Dear Readers:
The relationship between Democrats and the Black Lives Matter movement has become a critical issue, not only for the presidential candidates but for all Democrats as well.
Because Black Lives Matter is a loose umbrella coalition of many groups and individuals, it has not been clearly reported in the press that there are actually two very distinct — and basically incompatible — political perspectives that exist within the broad alliance. It is absolutely vital that Democrats and liberal-progressives make a major effort to clearly understand and sharply distinguish between them.
The reason is simple. While the first perspectives sees liberals and the Democratic Party as lacking in genuine understanding and adequate commitment to addressing the urgent needs of Black America, it nonetheless views them as potentially useful actors in the national political process. The other perspective views liberals and the Democratic Party as utterly and hopelessly tainted by racism and therefore as active, fully culpable collaborators in “the system” that oppresses Black America.
Liberals and Democrats cannot avoid forming an opinion about these two perspectives and then deciding how to respond to them, particularly in regard to the second view.
We are therefore pleased to offer the following Strategy Memo that examines this critical issue.
There are two profoundly different political perspectives within the Black Lives Matter coalition. It’s extremely important for Democrats to understand the difference between them in order to successfully relate to this important social movement.
To read the memo, click HERE
We believe you will find the memo both useful and important.
Sincerely
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategist

In “Gloomy Republican Campaigns Leave behind Reagan Cheer,” Jeremy W. Peters describes increasingly pessimistic assessments of the political moment by GOP presidential candidates, then adds: “Despite the country’s challenges, there are signs of improvement: Job growth is up, unemployment is down, and the economy is in vastly better shape than it was eight years ago.” Barring a sudden economic downturn, this is going to be a tough sell for Republicans a year from now.
Despite the incessant coverage of everything Trump, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn explains “Why He’s Still Such a Long Shot.”The party has huge incentives to unify against Trump. He is unacceptable to nearly every Republican wing. A unified party could spend millions — even hundreds of millions — attacking Mr. Trump, criticizing him in the media and fueling his eventual opponent…If it came down to it, G.O.P. campaigns and aligned super PACs could easily spend more than $100 million in California, New York, New Jersey and other big, blue and often winner-take-all states in April, May and June of 2016 to knock Mr. Trump out.”
At The American Prospect, however, Adel M. Stan’s “A Nation of Sociopaths? What the Trump Phenomenon Says About America” merits serious thought. Many factors feed Trump’s popularity, all of them worrisome. Stan’s concern about rising sociopathy is only enhanced by the poll referenced at the end of today’s Strategy Notes.
Whatever divisions still fester within the Democratic Party regarding the Iran arms agreement, Democratic senate candidates in the battleground states are of one accord in support of the deal, reports Alex Roarty in the National Journal.
in “A rising force, moderate Democrats put their stamp on California legislative session Sacramento Bee reporters Christopher Cadelago, Jeremy White and Alexei Koseff take an interesting look at Democratic party politics in the most influential megastate.
NYT columnist Charles M. Blow provides some perceptive observations in “Bernie Sanders and the Black Vote,” as the candidate struggles to improve his polling percentages with a key pro-Democratic constituency.
At CNN Politics Eugene Scott addresses an interesting question: “Can Democrats sway young evangelicals?,” noting, “In the past three presidential elections, Democrats have garnered no more than 24% of the white evangelical vote, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for CNN.”
At Roll Call Emily Cahn and Eli Yokley report that Democrats have potential map-expander U.S. Senate candidates in three states: Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in AZ,. Secretary of State Jason Kander in MO and Connor Eldridge in AR. But there is some concern about NH and NC, which should be in play if Dems can secure reasonably strong candidates.
Caveats about internet polling notwithstanding, this is disturbing.

