The Daily 202: Will supporting reparations become a new litmus test for Democrats in 2020?

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Analysis

By James Hohmann
February 22 at 10:05 AM

THE BIG IDEA: Barack Obama opposed reparations for the descendants of slavery when he ran for president. He warned the NAACP in 2007 that they would be used as “an excuse for some to say we’ve paid our debt and to avoid the much harder work” of enforcing anti-discrimination laws, improving public education, rehabilitating young men coming out of prisons and lifting people out of poverty.

In 2016, neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders supported reparations for the black community as a redress for slavery. Even as he promised a revolution of democratic socialism that would include tuition-free college and Medicare-for-all, Sanders said paying reparations to African Americans was a bridge too far. “First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil,” he said. “Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.”

But this is not your father’s Democratic Party, and it’s not 2016 anymore.

Four declared Democratic presidential candidates have signaled support for some form of reparations to specifically benefit African Americans: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro and Marianne Williamson. This puts more pressure on the rest of the crowded field to endorse race-conscious policies and could provide fresh fodder for President Trump to portray his 2020 challengers as outside the mainstream.

In the modern political sense, the term “reparations” is a little like “socialism.” It means very different things to different people, and the devil is in the details. Many think of direct cash payments to African Americans when they hear the word. Others think more broadly of investments that are specifically made by the government to lift communities of color. What one person calls reparations someone else might just describe as strengthening the social safety net. The fact that candidates are willing to use the term at all after generations of Democratic standard-bearers have seemed allergic to it reflects a sea change.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/02/22/daily-202-will-supporting-reparations-become-a-new-litmus-test-for-democrats-in-2020/5c6edc261b326b71858c6c02/