Black people in the US are the crash test dummies for the Democrats. The Democrats showcase the misery of Black people to maintain their legitimacy while deploying the Black political class to neutralize the “progressive” elements in the party.
A crash test dummy is a simulated humanoid used in car accidents to test the safety of vehicles for human consumers. In the U.S., Black people are the crash test dummies for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment. The Democrats showcase the misery of Black people - through a discourse of “racial grievances” - to maintain their legitimacy while deploying the Black political class to neutralize the “progressive” elements in the party.
During the Obama era members of the Black chattering class were used as crash test dummies to manufacture a liberal curated message that Obama, the Wall Street Manchurian Candidate and first Black president, was the embodiment of Black political aspiration justifying Blacks abandoning their civil rights posture toward racism. From this 2008 New York Times article, “Is Barack Obama the End of Black Politics:”
"“I’m the new black politics,” says Cornell Belcher, a 38-year-old pollster who is working for Obama. “The people I work with are the new black politics. We don’t carry around that history. We see the world through post-civil-rights eyes. I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but that’s just the way it is.
“I don’t want in any way to seem critical of the generation of leadership who fought so I could be sitting here,” Belcher told me when we met for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown one morning. He wears his hair in irreverent spikes and often favors tennis shoes with suit jackets. “Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He’s the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain. This opportunity is the sum of that."
During Obama’s tenure over 35% of Black wealth evaporated, and there was no recourse for or Black America. Furthermore, 95% of Obama’s presidential job growth was low wage temp jobs. Blacks were the crash test dummies whose noble history of struggle was pimped out so Banks could be protected as America saw one of the greatest wealth transfers upward since the gilded age.
After the 2016 election, the racial grievances of Blacks rendered them as crash test dummies again. This time the corporate faction of the Democratic party deployed the Black political class and its media acolytes to neutralize the rising cry for social democracy and anti-capitalist politics. Black thought leaders in the chattering class deemed the Bernie Sanders candidacy as “tone deaf on race,” while pushing to coral Black politics around neoliberalism and Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, the Black political class has been repeatedly dispatched to destroy candidates for office that have carried the Sanders message. This subterfuge became obvious with both the 2021 Nina Turner campaign in Ohio, as well as the India Walton campaign in Buffalo, New York.
What is fascinating about the deployment of the Black liberal political call to destroy progressive social democratic policy rooted in political economy is that during the inter-war period, before Anti-Communism made such politics impossible to demand, the Black liberal political class took its lessons from Black socialists and Black communists. They used these lessons to shape their advocacy for Black America.
The book, “What the Negro Wants,” was written in 1944 and is a series of essays by some of the most heralded Black thinkers and activists of that era. W.E.B. DuBois, Rayford W. Logan, Charles H. Wesley, Mary McLeod Bethune, and A. Phillip Randolph are just a few of the contributors. What is fascinating is how little discussion there is about racism and White Supremacy, and how much is based on programmatic solutions rooted in political economy. I guess these folks would have been called "class reductionists" since almost all their solutions were premised on social democracy. In reading the book, you realize the bankruptcy of today’s Black social and political thought. A review of the book tell us:
“What the Negro Wants provides a unique view into black politics during that time period. The essays reveal the wide array of ideological tendencies operating within black political life, something often missing today from analyses that adopt the monolithic framework of a singular “black community.” Perhaps more striking was the common agreement among the diverse tendencies — and what this tells us about the transformations in black political life from then to now.
The writers shared a broad consensus around the vital importance of the labor movement (especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations, CIO), given black people’s overwhelming working-class composition. There was also much agreement around broadly social democratic demands and the necessity of interracial coalitions.”
Under the current Biden presidency Democrats are worried that the strategy of using Blacks as crash test dummies by dispatching “woke” racial grievance discourse to stain Trump’s Republican party is backfiring. As working-class voters flee the Democratic party, the belief is that the age of “wokeness,” has cost Democrats so much that they might have to start appealing to working class white voters using whatever messaging is possible. The recent controversy over political data expert David Shor and his calls for the Democratic party to embrace his messaging strategy called “popularism,” has the vapid Black chattering class worried that the Democratic party is going to throw Black people under the bus to appeal to working class Whites. Elie Mystal, the Black MSNBC contributor, and writer for, “The Nation,” expressed outrage as he argued that the Democrats were going abandon Blacks to embrace David Shor’s “Popularism.” As, Mystal states:
“I disagree with Shor not on the problems but on his proposed solutions. Shor, according to Klein, suggests doing what Democrats have traditionally done: figure out what the racists want and give it to them, while simultaneously pretending the party will never take real steps to challenge white supremacy.”
Acolytes of Shor quickly responded to Mystal’s complaints by basically admitting that the Democratic party has no choice but to appeal to working class white voters because demographically the party cannot win without their support, regardless of the size of the Democrats’ Multi-racial coalition. As “New York Magazine,” writer Eric Levitz published in his piece, “Smearing Popularism Does not Help Black Voters:”
“All of which is to say: There is nothing inherently anti-Black about wanting the Democratic Party to avoid alienating bigoted voters, much less white working-class ones more broadly. A “mobilization” strategy will only benefit African Americans to the extent that it keeps the Republican Party out of power. Black families surely need a Justice Department that cares about civil rights, an NLRB that sides with working people, and a Congress interested in expanding social welfare more than they need Democratic messaging that rhetorically centers systemic racism. Yet Mystal makes no effort to demonstrate that the electoral math on his preferred strategy adds up. He does not sketch out how Democrats could afford to disregard white working-class voters and still capture a Senate majority. By all appearances, he simply presumes that there must be a way for the party to do so.”