As part of my regular effort to tamp down any unnecessary talk about “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I’d recommend a Nate Silver piece at FiveThirtyEight that scolds journalists who lazily lump together Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as fellow “populists” fighting together against their parties’ elites. Here’s what I had to say about it today at the Washington Monthly:

As part of his argument, Nate put up a chart showing the percentages in which Bernie Sanders voted with selected Senate Democrats in the last full Congress. The colleague with which Sanders agreed most was Barbara Boxer at 96.2%. No surprise there. But not far behind Boxer on the Bernieriffic scale were a couple of famously “centrist” senators, Cory Booker (95.8%) and Maria Cantwell (95.8%), both of whom have probably been called corporate whores by a lot of Sanders supporters on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the Donkey Party colleagues with which Bernie agreed least often include a virtual rogue’s gallery of New Democrats or even Conservadems. But you know what? Sanders voted with Joe Manchin 82% of the time; with Max Baucus and David Pryor 87% of the time; and with Joe Donnelly, Kay Hagan and Mary Landrieu 90% of the time. In three of these cases, moreover, these senators were running unsuccessfully for reelection in red states in a bad midterm cycle, presumably moving them far to the right.
Nate contrasts this relatively high level of party solidarity shown by Sanders to Trump’s adoption of wildly heterodox positions and his apparent hatred for his own party. I’d say it shows for the umpteenth time that despite more tolerance for ideological dissent the Democratic Party has less to fight over than you’d think.
Yes, I know, all Senate votes are not equal, and yes, most of the really vicious intra-Republican fights are over strategy and tactics (e.g., the Defunding Planned Parenthood and Obamacare brouhahas) rather than matters of principle or even policy. But all in all, Democrats do not look like a party coming apart at the seams even with the hourly reports that they are in a panic over Hillary Clinton’s standing in selective states vis a vis Sanders, Biden (the non-candidate enjoying an imaginary boom), or any Republican you can name.

The Democratic Party remains a pretty robust coalition.

At Vox Matthew Yglesias takes a peek into the #NRORevolt dust-up, and sums up the GOP’s dilemma thusly: “The strategy favored by much of the party elite — including George and Jeb Bush, John McCain, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, most of the business community, and the RNC in its official 2012 postmortem — is to try to neutralize the immigration issue in the Latino community and then win votes from more affluent or more religiously devout Hispanics. The alt-right/identitarian/Trump strategy is to do the opposite, and make increasingly explicit appeals to ethnic nationalism to try to make whites more uniformly loyal to the GOP.”
O’Malley and Chafee should probably hang around for a debate or two to see if some exposure helps, but so far neither has gotten any traction. So the question arises, could Biden’s entry help Clinton avoid the “coronation” stigma — if she wins? Clinton already has a ‘doing-better-than-expected’ opponent in Sanders. Since Biden has impressive approval ratings in recent polls, would a 3-way race strengthen the Democratic ticket, or conversely, escalate the risk of a divisive convention?
It’s a little early for “Plan B” talk among Democrats, but please, let’s rule out Gore or Kerry scenarios, which would jettison any hope of Dems being perceived as the party for the future.
And grand strategies aside, there are unforgiving filing deadlines approaching quite soon, as Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley report at Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
The Fix’s Phillip Bump has caveats aplenty regarding recent polls indicating Trump doing better-than-expected with Latino and African American voters.
From Kate Linthicum’s “Why the big Latino voting bloc is nowhere near as large as it could be” at the L.A. Times: “In the 2014 midterm election, only 27% of eligible Latinos voted, compared with 46% of whites and 41% of African Americans, according to U.S. census data…Last year, 33% of Latinos eligible to vote were 18 to 29, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, compared with 18% of whites, 25% of African Americans and 21% of Asian Americans. The Latino population is also heavily concentrated in two places, Texas and California, that have not been swing states in presidential elections for decades. Nearly half the country’s Latino eligible voters live in those two states. Because Democrats can usually count on winning statewide races in California and Republicans in Texas, neither party in those states has had an incentive to invest the huge sums necessary to register and turn out lots more Latino voters. By contrast, a large percentage of the black population lives in swing states that have been a heavy focus of voter registration efforts.”
“identity Crisis” seems a bit melodramatic, even for a headline — the term better fits the GOP these days. Kraushaar’s National Journal article more accurately describes the ferment of a healthy political party.
In her Huffpo Pollster article, “Wages of Win: The Public and the Minimum Wage Debate,” Kathleen Weldon notes, “Recent polls indicate that, despite ongoing concerns about very large increases in the minimum wage, there is considerable support even for candidates who favor a $15 minimum. A 2015 NBC/WSJ poll found 48 percent of registered voters said such a position would make them more favorable toward a candidate, 38 percent less favorable, and 13 percent said that position would make no difference. Continued support for some form of minimum wage increase appears to give Democrats a strong issue in the 2016 campaign.”
You too can “play in the political prediction market.”

