratic donor class — people like Lloyd Blankfein and Bernard Schwartz — who clamored for Sanders to be defeated. They threw their weight behind Biden, a guy who once said he didn’t want his kids “growing up in a racial jungle” and called Obama the “first mainstream African-American candidate” to be “clean, bright and articulate.”
In their minds he was the lesser evil.
