CROSS POSTED FROM MY BLOG, A LEFT INDEPENDENT
OR: Why do Jim Crow Democrats eat our young
The Jim Crow/Dixie-crat/Blue Dog Democrats, who support the war on drugs, have been supporting the mass electoral disenfranchisement of minorities and poverty oppressed urban Americans since Bill Clinton gave us a world record prison population in America. So many traditional core Democratic constituents have been disenfranchised or have become disaffected by this policy that not even a Black candidate like Obama campaigns to the poor and Black communities anymore because he knows that these communities are no longer politically viable thanks to three dozen years of drug war electoral suppression and repression. This is why all of the leading Democrats of the past dozen years have campaigned most to the “middle class”, which is a euphemism for rural white, rather than to traditional Democratic territory pluralistic urban interests.
At the same time that the drug war has mass disenfranchised minorities it has built large prisons in rural white districts that now house huge numbers of transplanted urban minorities and the poverty oppressed of America. Come apportionment time these Americans are counted in the rural white districts but have no vote there. This artificially bolsters the rural white districts while dis-empowering urban pluralistic districts by the loss of population.
Compounding the loss for the cities is the return to the cities from prison of disenfranchised people who also now have little or no economic viability in the legitimate economy. Since politics is money in America today the political outcome of ever more poor and politically disenfranchised citizens in our cities is obvious. Urban America effectively disenfranchised by the Jim Crow drug war Democrats in collusion with right-wing Republicans.
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama whole-heartedly support this Jim Crow war on drugs.
So, why is John McCain polling better than Obama and Clinton? Its not that there are so many white right-wingers in America today that Democrats can only win the presidency by the skin of their teeth. Rather its the fact that the right-wing of both parties, using the drug war, have made a concerted effort, since 1972, to neutralize and subvert both the Voting Rights Act and the 26st Amendment. Jim Crow right-wing Democrats like the Clintons, Kerry and too damned many others have happily gone along with the white right-wing on this policy rather than standing up for the Democratic Party’s greatest legacy, Voting Rights Act and the 26st Amendment. The electoral empowerment laws of the 20th century.
Republicans can win against any Democrat because of the 3-million or more criminally disenfranchised reduce the Democratic margin. The Democrats lose to any Republican because the drug war policy has, in the past dozen years, driven millions of social justice, human rights and civil liberties motivated activists like myself out of the Democratic Party and into the Greens, the Libertarians and the Nader Independent camps. The Democrats simply no longer have a margin to win with no matter how totally screwed up the GOP candidates are.