One of the perennial topics of this election cycle so far is the role of Super-PACs, those vehicles for really large donors that some presidential candidates are relying on heavily, especially on the Republican side of the barricades. I wrote about some concerns involving these beasts today at the Washington Monthly:

At the Atlantic Molly Ball poses a provocative question: will that super-weapon of contemporary politics, the Super-PAC, wind up being a lot more trouble that it’s worth to candidates who cannot even talk to the strategists and operatives deployed to “their” Super-PACs?
Ball focuses on the prohibition on “coordination” as the key problem with Super-PACs. I dunno. For one thing, I have a hard time imagining a serious presidential campaign going up in flames because of a “rule” no one other than the toothless Federal Election Commission is in a position to enforce. For another, the candidates were all free to coordinate with Super-PACs to their hearts’ desire before officially declaring (this was supposedly why some of them, especially Jeb Bush, waited so long to announce) their bids. Wouldn’t you figure Mike Murphy of Right to Rise worked out a daily operational plan with Jeb running right up to the Convention, with four or five variables factored in to account for what happens along the way?
Now it’s true that such advance planning probably did not anticipate an early Invisible Primary dominated by Donald J. Trump. And indeed, the signs of trouble in Bushworld Ball mentions all involve how the candidate and the Super-PAC are dealing, or failing to deal, with The Donald. Trump’s emergence, moreover, has had a huge ripple effect on all the rival campaigns, not just those from whom he has presumably won poll respondents, but even the bottom-feeders who see no reason to give up since the presumed front-runners are down there with them messing around in the single digits as well.
But it’s way too early to pass judgment on Super-PACs as a group. For all I know, some monster of a Super-PAC not tied to any candidate may be building up a plan and a war chest as we speak to go totally medieval on Trump on the fairly reasonable assumption that no one, not even Jesus Christ, could survive a sustained and vicious negative ad barrage with an unlimited budget. And partisan Super-PACs will presumably play a big role in the general election, especially on the GOP side, when the strategic decisions such entities must make are a lot less complicated…..
I don’t think we should spend too much time wondering if Mike Murphy is weeping with frustration as he looks at his silent cell phone and realizes once again the Jeb’s not going to call.

As with so many other aspects of politics, we’ll have to wait until it’s all over to see if this is a cycle that breaks the mold or one that shows the CW can survive momentary craziness.

From WaPo columnist Dana Milbank’s “Dick Cheney tries to fool the public again,” commenting on his address to the American Enterprise Institute:

Cheney hyperbolized, hyperventilated and gave rein to hyperactive imagination — “desperation . . . cave . . . neutered” — and the audience at the normally sedate American Enterprise Institute was riled…Applauding Cheney from the front row were Paul D. Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, and Sen. Tom Cotton, (Ark.), author of the Senate Republicans’ letter to the ayatollahs attempting to kill the deal during negotiations. In the second row were former congresswoman Michele Bachmann and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Cheney aide whose tenure led to a prison sentence.
Surely, those who would like to see Congress undo the nuclear agreement can’t expect that rolling out Cheney is going to save the cause. When it comes to dire predictions based on scary intelligence, the former vice president wouldn’t seem to have the best track record.

Clearly the GOP’s neocons have learned nothing from the Bush administration’s catastrophe. More disturbing is that few of the current Republican presidential aspirants are willing to say so.

In Jamelle Bouie’s Slate.com post “Why the RNC’s Loyalty Pledge Was a Huge Mistake,” he explains why Donald Trump’s signing the pledge sets the stage for an even worse disaster:

…A Trump nomination is so unlikely that it’s not the actual nightmare for the Republican Party. The nightmare is a third-party run, where Trump gets himself on the ballot in all 50 states, and siphons white voters from a GOP that needs white turnout to win national elections.
…On the surface, this is an important victory for Republican leaders. But look carefully, and it’s somewhere between a disaster and a catastrophe. Trump hasn’t just bound himself to the RNC, the RNC has bound itself to Trump and put pressure on other candidates to do the same. Let’s say Rubio wins the primary and becomes the Republican nominee. Thanks to the pledge, he’s linked to Trump, and Democrats can run wild with guilt-by-association. By the end of the campaign, Trump might be the face of the Rubio campaign, as much as the Florida senator himself.

