{"id":13990,"date":"2022-10-19T06:30:22","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=13990"},"modified":"2022-10-19T06:55:32","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T13:55:32","slug":"democrats-are-having-trouble-holding-onto-their-coalition-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=13990","title":{"rendered":"“The Mess in L.A. Points to Trouble for Democrats”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By <\/span>Thomas B. Edsall, Guest Essay,\u00a0<\/span>

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.<\/p>\n

Democrats in cities across America are having trouble holding their coalitions together.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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The mess in L.A. helps us see why.<\/span>Credit…<\/span>Genaro Molina\/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In Los Angeles, the battle is over power in the form of representation on the City Council; in San Francisco and New York, it\u2019s over affordable housing and access to public schools; across the nation, it\u2019s over tough versus tolerant criminal prosecution and lenient versus punitive approaches to homelessness.<\/p>\n

These tensions are, in turn, aggravated by white gentrification and have one thing in common: limited or declining resources, with shuttered businesses no longer paying taxes evident on downtown streets. An absence of growth prevents elected officials from expanding benefits for some without paring them for others.<\/p>\n

Political tensions<\/a> between African American, Hispanic American, Asian American and white communities in Los Angeles are now on full display as a result of the publication of a secretly taped<\/a>conversation that exposed the crude, racist scheming of three Hispanic City Council officials and a Hispanic labor leader \u2014 who were, in the main, angling to enhance their power at the expense of Black competitors.<\/p>\n

These zero-sum conflicts epitomize the problem for liberals struggling to sustain a viable political alliance encompassing core minority constituencies.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn general, conflict among groups is more likely to emerge when resources are scarce,\u201d Vasiliki Fouka<\/a>, a political scientist at Stanford, and Marco Tabellini<\/a>, a professor at Harvard Business School, said by email, in response to my inquiry about Democratic intraparty tensions: \u201cThis is especially true when groups perceive each other as different and have different priorities and preferences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fouka and Tabellini, authors of the 2021 paper \u201cChanging In-Group Boundaries<\/a>: The Effect of Immigration on Race Relations in the United States\u201d noted in their email that \u201cwhen the size of the pie is growing, everyone enjoys larger benefits and groups are less likely to view each other as competitors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEducation,\u201d they added,<\/p>\n

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is a case where we have recently seen such zero-sum dynamics. One example is the controversy over the admissions system of Lowell High School in San Francisco \u2014 from selective criteria based on grades, which led to higher representation of Asian and white students to a lottery system that increased admissions of Black and Latino students. That case ended with the recall of school board members, due to pressure exerted largely by Chinese American voters. The San Francisco case demonstrates that political power is key for settling disputes and allocating resources across other battlegrounds like education and housing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The City Council redistricting process in Los Angeles epitomizes \u201cI win-you lose\u201d politics. Fifteen districts of equal population must be drawn<\/a> every ten years within the confines of a city with rapidly changing demographics. The gains of one group almost inevitably come at the expense of another.<\/p>\n

Nearly sixty years ago \u2014 in 1963 \u2014 Los Angeles became \u201calmost a parable of rainbow politics,\u201d Harold Meyerson<\/a>, editor at large of The American Prospect, wrote last week in \u201cL.A. Backstory<\/a>: The History Behind the City Council\u2019s Racist Tirades.\u201d<\/p>\n

That year, Meyerson explains, three Black Democrats, including Tom Bradley<\/a>, a former Black police lieutenant, won seats on the City Council. In 1973, Bradley was elected mayor, winning the first of five elections with a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that kept him in office for a record 20 years.<\/p>\n

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In order to maintain this bloc, \u201ca delicate dance ensued,\u201d Meyerson continues:<\/p>\n

