In a slap in the face to the minority voters crucial to his election, the president has held fast to the failed, punitive drug policies of the past.
In a slap in the face to the minority voters who were crucial to his election, the president has held fast to the failed, punitive drug policies of the past.
S cience fiction and comedy work in similar ways: You can have as unlikely and outlandish a premise as you like, but the details of your story have to work logically and philosophically within the context of that premise — otherwise, you end up with midi-chlorians or The Hangover Part II.
Politics, our lowest form of literature (somewhere between reality show and professional wrestling), operates under similar constraints, as Joe Biden (the role the late Leslie Nielsen was born to play) is discovering to his discomfort.
Joe Biden’s character summary is, briefly, “Woke FDR.” But this is a comedy, and so Biden, a man of the 1970s (the early 1970s) is a fish out of wokester water on the 2021 political scene.
Woke-ism, if we may call it that, is to a remarkable degree a phenomenon of the well-educated and the affluent, and especially of people who occupy the commanding heights of business and culture or — here’s where it gets ugly — positions immediately adjacent to those commanding heights. This is, as I sometimes call it, the civil war between E-Class and S-Class.
There is no better place to watch this play out than in the New York Times, either as an institution (e.g., James Bennett being pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans to be replaced with . . . a different rich white Ivy League graduate) or in its pages, which are full of angsty stories about the heartrending travails of wildly successful black playwrights who have shows being produced on Broadway or African Americans who are serving as senior executives at major museums.
The Times offers the phenomenon in concentrate, but you can see it everywhere, e.g. at the Golden Globes, where the rich white host from a middle-class background (UVA ’88) made bitter jokes with the other rich white host from a middle-class background (BC ’93) about the awards show’s lack of diversity. If you look at that through the right kind of woke eyes, it works — it’s the political version of suspending disbelief.
And while the nation’s heart naturally bleeds for those poor souls whose careers are stalled as also-rans at the Golden Globes — along with the dispossessed minorities who are right on the cusp of being admitted to Harvard Law but who might, absent an assist from affirmative action, be relegated to Cornell or NYU and suffer all the horrors and indignities associated with that — there are some persistent problems that continue to plague a class of Americans whose interests and aspirations do not fit very well into the spaces between the Cartier ads and the Patek ads in the Times.
Mayor Bill de Blasio insists that in his city “every young person can achieve,” and touts as evidence of his success recent statistics finding that one in four black students in New York fails to finish high school on schedule. Forgive my English-major math, but it seems to me that there is some considerable distance between “every young person” and “actually a little bit less than three-fourths, if we’re being precise about it.” A world of difference, in fact.
What is to be done about that? If we judge the Democrats by their actions, then the answer is: approximately zilch.
President Biden has pledged to nominate a black woman to a Supreme Court vacancy, in the not-unlikely event that one comes up during his presidency. (There is pressure on 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer to retire.) That must be exciting news to each of the nine black women under 55 currently serving as Democrat-appointed judges on the federal bench. But being considered for a Supreme Court appointment is not the most common kind of interaction that black Americans have with the legal system.
In Bill de Blasio’s very woke New York City, 82 percent of those arrested on misdemeanor charges are black or Hispanic, far in excess of their share of the population. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers make up a similar share of those who receive administrative summonses for things like public drinking and disorderly conduct. Black prisoners in New York are more likely to be subjected to disciplinary actions that weigh against their being paroled and are more likely to have their parole revoked (if they receive it) than are white offenders. Data from 2010 found that one in three black men in the United States had been convicted of a felony. The emotional convulsions at woke Harvard and on woke Broadway are pretty far removed from all that.
So is the Biden administration.
While he commits himself to a largely symbolic gesture on the Supreme Court, President Biden proposes to make the real-world situation of black Americans — and poor and marginalized Americans more broadly — considerably worse by fighting the failed “war on drugs” like the Nixon-era dinosaur he is. Most recently, he has backed extending the Trump administration’s policy of seeking longer minimum sentences for those convicted of fentanyl possession. The policy is opposed by, among others, the NAACP, whose Hilary Shelton said in a press conference: “The Biden administration, its leaders and economists, are faced with their first major test of criminal-justice reform. If they choose to extend this Trump-era policy, it will increase mass incarceration and the over-policing and incarceration of people of color, and will be a missed position on Biden’s campaign promises.”
About this, the NAACP is undeniably correct. The so-called war on drugs has imposed heavier casualties on the non-white than on the white and on the poor than on the affluent. In ramping it up, Biden is effectively ramping up a war on African Americans, the very people who made him president, or at least escalating a war in which they will suffer disproportionate losses.
On the other hand, black graduates of elite colleges with outstanding academic performances and impressive curricula vitae will continue to enjoy a slight edge in admissions at Harvard Law, and those horrible redneck white-power knuckleheads who run . . . Broadway . . . have been put on notice at last.
It’s a funny ol’ woke world.