James Clyburn: ‘defund the police’ slogan may have hurt Democrats at polls

James Clyburn, the House majority whip and Democratic “kingmaker” who played an outsized role in Joe Biden’s successful presidential run, has said the “sloganeering” of the Black Lives Matter protests and other social justice efforts this summer might have hampered them at the polls.

Clyburn, a Black South Carolina congressman and prominent figure in the civil rights movement, likened the “defund the police” mantra of certain activists to civil rights efforts in the 1960s, when some public support for the movement’s objectives was eroded by radical messaging.

Clyburn invoked memories of John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died this year.

“I came out very publicly and very forcibly against sloganeering,” Clyburn said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “John Lewis and I were founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John and I sat on the House floor and talked about that defund the police slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what Burn, Baby, Burn did to us back in the 1960s,” Clyburn said.

Burn, Baby, Burn became a street slogan during the Watts civil unrest of 1965 in Los Angeles, at the time the largest and costliest uprising of the civil rights era.

“We lost that movement over that slogan,” he said.

He added: “We saw the same thing happening here. We can’t pick up these things just because it makes a good headline. It sometimes destroys headway.”

As an example, Clyburn cited the defeat of South Carolina US Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison, who ended up beaten comprehensively by the incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham in a race many had hoped he would win after he turned a longshot campaign into a real contest.

“Jaime Harrison started to plateau when ‘defund the police’ showed up with a caption on TV, ran across his head,” Clyburn said in a separate Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“That stuff hurt Jaime. And that’s why I spoke out against it a long time ago. I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort.”

Clyburn also attacked the Democratic party’s “progressive” left wing, members of which have already broken ranks and fired the first shots in a looming battle for the future political direction of the party.

“Sometimes I have real problems trying to figure out what progressive means,” he said.

Clyburn’s comments followed a salvo by left-wing rising star Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who has taken the opposite position, reflecting deep rifts in Biden’s victorious party as it prepares to reoccupy the presidency.

In a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, she warned that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose badly in the 2022 midterm elections.

The leftwing New York congresswoman sharply rejected the notion that progressive messaging around the summer’s anti-racism protests and more radical policies like the Green New Deal had led to the party’s loss of congressional seats. She said the party needed to play to its core base of supporters, not reach out to centrists, or soft Republicans.

“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is,” she said.

Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind.