Jim Crow 2.0
In the aftermath, Trump launched a new administration agenda to clean up the District of Columbia. As I noted laast week, this was an implicit reversal of a major civil rights agenda item from the 1960s and 70s, Home Rule for DC, and the current civil rights establishment understands it for what it is:
South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn has insited that President Trump’s cleanup of Washington D.C. amounts to Jim Crow 2.0.
. . . Meanwhile, the city’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser was slightly more diplomatic, describing the move as “unsettling and unprecedented.”
The Nation argued, with reference to the 1960s Home Rule issues:
Washington, DC, already lacks representation in Congress, has no control over its own budget, and cannot pass laws free from congressional interference. Now under the Trump administration, the city is moving toward bantustan status. By invoking bogus emergency powers under the DC Home Rule Act, President Donald Trump has effectively federalized law enforcement within the district, delegating supervision of DC Metro police to Attorney General Pam Bondi and authorizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to mobilize National Guard troops in Washington. Drug Enforcement Agency head Terry Cole will have operational control over Washington’s Metro Police Department as its interim federal commissioner.
On one hand, this is a retrospective acknowledgement that Home Rule for the District was a major civil rights agenda item back in the day, and it's also a recognition that Trump, as part of a new agenda, is going to dismantle the implicit 1960s civil rights settlement.This settlement was effectively brought about by Martin Luther King's implied threat, conveyed through his advocacy of non-violence on one hand, but on the other counterpointed by the reality on the ground of race riots in major US cities throughout the decade. The actual message was surrender power to black brokers in the urban core or risk all-out race war, and the elites took the deal in city after city in subsequent years, especially in Washington.
As the Nation piece at the link makes clear, the deal waa incomplete, and as far as Washington went, it still left a lot to congress. But there was another unspoken carveout: in return for leniency toward the criminal underclass in the ghetto, the new urban elite would continue to keep the criminals out of the wealthy enclaves (in Washington, Georgetown and the strip up Wisconsin Avenue to Chevy Chase) and otherwise favor the existing upper class in policy decisions. The upper class would also look the other way over the urban elite's corruption, again in return for averting the Helter-Skelter race war.
The problem is that the 1960s deal has been falling apart. That deal was, as I've kept saying here, an alliance between the upper class and Marx's Lumpenproletariat, the criminal underclass and its political brokers in the new urban elite, which left out the working class, who've been the group primarily victimized by the policy of leniency toward the criminal underclass. It's taken the working class 60 years to catch on, but they've finally caught on.
As far as the upper class goes, the new urban elites also haven't kept their part of the deal. A key issue has been homelessness; encampments have spread to affluent neighborhoods. In Los Angeles, Mayor Bass has become the figurehead for the city's inability to protect Pacific Palisades and the neighboring unincorporated Malibu, two highly affluent areas, from destructive wildfires or enable the residents' desire to rebuild. Bass is acutely coknscious of what Trump has in mind in taking over Washington, DC law enforcement, as shown in a recent interview with Kasie Hunt on CNN:
KASIE HUNT: The president, Madam Mayor, suggested that this effort that he has undertaken to take over the DC police force to federalize the city may not be limited to Washington, DC. Did you take that as a threat?
KAREN BASS: Well, I mean, the threat was already enacted upon here and we all know that DC is in a very different situation because DC is not a state. . . You remember, we didn't just have 4,000 National Guard members, we also had about, I think it was about 700 U.S. Marines. Completely inappropriate, a political stunt and that was not needed and I believed then and I believe now that Los Angeles was a test case and I think DC is a test case as well for the president to say, well, we can take over your city whenever we want and I'm the commander in chief and I can use the troops whenever we want.
Byron York, whom I've often characterized here as a spokesman for the conventional wisdom, sees things this way:
In opposing Trump, will Democrats end up defending crime in the district or defending its right to have a high crime rate? Some are already doing just that. It puts them on the wrong side of another lopsided issue, like they are with the border.
But here is the thing. Trump is imagining a Washington with a far lower crime rate than its residents have become accustomed to. Even though they stand to benefit enormously if he succeeds, many of those residents and their political representatives will oppose Trump for trying. In the process, they will become almost protective of their crime rate now that Trump is threatening it. That is crazy. But it might be where we are headed.
What York doesn't see is that the basic 1960s civil rights consensus has broken down. Whatever the brokers for the urban elite may try to say, they've failed to deliver on their implicit promise, leniency toward the criminal underclass, whose depredations would be aimed at the working class, while the privileges of the upper class would be quietly maintained. Trump, as he's doing with other aspects of the current polity, is insisting on renegotiating the deal.