As things stand now, Obama's race-related policies are much closer to Trump's than to those of most major Democratic presidential contenders.
Last week, at the opening of a justice-reform conference held at Benedict College, President Trump received a Bipartisan Justice Award in recognition of his part in the passage of the First Step Act, the criminal-justice-reform law he signed late last year. The title of the New York Times report on Trump’s acceptance of the award captured the flavor of his remarks: “In Criminal Justice Speech, Trump Belittles Obama’s Efforts for Black People.” But whether or not Trump cares to admit it, his race-related policies are much closer to Obama’s than those of virtually all the current Democratic presidential candidates.
One of Trump’s major initiatives is to expand access to charter schools. This, too, was one of Obama’s education-policy priorities. Indeed, in The Nation, Dana Goldstein reported, “The expansion of charter schools seems likely to be the most lasting of Obama’s education reforms.” By contrast, Elizabeth Warren spoke for today’s Democratic party when she promised to end Obama’s Charter School Program, a source of funds for charter-school expansion.
A second Trump policy is Opportunity Zones, which provide a set of financial incentives for businesses to open in distressed areas. The origin of this initiative is a 2015 paper co-authored by Jared Bernstein, who was the chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden through 2011. The paper reasoned that the problem with the previous Clinton-era Empowerment Zones was that they were not built at a sufficient scale to be as effective as possible. Bernstein has been mostly encouraged by the states’ opportunity-zone choices, and by the level of investor interest so far. While he still has some mixed feelings about the policy, he told Bloomberg Opinion’s Justin Fox in June that, “I think I’m less ambivalent than a lot of my fellow progressives.”
Another area of policy agreement is occupational training. One of Obama’s flagship programs was his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which aimed to enroll more high-school students in occupational-training programs. Obama’s efforts on this front were never embraced by progressives, who instead focused on four-year-college-for-all. As Trump mentioned in his Benedict College speech, under the leadership of his daughter Ivanka he initiated the Council for the American Worker, a set of programs coordinated with industry to reduce the shortage of skilled workers.
The most interesting coalescing of Obama and Trump policies involves criminal-justice reform. Trump’s First Step Act should be seen as a legislative extension of Obama’s clemency initiative, which offset harsh sentences for non-violent drug offenses. Both Obama and Trump shifted law enforcement’s focus away from low-level, non-violent drug crimes to violent crimes. And both have been roundly criticized for their efforts by Democratic progressives such as Senator Kamala Harris, who withdrew from the Benedict conference in protest of its award to President Trump (while conveniently ignoring that she amassed the record of a law-and-order Democrat as San Francisco district attorney). Obama got similar abuse from the 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award winner, Glenn E. Martin, an ex-convict turned social-justice warrior who wrote that Obama “continued to rhetorically throw most people in the system under the bus by dividing us into the misleading binary categories of ‘violent’ versus ‘nonviolent’ when people convicted of crimes defined as ‘violent’ have as much capacity for rehabilitation and redemption as anyone else.”
These critics — and many others on the left — prefer to ignore the fact that both presidents’ policies were a response to a rising tide of violent crime: From 2014 to 2016, homicides nationally increased almost 20 percent, and homicides of black people increased by 30 percent. A rational observer could be forgiven for thinking that shifting law-enforcement resources away from non-violent offenses is an appropriate response to such a trend and that black citizens would be the greatest beneficiaries of such a change.
Today, almost two-thirds of all federal and state prisoners were convicted of violent crimes while less than one-seventh of them were convicted of non-violent drug offenses. In response, many progressive district attorneys around the country, and particularly those in Philadelphia and New York City, have reduced the number of crimes classified as violent, as well as eliminating bail for many arrested for such crimes.
By redefining the violent-crime problem away in such a manner, today’s progressives have fundamentally rejected the framework that underpinned Obama’s approach to criminal justice. They have done so primarily because they have come to believe that these incremental reforms reinforce white supremacy — that more vocational employment, incremental prison reform, and neoliberal neighborhood revitalization will not change the racial hierarchy that dominates American society. Indeed, as an influential new book by David Markovitz argues, progressives increasingly reject merit as a legitimate basis for distributing social benefits. In the area of higher education, for example, meritocratic goals can more easily be achieved by the children of well-off professional families who are able to invest heavily in the educational development of their children, who then do well on standardized tests that enable them to gain admission to the best colleges.
It is depressing and more than a little unsettling to contemplate this shift in progressive attitudes, which is evidenced by the many major Democratic presidential contenders who’ve seen fit to trash Obama’s race-related policies as insufficient or even harmful. Moderate Democrats can only hope that once the primaries are over, the winner will think more realistically about what makes such policies truly successful and re-embrace Obama’s plans for black advancement.