Yesterday's Man. Branko Marcetic

America, had sung in 1978. “Some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in the street.” And other guys, it seemed, do citizen’s arrests and prosecute those guys.

      The incident was a powerful symbol for the direction Biden’s career would take from the 1980s onward as the twin issues of crime and drugs took a central role in his political persona. It captured the zeal with which Biden would prosecute the late twentieth-century “wars” against both, which quickly and seamlessly morphed into a war on the mostly nonwhite underclass of the United States.

      It’s practically impossible to divorce political issues in the United States from race. As everyone from newspaper reporters to sociologists would discover from the 1970s on, almost every hot-button topic in US politics, including education, welfare, and the size of government, was, in an era barely a few decades out from Jim Crow, deeply tied up with voters’ racial attitudes. It was something Ronald Reagan had capitalized on in a presidential campaign that darkly signaled to conservative white voters that he understood their frustration over minorities supposedly gaming the system to get ahead.³

      But perhaps no issues were more wrapped up in America’s fraught history with race than crime and drugs. By the time the 1960s were over, outright racism and support for Jim Crow had become out of bounds, and conservatives needed a way to keep capitalizing on white voters’ racist fears without coming across as defrocked Klansmen. The genuine rise in crime and drug use during the 1960s proved the most fertile ground. It is little wonder, then, that so many of Congress’s most-storied former segregationists so easily made the transition into tough-on-crime-and-drugs warriors after the 1960s.⁴