Karen Bass’s “Move Toward Pragmatism”

In 1990, Bass made a deal with the devil — more specifically, the federal government of the George H. W. Bush administration. In her words: “I did something I never thought I would do — I went after government funds to do organizing.” Experienced at that time with opposing the United States government and its foreign policy as an activist involved in international solidarity movements — including, for example, participating in solidarity brigades to Cuba — Bass traded in her former radicalism for a more pragmatic approach to the crisis of poverty and crack cocaine that was afflicting South Central Los Angeles.

“I was very frustrated with the progressive movement,” Bass later recalled. “The progressive movement was saying that we needed to end capitalism,” but had “nothing to offer communities of color and inner-city areas.” Her nonprofit organization would be different. With $1.5 million in federal funding, the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment — more commonly referred to as “Community Coalition,” or “CoCo” for short — opened its doors.

CoCo soon developed what would become its signature campaign: closing down liquor stores in the community, which was massively oversaturated with alcohol retailers compared to other parts of the city. This work rapidly intensified after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which 224 liquor stores were damaged or destroyed. By August of that year, a petition to “Rebuild South Central Without Liquor Stores” gathered over thirty-five thousand signatures, leading the city to enact a requirement forcing liquor stores to engage in protracted public hearings before being allowed to rebuild. Due to this and other related efforts, CoCo ultimately took credit for preventing 150 such stores from reopening, and Bass was catapulted to being a major figure in the policy and organizing world.

While prominent urban theorists such as the University of Southern California’s Manuel Pastor and the University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA) Ed Soja have lavished praise on the constellation of progressive-leaning organizations to which Bass and CoCo belonged, the shortcomings and contradictions of that era’s organizing have only rarely been considered. Historian Donna Murch is one scholar who has recently done so, pointing specifically to Bass’s work with the Community Coalition as the representative example of the “neoliberal-era nonprofit organizing model” that has come to dominate progressive politics in the city in the place of more radical, mass-based organizations.

Taking a closer look, one could be forgiven for accusing Bass of trying to rewrite this history. While she recently framed her early work at the coalition to the LA Times as being centered on opposing the practices of the notoriously racist then chief of police, Daryl Gates, the reality was that the organization’s focus on the nuisance posed by liquor stores often led to formal or informal coordination with Gates’s Los Angeles Police Department.

A central tactic CoCo utilized to prevent liquor stores from reopening was mobilizing opposition at the public hearings these establishments were required to navigate in order to rebuild. This brought the coalition into what Bass herself referred to as a “tactical alliance” with the police: as one scholar noted, “Police officers often backed up the coalition’s arguments,” with members of the vice squad pushing the same talking points as the community members turned out by CoCo. According to Kyeyoung Park, a professor at UCLA, “The Coalition’s emphasis on social order built support among some conservatives, including some members of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Bass herself explicitly championed punitive efforts by the LAPD, praising, for example, what was described as a “police crackdown” on loitering and public drinking in late 1992. Such an alliance was not merely a fleeting tactic in the immediate aftermath of the riots: in 1996, she participated in a press conference with the LAPD to celebrate another “liquor crackdown” that had resulted in the arrests of nearly two hundred people in South Central in its first six months.

CoCo’s emphasis on liquor stores and vice pushed a very limited vision of what was necessary to solve the poverty and alienation that had sparked the riots. Although Bass had previously articulated a more structural analysis of the community’s problems, by 1992 this had all but disappeared in favor of a single-issue focus. In an opinion piece she published in the LA Times that year, she argued that — rather than joblessness and underdevelopment — the prime evil to be combated in the city was the environment of “gambling, theft, drug sales and violent assaults” created by liquor stores; her demand was for the city to take “bold steps” and prevent these establishments from reopening.

A close look at Bass’s early career, then, helps us better understand what Bass has recently described as her “move toward pragmatism”: a move away from ambitious working-class politics and attempts to address the deeper roots of the city’s biggest problems. Yet Bass has elevated this word to a career-defining virtue. Indeed, it is difficult to find a profile or endorsement of Bass that does not highlight her “pragmatism.”

A Centrist Alternative

To be sure, crime and substance use are major problems in many working-class neighborhoods, which residents themselves are often very concerned about. But the centrist, police-driven solutions to which Bass has increasingly gravitated don’t get at the deep causes of crime in economic deprivation and social alienation.

The political aftermath of the 1992 rebellion in the public-housing complexes of Watts looked quite different from Bass’s liquor-store campaign. There young residents moved from formalizing an effective and lasting gang truce to pushing for aggressive redistribution of the city’s wealth. A remarkable document titled “Bloods / Crips Proposal for LA’s Face-Lift” circulated publicly, calling for $3.7 billion in public investments for demands such as ​​public ownership of damaged and abandoned lots; health care and childcare for all; and more community control over the police. “Give us the hammer and the nails, we will rebuild the city,” the plan concluded.

As the gang movement was quickly repressed — its “unity picnics” violently raided and its leading organizers thrown in jail — Bass and CoCo thrived. Bass’s organizing in the 1990s laid the groundwork for her successful run for California State Assembly in 2004, then US Congress in 2011. CoCo has grown steadily, currently boasting a staff of nearly forty employees, and successfully launching the political career of another one of its former executive directors, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who since 2015 has served on LA’s city council and now appears slated to become the next council president.

This history in Watts is not just interesting LA lore; it provides crucial context for understanding Bass’s organizing past. Bass’s rise in mainstream politics has been based on her ability to provide wealthy LA residents and business owners a palatable alternative to organizing rooted in the poorest and most oppressed groups in the city. To paraphrase the historian Gerald Horne, writing about a similar dynamic in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots in which capitalists flooded the neighborhood with funding for their preferred programs: “Just as the Left was being pummeled, the center was being boosted.”

Bass has been a proponent of certain popular left-wing causes in the past, cosponsoring bills in Congress in support of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, for instance. Yet her moves to the right as mayor on issues such as housing and policing, happening in a solidly blue city in a solidly blue state, illustrate the limits of mainstream Democratic Party politics.

Claiming the mantle of the progressive left while acting to reinforce the center: this is the key to Karen Bass’s mode of politics, which has endowed her with an impressive ability to co-opt progressive goals and language toward reactionary ends — her “Inside Safe” program being perhaps the best example. As even Pastor, a scholar with ties to social movements who remains close to Bass, recently told the LA Times, “I think she’s gotten more grace than other political figures might get.”

Bass’s mayoralty ought to serve as a warning to the Left about the type of nonprofit organizing she started practicing in the 1990s. What Mike Davis said in the preface to the 2006 edition of his classic book City of Quartz rings out more urgently than ever: “Los Angeles needs, in short, a more, not less, ideological politics.”