The last time Democrats used major polling analysis to change their messaging we got the Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton Crime Bill, the New Democrats, NAFTA GATT and worse neoliberalism that was highly racialized against Blacks. And in 1984 the same argumentation was used, "Democrats need to find a way to appeal to working class Whites." As vapid as the Black liberal chattering class has always been, I don't think we can totally fault them for their paranoia about the Democratic party's alleged embrace of "Shorism" or "Popularism."
What we are seeing is the failure of Democrats’ cynical post Obama strategy of focusing on racial grievance discourse divorced from materialist policy. That strategy was supposed to both shut down the possibility of any social democracy, or Sanders-type politics that would benefit most Black people, while secondly using Blacks as crash test dummies to fight Trump. That strategy has blown up in the Democrats face and is doing nothing but feeding the reactionary right. This is largely happening because liberals and the left flank of capital chose to platform neoliberal Blacks and Black foundation types spewing race first politics that only lined their own pockets from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Black Lives Matter. The support for this liberal “woke” racial grievance discourse has allowed Trump operative Steve Bannon to organize a grass roots takeover of political apparatuses throughout the Red States using contrived paranoia about Critical Race Theory as a flashpoint. Liberals played the Black elite and the Black Chattering class like suckers again. Now with debates emerging about “popularism,” and the tactics of David Shor, Democrats might seek to hang Black voters out to dry, once again, since they now realize they were riding a one trick pony that was only good to get Biden elected.
These racial changes in political messaging have a long and effective history during the 50 plus year counter-revolution against the gains of the 1960s and the New Deal. Starting with the hard hat riot and framing late 60s radicalism as social chaos, Nixon was able to begin the process of White working class spillage into the Republican party causing the first fracture of the New Deal-Civil Rights Coalition. Reagan doubled on this strategy by using the Nixonian Southern strategy fostering the "Reagan Democrats." Bill Clinton was the key to where this whole strategy of white racial appeal went bad. Clinton used the Southern Strategy as well to appeal to working class Whites by appearing tough on crime with the execution of Ricky Ray Rector and his Sister Soulja moment. Predictably, Clinton governed in a way that destroyed the working class across the board and savaged poor Blacks. The consequences of Clintonian politics were so bad that neoliberalism became equated with Democrats in the conscience of many Americans. Obama had an opportunity to repair these issues. Obama had more goodwill coming into office than any U.S. president in modern history. Instead, Obama doubled down on the worst elements of neoliberalism as a handpicked pawn of the banks. Furthermore, under Obama we also saw a massive opioid crisis ravage poor and working-class Americans hurt by Clinton Era NAFTA and GATT policies. Bernie Sanders revived a progressive left that had been dead for 50 years while Hillary Clinton was the emblem of all that was horrible with Clintonian Neoliberalism after Obama’s lack of recovery.
Therefore, the culture war nonsense is a product of a policy bankrupt Democratic party using vapid identity politics virtue signaling with no real material benefits to posture progressive while masking their complicity with the agenda of finance capital and the power elite. This shift to dump the working class was a strategic choice of the Democrats, not an accident. They did so under the charade of hoping Blacks and Latinos would forget they were working class and instead see themselves as ethnic and racial identities first. The Republicans have spun the culture wars to appeal to other aspects of the working-class psyche not contingent exclusively on racial identity, such as anti-vaccination mandates. Though neoliberalism has been a bi-partisan consensus since the 1970’s, the 30-year strategy and pivot of Neoliberal Democrats starting with Clinton and continuing through Obama, worsened the carnage. This is why Democrats deserve most of the blame for the turn in American capitalism to neoliberal privatization.
Some have argued that the current “wokeness,” paranoia has been caused by the social democratic Sanders faction of the Democratic party. Progressives did not ignite a culture war. Liberals ignited a culture war doubling down on woke racial grievance discourse to use black people both as crash test dummies to fight Trump and to neutralize the Progressive faction of the Democratic party's actual demand for materialist politics. The Liberal institutions from media to foundations, and even corporate finance, all supported wokeness especially after George Floyd’s murder. Progressives weren't pouring millions into capitalist streaming services like Netflix and Amazon to platform programming focused on Negroes racially navel gazing and fart sniffing their problems to pander to white guilt. Progressives, got their politics crushed by this materialist bankrupt form of race reductionism that they have been calling out while being called "class reductionists." Yet the only class of Negroes benefitting from this race reductionist nonsense are pedigreed Blacks who have always leveraged the misery of Black toilers for policy considerations that largely only benefit those Black elites. Negro elites and certain Blacks in academia have made a fortune off George Floyd’s corps for doing nothing but protecting the status quo. So don't blame Progressives. Blame the liberals, Black, White, and otherwise who have been using Black people as crash test dummies while showing sheer disregard for most of Black America during almost all the last 50 plus year counter-revolution.
Pascal Robert is an iconoclastic Haitian American Lawyer, blogger, and online activist for Haiti. You can find his work on the web at Thought Merchant, and at Huffington Post. He can be reached via twitter at @probert06 or [email protected].
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