The Squad Has Been Decimated by the Democratic Primaries
slate.com
Both BLM activists were pushed out. And the Squad isn’t done being primaried.

Despite broad popular support for legislation to curtail police violence, Congress got nothing done. Democrats, despite controlling both the House and Senate in 2021 and 2022, slow-walked the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, insisting on bipartisan support that never materialized. Ending qualified immunity, the legal standard that prevents police officers from being sued for wrongdoing even when they knowingly break the law, was deemed not urgent by Jim Clyburn, then the highest-ranking Black member of the Democratic House majority, despite that being a core demand of the protest movement. Once that slipped away, it opened the door to even smaller reforms floating out of reach.

In the end, despite the embarrassing photo op in which Democratic leaders donned matching kente-cloth stoles and knelt on the floor of the Capitol building, no reforms were passed into law. After much hand-wringing over activists’ use of the slogan “Defund the Police,” no major efforts to defund large police departments were ever implemented. Police killings continued to increase: Officers killed at least 1,232 people in 2023, the deadliest year in a decade.

Now not even a single representative who swept into Congress on the heels of the popular mandate of police reform remains.

It’s a stark outcome. Consider, for example, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and the leader of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. Lewis continued his activist work for years afterward, arriving in Congress only in the 1980s, but he served 17 terms as a celebrated member of the Democratic House caucus until his death in 2020.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240814115829/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/omar-tlaib-bush-bowman-primaries-squad-democrats-aipac-israel.html

Worth noting, this opinion piece came out before Ilhan Omar’s primary took place, which she ended up winning

e; wrong archive link

  • octopus_inkEnglish
    11·
    4 months ago

    While MeToo and BLM were fairly short-lived political movements, they had an incredibly large and positive impact on the culture.

    I think MeToo is still felt, and its my perception that it’s changed culture and attitudes in a way that will persist, even as I acknowledge it’s not complete.

    I’m expecting another BLM-style country-wide protest in about another twenty years when it turns out once again we’ve done nothing but wallpaper over the status quo on police brutality. The only thing that gives me some hope is that we’re clearly into the era where everyone having a good camera in their pocket is a wildcard that so far seems to be a very positive detail most of the time.