WI: Black voters threatened to stay home on election days if both parties supported the war on drugs

What if, in the Nixon, Reagan, HW, and Clinton
years, black voters threatened to stay home on election days or even to vote Republican unless Democrats opposed the war on drugs?
 
They have no leverage in an era of Republican domination of Presidential politics. They stay home and all that happens is that more Republicans get elected to office downticket who will not be remotely sympathetic to ending the drug war.

And this is not an effective tactic in the American political system even in different circumstances. If you want different candidates you need to do it through the primary system.
 
The problem is that lots of black voters (as well as most black politicians) completely supported the War on Drugs.

Especially Charles Rangel:

"In March 1971, New York City faced a growing heroin epidemic. That year, Charles Rangel — then just 41 years old — was part of a delegation of newly-elected black congressman who won a closed-door meeting at the White House with President Richard Nixon.

"It was a historic moment. Nixon had already begun the process of criminalizing drugs in new ways, ramping up the federal effort to crack down on dealers and addicts. Over the decades that followed, those policies would send millions of young black men to prison. Some African American leaders were already voicing doubts and concerns.

"But during the meeting, Rangel didn’t urge Nixon to rethink his drug war strategy. Instead, the Harlem Democrat urged Nixon to ramp up drug-fighting efforts more aggressively, more rapidly..." http://www.wnyc.org/story/313060-profile-charles-rangel-and-drug-wars/
 
The problem is that lots of black voters (as well as most black politicians) completely supported the War on Drugs.

This is completely correct, particularly in the violence-prone '80s and '90s. The pressure in many communities from the grassroots was for more policing, more enforcement, more mandatory sentencing and more incarceration. The backlash to the War on Drugs is a fairly recent phenomenon that has emerged in response to the more obvious failure of the "war", the toll of mass incarceration, continued police violence and lower crime rates as well as the growing spread of opioid addiction in rural and suburban, predominantly white, areas. While there was always dissent regarding drug policy, what tends to be forgotten today is how much of a consensus policy it really was in its heyday. There was something of a hysteria surrounding the issue and no politician could safely ignore the pressure for stricter laws concerning drugs.
 
This is completely correct, particularly in the violence-prone '80s and '90s. The pressure in many communities from the grassroots was for more policing, more enforcement, more mandatory sentencing and more incarceration. The backlash to the War on Drugs is a fairly recent phenomenon that has emerged in response to the more obvious failure of the "war", the toll of mass incarceration, continued police violence and lower crime rates as well as the growing spread of opioid addiction in rural and suburban, predominantly white, areas. While there was always dissent regarding drug policy, what tends to be forgotten today is how much of a consensus policy it really was in its heyday. There was something of a hysteria surrounding the issue and no politician could safely ignore the pressure for stricter laws concerning drugs.

The modern left seems to have a weird disregard of history. They think the world was always as far forward as (they think) it is now.
 
The modern left seems to have a weird disregard of history. They think the world was always as far forward as (they think) it is now.

I wouldn't characterize this as a right/left issue at all. I have, I think, more perspective on it than some because I lived through the era. I personally thought the policies were wrong and misguided, and I viewed them as a de facto war on minorities trying to impose a law enforcement solution on broader complex social problems. But there was no denying that there was a public outcry for government to do something and that some of the outcry came from minorities themselves. There was also no denying that drugs were causing huge social problems including some rampant and senseless violence. There was real fear out there which was not entirely unjustified.

Unfortunately, politicians took the easy way out rather than actually trying to do something about the hollowing out of the economy which was taking place as deindustrialization hit urban areas hard in the 1980s and 1990s. What we are seeing today is the same phenomenon hitting the suburbs and rural areas as their economies are hollowing out due to globalization and the result is the opioid crisis, which is getting a more sympathetic hearing because, frankly, its victims are white and born in the United States. I'm not singling out the Republicans, by the way. The Democrats had just as big a hand in the 80s and 90s in setting drug and criminal justice policy (Joe Biden wrote the 1994 drug legislation) and are now also changing their tune as the demographics of drug addiction change. This is, by the way, a good thing. The policies of the 80s and 90s did little to solve actual problems. There is, in fact, a study out there (too lazy to look it up right now) that makes a good case that much of the violence of the 80s and 90s could in fact be traced not to drugs at all but to environmental lead and what caused the drop in violent crime after that period was environmental regulation that took lead out of the living environment of children.
 
The drug war is Prohibition in modern times. People supported it for the same moral, social, and cultural reasons. The wave that carried it will break over anyone not willing to ride it.