I’m not sure any GOP nominees would be all that bound to Trump just because of the pledge. It’s more about Trump sliming the whole party and his misogynistic, Latino-bashing and general boorishness becoming the new face of the Republican Party — regardless of the pledge. He sucks up all of the media coverage to the point where the word “Republican” conjures up a caricature of Trump’s head. He’s a wet dream, not only for cartoonists and late-night comedians, but also lazy TV reporters and commentators. The other GOP presidential candidates can’t get arrested as long as he is around.
But I think Bouie is dead right about Trump’s fidelity to the pledge, or anything he says, for that matter. This is a man who thinks it is perfectly alright to contradict himself 180 degrees within a couple of days, if not hours. As Bouie explains:

That’s the disaster. The catastrophe is that there’s nothing to hold Trump to the pledge. As soon as it becomes inconvenient, he can break it. And because he’s untethered from the institutions of the Republican Party, Trump has nothing to lose from breaking the pledge. Indeed, anything he gains from signing–the imprimatur of the GOP and commitments from other candidates–is almost irrelevant to his appeal as the “outsider” who understands the world of the “insiders.” The only thing that ties Trump to his word, on this score, is the promise of official “respect.” For a man of Trump’s ego, that’s weak binding.

Bouie shares a reminder of Ross Perot’s waffling about his independent candidacy intentions in 1992, and Perot was a guy with some actual principles. Remember Perot prattling on about being drafted by “the volunteers”? Something similar is all the cover Trump would need to trash his pledge, argues Bouie quite convincingly.
“The people are calling, and I must answer the call,” has been leveraged by many a demagogue down through the ages, and it’s not hard to imagine Trump playing that card with gusto. Some will grumble if he breaks the pledge, but few of his potential supporters would hold him accountable. They got on the Trump bandwagon less because they admire his consistency and integrity, and more because they wanted to root for a rogue rhino smashing up the crystal.
What “the pledge” does for Trump is buy him a little breathing space. His GOP opponents can and will still attack him. But he has disarmed the “not a real Republican” argument to a degree, at least for the time being. It secures the possibility that he can win the GOP nomination, but does nothing much to insure that he won’t reneg on the pledge and run as an independent. As Bouie concludes,

If anything, the loyalty pledge enhances his platform. He can run his campaign–touting Social Security and condemning illegal immigration–and when he loses the nomination, he’ll have the audience and support he needs to make an independent run. Whether Priebus knows it or not, he’s been played, and it’s going to hurt.

Priebus had to do something, and the pledge also gives him a little cover. But no one should bet that it will be honored. Trump may fool us all and gracefully bow out when the time comes, but at this point that’s not a bet for the smart money.
Dems have to run their best campaign, regardless of what Trump does. He may end up a king-maker, or worse, gulp, a king. Let the media continue to obsess about Trump’s distraction du jour, all the way to November of next year. For Dems, however, the challenge is to get focused on mobilizing their base and honing the message that there is only one party that represents adult America, and it is not the party Trump currently leads.

