With the choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden has cemented the creation of what must be one of the most “law and order” presidential tickets in recent memory: at the top of the ticket we have the author of the 1994 crime bill, the man who once claimed that “every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, had [his] name” on it, and right beneath him we have a former district attorney and attorney general who has proudly labeled herself a “top cop.” (Biden started his career as a public defender, but put that aside for now.) You would be hard pressed to find two politicians who better encapsulate the last fifty years of law enforcement history in this country: in Biden we have the chief avatar of a nationwide war on crime and in Harris we have the exemplar of a quieter, localized form of policing that has proven no less harmful.
Harris had the misfortune to step onto the national stage at a moment of national reckoning over the role of prosecutors in the criminal justice system: a wave of local elections saw the ascension of “progressive prosecutors” such as Kim Foxx, Larry Krasner, (almost) Tiffany Caban, and most recently Chesa Boudin in Harris’s old bailiwick of San Francisco. As the Democratic Primary began last year, writers and activists on the left seized onto Harris’s long tenure as a district attorney, pushing a conversation about her punitive prosecution strategies onto the national debate stage. (The main quarrel with her tenure as attorney general is that she did not prosecute enough, letting big banks off the hook for the subprime mortgage crisis.)
At first blush one might think that running a former prosecutor as vice president during a national upheaval over police violence is about as good an idea as running an infectious disease expert from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but there is a perverse logic to the idea. Although a number of Harris’s rivals pecked at her during the debates over her record as a prosecutor, I would imagine most voters do not see the act of prosecuting and jailing people as an inherently bad one. While district attorneys form an integral part of an essentially violent police state, they are not responsible for the gruesome and egregious acts of physical violence that triggered this summer’s protests.
Furthermore, Harris’s status as both a Black woman and a law enforcement official makes her the perfect candidate to attract the white liberals and moderates who have newly warmed to the cause of Black Lives Matter. Trump is having a hard enough time tarring Biden as an avatar of the radical left, but he will have an even harder time tarring Harris as an anti-police anarchist given that she is, as she has said, a “top cop.” As for the question of whether her presence on the ticket will provide that fabled enthusiasm, well, we talked about that last time.
Biden is a more interesting case. His support among Black voters in the Democratic Party is well established by now, but why? How have his intimate involvement in the War on Drugs and his authorship of the 1994 Crime Bill not made him a no-go for an age of police and prison reform? For one thing, many of the older Black voters who now support Biden were also supporters of the crime crackdown of the 1980s and 1990s, a fact attested by James Forman’s book Locking Up Our Own. The book explores how a number of Black politicians, judges, and police chiefs came to power in the wake of a decade-long crime wave and responded to that crime wave by endorsing extraordinarily punitive criminal justice policies. (Foremost among these figures were Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and future attorney general Eric Holder.)
When I was in college and reporting for the South Side Weekly on the churches and community centers on the South Side of Chicago, I encountered attitudes that strongly resembled those depicted in Forman’s book: the older Black people I spoke with in these neighborhoods frequently expressed a desire for more policing on their blocks—or really I should say more effective policing, since at the time Chicago’s 12,000-badge police force had a murder clearance rate of around 25 percent. That the Chicago Police Department was a biased and violent institution was not even up for discussion, but many people in those communities were willing to tolerate the presence of that institution on their blocks if it could help protect them from the immediate threat of gun violence.
Of course Black people are not to blame for the swollen population of our nation’s prisons, not least because white people supported those same punitive policies with even greater fervor and continued to enforce those policies for decades, even after crime had gone down. The point is that law enforcement is an instrument of social control, one that marks some members of a society as irredeemable in order to maintain for the others the illusion of rational community. Cy Vance gives a homeless man three to five years for stealing toothpaste not because some capitalist pig makes a profit when that man sits in Rikers but because the “law-abiding” members of society have a fundamental need to push out of view the truth that it is they who drove that man to the point of theft in the first place.
In this context we can view policing as a national institution of psychic repression, a guilt complex that is disproportionately prevalent in the United States because we have disproportionately more to be guilty about. Thus the truth that there is no such thing as a “progressive prosecutor” is similar to the truth that there is no such thing as “ethical capitalism”: it may well be true, but it is a truth so profound that it will never appear on any ballot. So it would be wrong to frame this year’s election as a referendum on whether policing as a social form is good or bad, one in which the Democrats, by picking Biden and Harris, have accidentally staked out the same pro-cop position as the Republicans. Rather this election represents a contest between the grotesque violence of policing and the law-abiding liberalism that backstops that violence, a contest between the brute force of the billy club and the soft slice of the county court clerk’s stapler. The countless Americans who have been victims of that violence, meanwhile, are safely out of sight, locked up in places where they cannot pose a threat to the prospects of either party.
What I’ve Been Writing
I have a new piece in The Guardian on Trump’s postmaster general Louis DeJoy and the havoc he’s wreaking on the Postal Service. It’s been weird and amazing to see the news media descend on the Postal Service beat I’ve been working for a few years and I’m happy to have done my part. More to come as the election gets closer.
And there’s my monthly mini-column for The New Republic on the rightwing media, this time about their attempt to scare suburban voters away from Black Lives Matter.
Again, not much more—I’ve been doing some longer-term reporting and fact-checking a few books. I’ll have more about that another time.
What I’ve Been Reading
Books
The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I can’t recommend this highly enough, a truly unique novel by a very talented writer.
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston. A historical novel about Joey Smallwood, the socialist leader of Newfoundland. Pretty good, I really want to visit Newfoundland now.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I found this book pretty dull but it was clearly ahead of its time. It was published in 2003 and has clearly served as a blueprint for an entire generation of fiction about the process of immigrant assimilation.
Articles
Vicious crab-eating macaques are taking over towns in Thailand, breaking into stores and stealing food and jewelry. (New York Times)
China is trying to buy an Arctic gold mine in Canada; relatedly, Kate Aronoff on China as a necessary partner for tackling the climate crisis. (Wall Street Journal, New Republic)
Alex Jung interviewing Michaela Coel and Molly Fischer interviewing Sarah Schulman. Two articles, four luminaries. (Vulture, The Cut)
An incredible piece from Elizabeth Rush on climate migration and managed retreat; her book Rising is one of the best on the subject. (Anthropocene)
A beautiful reported narrative about being young and homeless in New York City during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. (n+1)
How fifty prison inmates prepared a dinner to honor the life of George Floyd. (The Counter)
A jaw-dropping article about the Tom Brady fan who stole the New York Giants’ Super Bowl rings. The entire Bloomberg “Heist Issue” was amazing. (Bloomberg)
Google invests half a billion dollars into ADT, the home security system company. When you’ve exhausted the Cloud, there’s always the Yard. (WSJ)
The story of a rich Toronto couple who adopted 30 children from all over the world, a perfect parable of Canadian multicultural liberalism. (Toronto Life)
The FBI had a beer distributor wear a wire around Biden associates for two years in order to probe the shady world of Delaware politics. (Politico)
David Dayen on how monopoly power makes it so that salt water in a bag is a scarce commodity. (Prospect)
I really want to read this new book about history’s first global manhunt, a chase for pirate Henry Every and his stolen stash of Mughal treasure. (NYT Book Review)