The black Bloc not voting fails to change anything.
 
I wouldn't characterize this as a right/left issue at all. I have, I think, more perspective on it than some because I lived through the era. I personally thought the policies were wrong and misguided, and I viewed them as a de facto war on minorities trying to impose a law enforcement solution on broader complex social problems. But there was no denying that there was a public outcry for government to do something and that some of the outcry came from minorities themselves. There was also no denying that drugs were causing huge social problems including some rampant and senseless violence. There was real fear out there which was not entirely unjustified.

Unfortunately, politicians took the easy way out rather than actually trying to do something about the hollowing out of the economy which was taking place as deindustrialization hit urban areas hard in the 1980s and 1990s. What we are seeing today is the same phenomenon hitting the suburbs and rural areas as their economies are hollowing out due to globalization and the result is the opioid crisis, which is getting a more sympathetic hearing because, frankly, its victims are white and born in the United States. I'm not singling out the Republicans, by the way. The Democrats had just as big a hand in the 80s and 90s in setting drug and criminal justice policy (Joe Biden wrote the 1994 drug legislation) and are now also changing their tune as the demographics of drug addiction change. This is, by the way, a good thing. The policies of the 80s and 90s did little to solve actual problems. There is, in fact, a study out there (too lazy to look it up right now) that makes a good case that much of the violence of the 80s and 90s could in fact be traced not to drugs at all but to environmental lead and what caused the drop in violent crime after that period was environmental regulation that took lead out of the living environment of children.
Exactly. The issue is what is causing the rise in drug use, not those supplying it. A change in policy is needed from decriminalization to support programs and aid, but that is a totally different argument.
 
What if, in the Nixon, Reagan, HW, and Clinton
years, black voters threatened to stay home on election days or even to vote Republican unless Democrats opposed the war on drugs?

Two problems:
1) The Democrats would try to argue, "Yeah, but we support it more nicely" and would expect that to work
2) Alternately, the Democrats would (in general) assume that it's a bluff because they've been able to count on black voters for decades.
 
What if, in the Nixon, Reagan, HW, and Clinton
years, black voters threatened to stay home on election days or even to vote Republican unless Democrats opposed the war on drugs?

They have no leverage in an era of Republican domination of Presidential politics. They stay home and all that happens is that more Republicans get elected to office downticket who will not be remotely sympathetic to ending the drug war.

And this is not an effective tactic in the American political system even in different circumstances. If you want different candidates you need to do it through the primary system.

Blacks threatening to vote Libertarian en masse makes more sense, but the LP is probably a little too states-rightsy for them.

Also no ethnicity is a hive-mind.
 
So, a racial group is going to mass boycott voting in a first past the post system. It literally accomplishes nothing.

I think you're mixing up voting with a general strike.
 
I wouldn't characterize this as a right/left issue at all. I have, I think, more perspective on it than some because I lived through the era. I personally thought the policies were wrong and misguided, and I viewed them as a de facto war on minorities trying to impose a law enforcement solution on broader complex social problems. <snip rest cuz this is what I'm replying to>.

I lived through it, too, and in my neck of the woods, it was mostly whites who got caught in the war, not 'minorities'. Could your POV be a reflection of where you lived, rather than an actual de facto war?
 
What if, in the Nixon, Reagan, HW, and Clinton
years, black voters threatened to stay home on election days or even to vote Republican unless Democrats opposed the war on drugs?

My immediate reaction to this was: Clinton never becomes president. He's the only Dem on your list.
 
I lived through it, too, and in my neck of the woods, it was mostly whites who got caught in the war, not 'minorities'. Could your POV be a reflection of where you lived, rather than an actual de facto war?

Sure. And I didn't mean to imply that there weren't whites who were similarly caught up in a very punitive system; if I had gotten into that, I would have wound up writing a treatise rather than a short post. But...

What I saw as a law student and young lawyer was a lot of disparity in who was stopped by police and a lot of disparity in how individual cases wound their way through the court system. This was New York, under Dinkins and Giuliani. The way the law was applied came across to me as very much being a war on minorities and the poor. You did not want to be a defendant without means relying on an overworked public defender regardless of your ethnic background.
 
As has already been pointed out, there was widespread African American support for the war on drugs. But equally important is that even if blacks *had* opposed it, they were not one-issue voters and could not afford to boycott elections over the war on drugs when so many other important issues ranging from the economy to civil rights enforcement were at stake.
 
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