Framing the recent electoral success of moderate Democrats as somehow a general referendum against progressives—fundamentally misstates the issue.
Conceivably, this melange of institutions could be run in a coherent way, but we fracture political and budgetary responsibility so that any real cohesion across all these groups is essentially impossible. In other words, much of the moderate-progressive schism isn’t over “criminal legal reform” writ large, but rather reflects that the term homogenizes a complex set of systems, one where people hold different views about the different pieces.
For example, over the 2010s, a tenuous bipartisan consensus formed for scaling back prison populations, at least for non-violent crimes ; it’s likely that this consensus still persists, even in the wake of all the upheavals of 2020. And this is an issue that progressive prosecutors are well-situated to address.But there has always been much less of a clear desire for reducing policing, especially for white voters.
, which chronicles Washington, D.C. from the 1970s-1990s and the demand for tough-on-crime policing from the majority-Black city council. While the council’s Black members were aware of the costs of policing, they also understood they needed the police today to get the guy with the gun off the street corner today.