The power and limits of protests and collective action
The power of activism, protests and collective action
The mass of people in Louisville who protested in 2020 helped lead to three different outcomes: Breonna Taylor’s family receiving a $12 million settlement from the city; a federal investigation that resulted in charges against four of the officers involved in the raid that resulted in Taylor’s killing; a broader federal investigation that essentially validated the protesters’ criticisms of the city’s police and officials.
It is hard to imagine all of that happens without the months of protests in the summer of 2020.
More recently and on a smaller scale, a group of tenants, aided by the broader Louisville Tenants Union, organized a campaign that convinced local officials to bar the Collegiate School from tearing down some apartments on property owned by the school. This was quite a political victory—a group of tenants defeated a school with ties to some of the city’s most powerful people. (Here’s an in-depth recent article on the tenants union.)
People ask me often what to do about say DeSantis, Trump, radical Republican politicians, abusive police departments, and Democratic politicians who use the word equity a lot but align with the police, big corporations and the powerful whenever it really matters.
Protests and collective action are necessary for change. But they are still often not sufficient. Kentucky legislators heard for three months how bad and unnecessary their anti-trans proposals were—and passed them anyway.
It really was that bad
The just-finished legislative session featured lots of terrible bills that seemed intended more to troll Louisville, Democrats around the state and Gov. Beshear than actually address major issues. The Medicaid benefits rollback and the anti-trans legislation were particularly egregious. (The tax policies were not as mean-spirited but also bad.)
Sadly, this is the governing approach of Republican officials in red states across the country, as I described in one of my recent Washington Post pieces. Stivers, Osboure and Co. are being outdone by the Republican lawmakers in Tennessee, who really, really hate Nashville.
The session and the campaign
Policy and elections are of course connected. But I am not sure much of what happened January-March will affect the November elections.
At the start of the year, Daniel Cameron was in a great position to win the Republican nomination for governor because he
1. Has already been elected attorney general;
2. Is a prominent black politician in a party eager to shed its reputation for being racist;
3. Is endorsed by Donald Trump;
4. Didn’t file charges or sharply criticize the police in the wake of Taylor’s killing. (Republican primary voters are very pro-police and anti-Black Lives Matter.); and
5. Has high name recognition (in part because of 1-4.)
Cameron has had a substantial lead in most of the polls of the Republican field. But there haven’t been many recent polls. So the big unknown is whether all of Kelly Craft’s tv ads have boosted her much. The Republican primary is on May 16.
At the start of the year, it seemed Gov. Beshear had a strong chance of winning reelection but was not a shoo-in. That still seems true as well. I doubt the legislative session dramatically changed voters’ perceptions of him. He is pretty popular but this is a very Republican-leaning state. It’s hard to see him getting above 55 percent of the vote or less than 45 percent. It’s easy to see a very, very close race like in 2019.
I think this is a super important election. Because the legislature has a huge Republican majority, Beshear has very limited power. So for three months each year, terrible bills pass, he vetoes them, those vetoes are overridden. But if Cameron or another Republican becomes governor, I assume it would be three months of terrible bills and then nine months of terrible actions by the executive branch. Oy.
The DOJ report
I highly recommend that you print out and read the 90-page report about policing in Louisville that the U.S. Department of Justice released earlier this month. I didn’t finish it in one sitting—some of the details are really horrible and made me want to stop reading. But it’s an important document about the state of Louisville in 2023.
The report tells one story that sadly is common both in the United States and even abroad: police treating the “minority” group in a given area worse than others. But the report also depicts the Louisville police at times treating white people quite badly too. It details non-police issues that harm black Louisville residents. Finally, it features a number of instances of activists, black residents and/or Louisville news outlets highlighting police abuses and then being ignored by city and police leaders.
Somewhat related, I am glad to see that the Metro Council is pushing back on Mayor Greenberg’s plans to use money intended to reform policing in Louisville to fund a new wellness center for officers. Chicago mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson has the kind of ideas on public safety I would love to see tried here.
The Kentucky Lantern
The Lantern is a new non-profit outlet covering Kentucky, with a focus on state government. They don’t have a paywall. They do have a regular newsletter that is excellent. You should definitely read this Lantern article by Sarah Ladd on Ray Loux, a 16-year-old transgender boy who lives in Lexington.
An interesting factoid
The New York Times has around 10 million paid subscribers in a nation of about 330 million people. So about 3 percent of Americans are paid subscribers. (It’s likely some of those subscribers live in Paris but you get the idea.) Nieman Lab recently put out an analysis that suggested about 40,000 people in Louisville are paid subscribers to the Courier-Journal. That’s around 3 percent of people in the Louisville metro area.