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Since the 1960s, the three of the city\u2019s 15 council districts located in and around heavily Black South Central had been informally designated as Black seats, and Latino political leaders agreed not to contest them, even as the Black share of the city\u2019s population shrank from 15 percent in the 1970 census to 8 percent in the 2020 census, and even as the city\u2019s share of Latinos rose to 48 percent in 2020.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I asked Raphael Sonenshein<\/a>, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State-Los Angeles, about the history of racial and ethnic politics in Los Angeles as well as the current situation. He wrote back by email: \u201cBetween 1900 and 1949, there were no City Council members who were African American, Latino, Jewish or Asian American.\u201d In 1949, Ed Roybal<\/a>became the first Hispanic member of the council and held his seat until 1962 when he successfully ran for Congress, Sonenshein noted. But \u201cthen there was a long hiatus with no Latino members until 1985, all during the heyday of the Bradley Black-Jewish coalition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, according to Sonenshein, \u201cthere are three African American and four Latino \u2018seats\u2019 on the council,\u201d with the strong possibility of a fifth Hispanic seat depending on the outcome of a Nov. 8 runoff. Black Democrats have held three council seats every cycle since 1963 despite the sharp decline in the African American share of the city\u2019s electorate, the result, Sonenshein wrote, of \u201ca long-term Black-Latino d\u00e9tente and at times strong alliance.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Sonenshein about the all-or-nothing element of redistricting in Los Angeles, and he replied that the unusually strong powers held by the City Council make the competition for seats particularly intense:<\/p>\n

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The conflict is further enhanced by the unique nature of the L.A. council. It is certainly the most powerful council in any city with a mayor-council system. The relatively small size of the council and the visibility of the council as the most public facing institution in the city government make each seat immensely valuable. L.A.\u2019s growing stature as a key political force in California and even national Democratic politics causes state legislators to consider abandoning their seats when a council position opens up. (Can you imagine that happening in N.Y.C. or Chicago?)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Conversely, Sonenshein argued, there are two factors mitigating conflict: \u201cstrong incentives in communities to build and maintain progressive cross-racial and cross-ethnic coalitions on the Tom Bradley model and cross cutting elite political alliances that link together members in different communities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sonenshein described the current situation in Los Angeles as the<\/p>\n

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mirror image of the 1990s. As the Latino population grew in the 1980s and 1990s in what was then known as South Central Los Angeles, there was considerable intergroup tension at the street level. Jobs, housing, services, all played a role. It took a while for those tensions to bubble up to the political level.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

David Sears<\/a>, an emeritus professor of psychology and political science at U.C.L.A., emailed his response to my query about racial and ethnic politics in Los Angeles:<\/p>\n

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The zero-sum character of redistricting surely exacerbates intergroup conflict. In L.A., such conflicts are barely below the surface in general. Especially Black-brown. Latinos have moved into historically Black neighborhoods in large numbers in L.A. and now generally outnumber Blacks. City Council representation has not adjusted to reflect that change. Black-brown political coalitions do form but they can be evanescent, with the tensions generally sub rosa rather than displayed out in public.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In peaceful times, Sears wrote, \u201cthe theory of \u2018common in-group identity\u2019 argues that coalitions can form around a common superordinate identity. One example would be the Democratic Party in the California legislature\u201d where there are \u201clots of pressures to bind the coalition together \u2014 e.g., maintaining a supermajority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sears cautioned, however, that \u201csubordinate group identities can sometimes fracture that common identity when subordinate group identities are made salient, as in redistricting (or ticket composition) decisions. The current controversy is a textbook example of these dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sears pointed out possible future developments. On one hand, he again mentioned \u201clots of pressures to bind the coalition together.\u201d At the same time, however, Sears noted that<\/p>\n

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Centrifugal pressures include upward mobility among Latinos, who are rapidly moving into being small-business entrepreneurs. The younger generation is getting a lot better educated: e.g., the numbers of Latinos admitted to U.C.L.A. are rising rapidly. And intermarriage with whites is very common in post-immigrant generations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cExpect more ethnic conflicts,\u201d Sears concluded:<\/p>\n

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despite the incentives for coalition building. The fragmentation of neighborhoods leads to fragmentation in the schools. Many lighter-skinned Latinos have an easier road of it than African Americans in terms of upward mobility. I believe that broken families are still much more common in the Black community, which has its costs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Redistricting is a redistribution of political power, and political power determines the allocation of crucial resources. Cecilia Menj\u00edvar<\/a>, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., emailed me her analysis of the role of scarcity in the struggle for power:<\/p>\n

