The house that black voters built
Still thinking about why an overwhelming number of black voters support Biden despite the fact that black politics —economic justice, criminal justice, voter reenfranchisement— is the most progressive set of politics in the country (and in the face of two candidates running on political revolution and big structural change). The conventional wisdom that black voters are “pragmatic” explains surface-level voting behavior like why they’ve supported Biden over other centrist candidates like Harris or Booker (it’s the same reason they backed Clinton before realizing that Obama could win), but doesn’t necessarily explain why they, by and large, reject the Left’s attempt to revolutionize the Democratic Party. The explanation is that black voters have already revolutionized the Democratic Party
FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon, Jr’s theorized that the reason black voters prefer establishment candidates over liberal alternatives is because black leaders are part of the establishment and support its candidates:
Why are elected black officials more likely to side with establishment candidates? Many of these candidates have long courted black community leaders, including elected officials, as I mentioned in №1. But I also think it’s the case that many black Democratic elites spent much of the last several decades courting the establishment, and are thus tied to it. You see this on Capitol Hill, where black House members are among the strongest defenders of Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her internal battles with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the progressive wing of the House. Black elites also express the same pragmatism that black voters do and are wary of pushing forward candidates they view as unable to win a general election.
This still begs the question — why are black people invested in the establishment? Black voters support the establishment because black people created the contemporary Democratic Party. The black freedom movement transformed it from the party of white supremacy into its current form as a multi-ethnic, cross-class coalition in a way that the New Left counterculture of the ‘60s, for example, did not. Black politics is comprised of a tension between movement politics and party politics — espousing radical anti-racist politics on one hand while maintaining mainstream political power through existing political structures on the other. But, beyond being pragmatists, black voters have always been structuralists, understanding that their survival is bound up in their relationship to broader systems and structures and navigating American politics with a unique understanding of those constraints. The Democratic Party looks the way it does because of the oppositional politics of black people. Perhaps Biden is the candidate black voters support because the Democratic Party is a structure they perceive as the closest thing to theirs.
