THE VIRGINIA ELECTIONS PART I: DEMISE OF THE DEMOCRATS? NOT SO FAST!

                                                             

A Republican victory in Virginia’s off-year elections (and a closer than expected win by incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy in New Jersey’s governor’s race) prompted a spate of media stories about the Democratic Party’s supposedly dismal

electoral prospects. Coupled with President Biden’s falling poll numbers, the loss by former Governor Terry McAuliffe to Glenn Youngkin and GOP gains in the Virginia legislature generated rampant speculation about Democratic prospects in the 2022 midterms and through 2024.  Some

pundits suggested it’s a foregone conclusion we’ll have a Republican Congress in 2023 and a Republican in the White House in January 2025.   We don’t subscribe to the hype, but we recognize the Virginia outcome merits discussion of where Democrats stand and what they must do so they can keep a sufficient numerical advantage.

The question takes on so much importance because

of our fractured political landscape. Republicans seem bent on destroying Democracy. Only the Democratic Party obstructs the way. It’s essential, therefore, to evaluate where Democrats stand with the electorate

and understand how the country maintains this precarious equilibrium and doesn’t buy into the Republican zero-sum game.

 

The Narrative

Virginia has trended increasingly Democratic in

recent years. Biden won the state 54-44 in 2020. George W. Bush, with a 53-45 victory over John Kerry in 2004, was the last Republican presidential candidate who won the state.  Both Virginia’s Democratic senators, 2016 vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine and Mark

Warner, easily won reelection the last time they ran (Kaine, 57-41 in 2018 and Warner, 56-44 in 2020). In 2017, in addition to the 53-45 gubernatorial victory of Ralph Northam, Democrats won majorities in both houses

of the Virginia legislature. A year later, they flipped control of the state’s congressional delegation. Because of these outcomes, the view of Virginia as a swing state eroded. Before the 2021 elections, many observers saw it as safe Democratic territory.

                                              

That prognosis, however, masked another truth

about Virginia. In its quirky odd-year races that follow election of a new president, the candidate of the party that lost the presidency usually wins the Virginia governor’s chair the next year. That happened when Northam won in 2017 following Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. After Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, the next year Republican Bob McDonald took the Virginia governor’s race. In 2001, after George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential triumph, Warner captured the Virginia governorship. Republican George Allen won in Virginia in 1993 after Bill Clinton took the White House in 1992. Democrat Doug Wilder, the state’s first black governor, won in 1989 after George H.W. Bush captured the 1988 presidential election.

Virginia’s voters apparently like this arrangement, since they’ve engineered it so often. Perhaps analysts need not look beyond the history books for an understanding of the 2021 outcome.    

 

The Other Explanations             

Despite the history, however, political observers offered other explanations for Youngkin’s win and McAuliffe’s defeat:

·    The fact House Democrats didn’t pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill before the election. They approved it a few days later, but Warner asserted McAuliffe might have won if he could have campaigned on the roads, bridges, and other improvements the state would receive under the bill.

·    The Critical Race Theory boogey man. Despite no evidence any Virginia school district teaches Critical Race Theory or anything like it, Youngkin capitalized on the concerns of white parents about what’s being taught about race in public schools. McAuliffe made things worse with a tone-deaf comment that he didn’t “believe parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

·    Biden’s performance as president. This explanation begins with the messy Afghanistan exit. McAuliffe tied himself closely to Biden. Some conservative commentators argued that as Biden’s poll numbers fell in the wake of the bad Afghanistan optics, McAuliffe suffered some of the fallout.

·    Economic anxiety. Even if the economy is doing reasonably well in bouncing back from the pandemic, fears about inflation have ramped up. Some thought that hurt McAuliffe as well.  

 

Virginia and Malcom Gladwell

We’ve taken note before of the work of social commentator Malcom Gladwell who observed in

his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, that one thing seldom causes an airplane crash. Instead, most air disasters result from a cascading series of events piled on top of each other. We think that also applies to political outcomes. Races one candidate should win but doesn’t – as happened with McAuliffe – usually have many explanations, not one.

Our list of what may have created the Virginia result probably isn’t all inclusive. Other things could have played a role.  But the cause is important in light of the question we began with: What does the Virginia outcome say about where the Democratic Party stands with the electorate as the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential cycle approach?