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Ethnic conflict does not happen in a vacuum of other social forces, especially material resources such as income and especially inequality \u2014 absolutely and relative \u2014 in personal income but also resources such as housing, and school funding, etc. which varies quite a bit by place, neighborhood, etc. This is important because it\u2019s not just income and material resources but increased inequality \u2014 the uneven distribution of resources that shapes perceptions about a sense of scarcity that groups (and individuals) perceive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Income and access to resources and benefits are all key, Menj\u00edvar continued, \u201cbut inequality, the uneven distribution and access to resources and society\u2019s benefits, is absolutely vital to consider here because it is perceptions of unequal access, unequal distribution of benefits, etc. that I see more than income distribution alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along similar lines, Betina Wilkinson<\/a>, a political scientist at Wake Forest University, emailed me to say that her survey and focus group data \u201creveal that for some Blacks and Latinxs, social, economic and political opportunities are zero-sum since they feel that their sociopolitical power and struggles are comparable to those of the other minoritized group, that there are limited resources and opportunities and thus that the other group poses a threat to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Limited economic opportunities granted to Black and Hispanic Americans, Wilkinson argued,<\/p>\n

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along with many employers\u2019 deep-seated racism against Blacks and favorability toward Latinxs prompts some Blacks to regard Latinxs as economic threats. What matters is perceptions. Perceptions of one\u2019s sociopolitical standing and perception of the opportunities and resources that one and one\u2019s group has to move up the socioeconomic ladder.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Karen Kaufmann,<\/a> a lecturer at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at U.C.L.A., argued in a 2007 paper \u201cImmigration and the Future of Black Power in U.S. Cities<\/a>,\u201d that biracial and multiethnic coalitions in Los Angeles and other cities have produced only modest gains for minorities in patronage and set-aside contracts, posing little threat to the white establishment:<\/p>\n

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Scholars assume that Blacks and Latinos would obviously be individually and collectively better off if they governed in unity. This perspective assumes that minority mayors and legislators are particularly responsive to poor urban communities, especially in contrast to White-led administrations. This assumption, regardless of how reasonable it appears, is not a matter of fact. The preponderance of evidence to date suggests that minority representation does quite little to advance minority interests above and beyond policies and programs that already exist under White regimes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Since \u201cminority-specific rewards in the realm of local government are largely inelastic,\u201d Kaufmann argued, \u201cBlacks and Latinos have powerful incentives to compete with one another for control of these resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the extent \u201cthat the pool of minority benefits such as government jobs, appointments, contracts, and redistributive monies will not be appreciably larger under a minority-led regime than it is under a White-led government,\u201d Kaufman continued, \u201cminority groups will be better off as the most powerful minority in a coalition with Anglos than as the second most powerful in a minority-led administration.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Black and Hispanic Americans, according to Kaufmann, \u201cthe impetus for political inclusion is not so much about opening up new sources of minority opportunity as it is about controlling those already established. From this perspective, the absence of minority coalition building at both the elite and the mass level generally constitutes rational, group-interested behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

A series of Public Opinion surveys<\/a> of Los Angeles residents conducted by Loyola Marymount University in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2022 suggested a recent deterioration in race relations in the city.<\/p>\n

The Loyola study found a sharp drop in optimism concerning race relations in 2022. For example, from 2017 to 2022, the percentage of Los Angeles residents saying race relations had improved fell from 40.6 to 19.3 percent. The percentage saying relations had worsened grew from 18.0 to 38.5 percent.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the percentage of resident saying riots were likely to happen in the near future grew from 40.8 in 2015 to 64.7 percent in 2022. From 2019 to 2022, the percentage of residents saying racial and ethnic groups were getting along well fell from 72.4 to 61.2 percent.<\/p>\n

Los Angeles and cities everywhere can look forward to constrained budgets restricting spending on everything from schools to housing to street repairs to policing. These limits drive relentless competition, foment resentment and ravage coalitions.<\/p>\n

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in \u201cNury Martinez\u2019s racism feeds into Black Angelenos\u2019 worst fear. It\u2019s us versus them<\/a>,\u201d Erika D. Smith, a Los Angeles Times columnist, describes the brutal realpolitik in the covertly recorded conversation I mentioned earlier, which included Nury Martinez, then the City Council president:<\/p>\n

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It wasn\u2019t just a forum for swapping the kind of racist remarks and \u2018jokes\u2019 you might hear at a Trump rally. It was ostensibly convened to talk about the redistricting of City Council seats that was happening at the time. But it very quickly veered into strategies for manipulating district maps to deprive Black people of political power and provide it to Latinos instead.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The controversy in Los Angeles raises a key question: Is the City Council debacle an exception or is it a warning sign that the bitter, if often submerged, battles involving intraparty competition \u2014 part of the package of tensions continually inflamed by Trump \u2014 will further endanger Democratic prospects this year and in 2024?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n