“Happy Labor Day — Really,” by WaPo/American Prospect columnist Harold Meyerson notes that, despite wage stagnation and shrinking union membership in recent years, there have been some recent gains American workers can celebrate, including: “Through actions in city halls and statehouses, through court decisions and labor board rulings, public officials, prompted by workers’ advocates, are finding ways to overcome many of the obstacles–outsourcing, franchising, stagnating minimum wages, union busting–that have created the new normal and with it, the shrinking of the middle class…Ordinances to raise the local minimum wage, which first popped up in liberal strongholds like San Francisco and Seattle, have in the past few weeks been enacted in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Birmingham, Alabama. A proposed ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2021 in California–home to one out of every eight American workers–commanded 68 percent support in a Field Poll last week…Unions are polling better, too…”
Another possible sign of labor rising — a presidential candidate on a picket line.
From Benjamin Siegel’s “Obama to Give 300,000 Workers Paid Sick Leave With New Executive Order” at ABCNews.com: “President Obama will sign an executive order Monday giving hundreds of thousands of workers employed by federal contractors access to paid sick leave…The order will require federal contractors to give employees the ability to earn at least seven days (56 hours) of paid sick leave annually. It will give about 300,000 workers new access to paid sick leave, and an additional number of workers the ability to earn more sick leave than they had before.”
For a more expansive take on the president’s initiatives on behalf of American workers, read Noam Scheiber’s “As His Term Wanes, Obama Champions Workers’ Rights.”
So how’s the President doing on job-creation as we celebrate Labor Day 2015? Paul Krugman reports, “As of last month, the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office, had fallen to 5.1 percent. For the record, Mr. Romney promised during the campaign that he would get unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of 2016. Also for the record, the current unemployment rate is lower than it ever got under Ronald Reagan. And the main reason unemployment has fallen so much is job growth in the private sector, which has added more than seven million workers since the end of 2012.”
Former Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett unveils a new tweak in the GOP’s strategy to divide American workers’ voting power by race.
Moyers & Company presents a panel discussion, “Is Labor a Lost Cause,” featuring a dialogue with labor reform leaders, Stephen Lerner and Bill Fletcher, Jr (transcript here)

E. J. Dionne, Jr. addresses the proper role of government with respect to the lives of American working people and notes, “Many of the choices are not between more or less government. They are about whether what government does provides greater benefit to workers or employers, management or unions, individual investors or investment firms…”Which side are you on?” This question from the old union song is the right question to ask about government.”
At Counterpunch Walter Brasch’s “The Boss Who Fought for the Working-Class” pays tribute to Horace Greeley, whose newspaper, The New York Tribune was #1 in circulation world-wide, featured columnists like Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Karl Marx — and was read cover to cover by Greeley’s friend (and sometimes adversary) President Abraham Lincoln. “When his [Greeley’s] employees said they didn’t need a union because their boss paid them well and treated them fairly, he told them that only in a union could the workers continue to be treated decently, that they had no assurances that some day he might not be as decent and generous as he was that day. The union was for their benefit, the benefit of their families, and their profession, he told them.”

Are you one of those Democrats who don’t think it ultimately matters that much who wins the 2016 presidential contest, especially if someone you consider a corporate lackey wins the Democratic nomination? You really, really need to pay attention to Republicans plans for the Supreme Court, which encompass vast economic as well and social and civil rights issues. I discussed one very prominent conservative blueprint for remaking America via SCOTUS at Washington Monthly today:

I really do appreciate the efforts of Constitutional Conservative legal beagles Randy Barnett of Georgetown and Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law in laying out in some detail–and not in a legal journal but in the Weekly Standard–rules for examining future Republican Supreme Court appointments. It’s not just a litmus test in the making–which presidential candidates in both parties typically say they do not want to administer–but a rationale for a litmus test. And their piece has the advantage of being very clear on the key points.
To Barnett and Blackman, who first discuss the notorious history of Republican SCOTUS appointments they view as betrayals, the big thing is that prospective Justices have a clearly documented willingness to ignore both other branches of government–the principle behind the receding Republican doctrine of “judicial restraint”–and stare decisis–the principle against overturning well-settled Court precedent–in pursuit of the “original” meaning of the Constitution. That means treating SCOTUS as an all-powerful institution communing with eighteenth century Founders–or worse yet, Con Con mythologies about those Founders–and empowered to kill many decades of decisions by all three branches of government, precedent and democracy be damned. No wonder they talk repeatedly about needing Justices–and presidents–with courage! And the dividing line between good and bad “conservative” Justices could not be made much clearer: Alito goooood! Roberts baaaaaad! Barnett and Blackman even suggest their rules should be made clear to and then demanded by presidential primary voters!
If that actually starts happening, it will be as or even more important to watch as any other discussions of any other issues. As Brian Beutler recently noted in an important piece at TNR, Barnett and Blackman are among other things leading advocates for a return to the Lochner era of jurisprudence, whereby most regulations of private economic activity by the executive or legislative branches would be declared unconstitutional as an abridgement of “natural law” concepts in the original Constitution and an exotic understanding of the due process clauses in the 5th and 14th amendments. These are dangerous people to let anywhere near a Supreme Court nomination. But they and many others like them, who now play a dominant role in the very powerful conservative legal fraternity the Federalist Society, are likely to be right there with their litmus test in hand.