We adhere to Gladwell’s basic principle – one thing seldom causes a disaster. We point to the things we’ve listed and raise the possibility that winning

in 2022 and 2024 requires that Democrats look at the question in an entirely different way. While not ignoring the list of  possible reasons for the 2021 Virginia loss, perhaps Democrats should focus on the broader question of what policies they must offer that will insure their

standing with the electorate in the upcoming elections. Just on the politics, the Virginia outcome suggests Democrats are not now in a good place with voters. In our next post, we’ll offer suggestions about how they might rectify that situation. 

                                      

A DEEPER DIVE INTO THE N-WORD: DISTURBING HISTORY/TROUBLING PRESENT

In our last post we expressed the idea that perhaps today’s racists should abandon their fake civility and speak like they think and act. We noted thatcurrent day racists don’t regularly use the n-word in public, unlike their more obviously racist predecessors, who often did. The thought occurred to us that we should take a deeper dive into the history of this racial slur. Maybe we could explain there isn’t any difference between the fake civility of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson and 1960s era segregationists like Mississippi Senator Jim Eastland, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, and Alabama Governor George Wallace. The words differ, but the policies are the same – voter suppression, gerrymandering, and fearmongering that prevent the accumulation of black (and brown) political power and quash challenges to white supremacy.

 

‘The Atom Bomb of Racial Slurs’

In the O.J. Simpson trial, prosecutor Christopher Darden called the n-word “the filthiest, nastiest word in the English Language.” One British Member of Parliament (MP) termed it “the most offensive word in English.”  Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy dubbed it the “atomic bomb of racial slurs” because “if you want to put somebody down, analogize them to the [n-word].”  These characterizations of the n-word haven’t stopped its use in contemporary society, on either side of the Atlantic.

Just in 2017, Diane Abbott, a Labor Party MP of African descent, described being repeatedly referred to by the n-word on social media and in e-mails from members of the public.  In the United States in 2016 a Charlotte, North Carolina television journalist was reporting on a hurricane when a man walked by and dropped the n-word on him. Donald Trump’s election as president spurred numerous accounts of racial slurs, including the n-word, being hurled at public school students.

 

History

Where did the n-word come from and how did it become the slur it’s now recognized as?  Scholars seemingly agree that the word originated around 1619 with the arrival of the first African slaves in what’s now the United States. The slaves were referred to by the Spanish and Portuguese term for “black.” The word—N-I-G-G-U-H-S—for a time was seen as merely descriptive, but before long it became derogatory. By the 1820s and 1830s, white people had begun using it as a way of admonishing children not to engage in certain behavior. It became a widely recognized epithet aimed at making black people feel inferior and unworthy. As one British professor observed, “It’s really tied into the idea that African people aren’t really human beings.”

 

Substitutes

It’s clear that much of the public now won’t stand

for use  of the n-word. The BBC, for example, received over 18,600 complaints about a July 2020 story that included the word in an account of a racially aggravated attack. Scrubbing the word from accepted public discourse, however, hasn’t prevented racists from getting their racial message across. Consider:

•       In 2014 then-National Football League star Richard Sherman noted that he’d been called a “thug” and “ghetto” for a rant he went on about events in an NFL game.  Sherman said such terms had become “the accepted way of calling somebody the n-word.”

•       Beginning in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, code words like “welfare queen” in essence became a surrogate for the n-word as conservative political figures put a black face on abuse of public assistance programs.

•       “States’ rights” was a favorite term of southern politicians in the ‘60s in opposing civil rights measures. Reagan gave that term new life by opening his 1980 general election campaign in Mississippi in the same county where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The n-word wasn’t used in his speech, but it was an undercurrent of his message.

•       Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, saved his 1988 presidential campaign with the infamous Willie Horton ad that put a black face on crime. The ad didn’t use the n-word, but it wasn’t needed. His base got the message.     

Former NBA star Charles Barkley was once quoted as saying many people “don’t have enough courage to say the n-word, so they say things like ‘thug’ or ‘street cred.’” Even if Barkley is controversial as a social commentator, he’s not wrong about this.  Many people won’t say the n-word in public, but their policy preferences get the message across.

We’d prefer a world in which people didn’t use the n-word. What we really prefer is a world in which

people  didn’t think the thoughts that lead to the n-word.  In advocating an end to false civility and for honesty about the n-word, we’re really suggesting that what we’d like to know is where people stand. If they won’t stand with us in opposition to racial oppression, we prefer seeing who they are and understanding how they think.  As we said before, talk like you think and act. It was clear to everyone what racists believed and meant when they used the n-word.  That had the benefit of letting the rest of us identify them.

AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS: DEMOCRACY, THE N-WORD, AND THE NEED FOR ALLIES

 

We see a new iteration of the n-word at the forefront of our current political discourse.  For

anyone who leans progressive, as each of us does to varying degrees, the last few weeks haven’t been pleasant. We’ve seen plenty worthy of being unhappy about recently:

·    An unending campaign in some states that would take us backward on electoral fairness
through voter suppression laws and redistricting plans that threaten (perhaps assure) permanent Republican rule despite demographic change that should swing legislative representation toward Democrats.

·  The dwindling stature of the Biden presidency, burdened as it is by falling poll numbers and bickering among Congressional Democrats that imperils his domestic agenda and the party’s prospects in the 2022 midterms.

·    Relative public indifference to Republican obstruction of a full-fledged investigation into
the January 6 attack on the Capitol, amid hints the Biden Justice Department may go easy on some insurrectionists out of a misguided fear of further radicalizing them; and

·    Misogyny, racism, and homophobia at high levels of the nation’s most popular professional sport.

Given this list, we almost find ourselves asking, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theater?”

Historical Parallels

We acknowledge the nation has found itself in such a dark place before. About the tumult of 1968, journalist David Halberstam wrote that he  saw thecountry on the “verge of a national nervous breakdown” because of Vietnam and racial turmoil. Perhaps we’re not there now, but disarray abounds. Many supporters of former President Donald Trump appear willing to abandon democratic norms and institutions so he can wield power again.  

After Barack Obama’s 2008 victor some saw the ugliest of our racial conflict as behind us, a feeling that was clearly premature. Even six years ago, before Trump’s rise, many wouldn’t have believed the acquiescence of mainstream Republicans to this abandonment of democracy. 

We don’t know where this is going. The 1960s

precedents may or may not apply. After the civil rights marches Congress passed laws that improved the legal, social, and economic lives

of people of color. Yet, we have today’s political polarization, much of it rooted in racial division.

We moved in a different direction in foreign policy,

or appeared to for a while. Still, despite our Vietnam experience, we fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan from which we’ve only now extricated ourselves, complete with messy consequences for the current administration. We can’t say this will all come out right.

The Race Thing

We find nothing so disconcerting as the direction in which we seem headed on race. Barack Obama got

elected president. Kamala Harris got elected vice president. Those are positives, but look at what’s happening on the other side of the ledger.

Across the nation angry white parents attack school boards and teachers in seeking assurance their children will never learn, at least in school, the country’s terrible racial history. They’ve

found a convenient whipping boy by distorting an obscure old academic approach to race discrimination called Critical Race Theory and made it a boogey man that has become the basis for whitewashing America’s past. Meanwhile, in some states Republican legislators demand that their black and brown colleagues (and white ones so inclined) never refer to racism in legislative debates, even if a third grader could see the racist intent in voter suppression proposals and gerrymandered redistricting plans.

These Republican legislators and their right wing media comrades squeal long and loud if anyone calls out their behavior. Me, a racist? How dare you! We suggest they read Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to talk about Racism. She could have subtitled the book Why So Many White People Refuse to Talk About Racism.

                                

We’ve wondered what difference really exists

between these modern deniers of racism and their Jim Crow predecessors. It’s true, they don’t regularly use the n-word in public. At least we knew where old time segregationists stood, men like Jim Eastland and Ross Barnett, many of whom used the n-word in public. Former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden didn’t in his now famous

e-mails, but the message was the same. Wouldn’t we live in a more honest, transparent society if descendants of the segregationists—the Grudens, the Greg Abbots, the Brian Kemps – discarded the fake civility and talked like they feel and act?

Not Devoid of Hope

Woodson tells of a white friend who told him the story of a young man of color – a fifth or sixth grader – with whom at school he developed a close friendship as a youngster. One day, no one could find the young black man.  His friend discovered him crying in a restroom because someone called him by the n-word. He’d been taught that if he lived righteously and played by the rules people would accept him.

The incident demonstrated that wasn’t always the case, seemingly yet another reason for despair. The

white student, now an adult, said 

that was when he first realized his black friend’s life experiences differed radically from his own. Now, as an adult, this white man attends a multi-ethnic church and has committed himself to racial justice. 

The story illustrates that bad people inhabit the world and we must face them individually and

collectively. It also shows we can find hope when we find allies. Fellow travelers abound. Kindred spirits of all colors inhabit the world. They don’t hide behind false civility and will engage in good faith discussion and debate. Henry reminds us that in the past we’ve always had enough people who believed in this vision that we could keep it alive. Do we have enough now? We shall see.