Think about that before uttering any “not a dime’s worth of difference” assessments this year.

The New York Times editorial board explains the politics behind Republican posturing about the Black Lives Matter movement, and calls out several of their presidential candidates in particular for trying to stir up white resentment:

The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — is to cast the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas crystallized this view when he said the other week that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would be “appalled” by the movement’s focus on the skin color of the unarmed people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police. This argument betrays a disturbing indifference to or at best a profound ignorance of history in general and of the civil rights movement in particular. From the very beginning, the movement focused unapologetically on bringing an end to state-sanctioned violence against African-Americans and to acts of racial terror very much like the one that took nine lives at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.
The civil rights movement was intended to make Congress and Americans confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for offenses like trying to vote, and had the right to life and to equal protection under the law. The movement sought a cross-racial appeal, but at every step of the way used expressly racial terms to describe the death and destruction that was visited upon black people because they were black.

It’s a shameful legacy for a political party which once included leaders who actively supported civil rights reforms. Republicans like Sens. Jacob Javitz, Lowell Weicker, and Everett Dirksen, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and others all had impressive records of supporting racial justice and equality, even though they were conservative on most economic issues. Today GOP leaders are all active and tacit supporters of suppressing of African American votes. Huckabee has even advocated illegal measures to suppress voting on several occasions.
In reality Dr. King and the Movement were deeply concerned about violence targeting Black Americans and spoke out about it many times. As the Times editorial notes, in his eulogy for the four little girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, Dr. King “did not shy away from the fact that the dead had been killed because they were black, by monstrous men whose leaders fed them “the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.” He said that the dead “have something to say” to a complacent federal government that cut back-room deals with Southern Dixiecrats, as well as to “every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice…”
The Times editorial also emphasizes the clear connection between voter suppression and the racial violence that occurred during the Movement:

During this same period, freedom riders and voting rights activists led by the young John Lewis offered themselves up to be beaten nearly to death, week after week, day after day, in the South so that the country would witness Jim Crow brutality and meaningfully respond to it. This grisly method succeeded in Selma, Ala., in 1965 when scenes of troopers bludgeoning voting rights demonstrators compelled a previously hesitant Congress to acknowledge that black people deserved full citizenship, too, and to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Along the way, there was never a doubt as to what the struggle was about: securing citizenship rights for black people who had long been denied them.

During the Civil Rights Movement most southern Democratic elected officials were a huge part of the problem of racial injustice and they worked together with right-wing Republicans to relentlessly suppress the votes and civil rights of African Americans. It was a coalition of progressive Democrats and Republicans who opposed and finally overcame them to secure passage of the great Civil Rights reforms of the sixties.
But the Democratic Party has matured to the point where no Democratic political leaders advocate voter suppression or rolling back the clock on civil rights. Conversely, with very rare exceptions, no Republican leaders oppose voter suppression and most of them actively support it.
The Times editorial goes on to underscore the fact that Black Lives Matter “focuses on the fact that black citizens have long been far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police, and is of a piece with this history.”
They are not saying that white lives don’t matter; they are calling needed attention to the outrage of racially-motivated violence, committed by police and others, and they are demanding corrective action, in keeping with the best traditions of the American Civil Rights Movement. And despite media focus on riots and civil disturbances in the wake of police violence, the overwhelming majority of Black Lives Matter protesters have remained exclusively nonviolent.
Republicans are trying to suggest otherwise. But this lie won’t stand the test of honest scrutiny.
The modern Republican Party now sees its hope for survival being based on energizing white resentment toward people of color, particularly those who dare to protest for their basic civil rights. As the editorial concludes, “politicians who know better and seek to strip this issue of its racial content and context are acting in bad faith. They are trying to cover up an unpleasant truth and asking the country to collude with them.”
The Republicans have deployed this strategy for decades with mixed results. But it is especially shameful when directed at a group of citizens whose central concern is their right to be free from racially-motivated violence.