Why would any Democrat accept strategic advice from Victor Davis Hanson, a commentator whose political proclivities are no secret? His lionizing of The Cryptofascist in Chief has been unflagging and he in no wise wishes the left well. Perhaps his motive, should his favored result not materialize, is to mitigate the damage by pushing the Democratic ticket rightward. It’s political advice worthy of a Never Trumper, which Mr. Hanson is not. It’s also an absurdity. The Richmond Times-Dispatch didn’t print my response.
Victor Davis Hanson, “As in 1944, the Democratic Running Mate Seems Pivotal,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 May 2020, A15 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/victor-davis-hanson-column-as-in-1944-democratic-running-mate-selection-seems-pivotal/article_d169b479-9ee6-594f-920e-3d591b694eef.html).
Victor Davis Hanson’s feigning of concern for the impact of Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick upon his electoral prospects conceals neither Hanson’s defective drawing of historical analogies nor his continuing demonization any politician a scintilla left of center. No rational Democrat should accept political counsel from an apologist for President Trump. A far better historical parallel for the current moment is not the 1944 election, when Henry Wallace gave way to Harry Truman as FDR’s running mate, but the 1932 election that brought Roosevelt to power.
Mired in the Great Depression, a disillusioned electorate faced a stark choice: A GOP candidate, whatever his virtues, who subscribed to an outmoded philosophy of governance providing the people no succor and who implied that putting on a happy face would somehow dissipate the crisis, versus an empathetic Roosevelt, who pledged to move the levers of power to alleviate misery.
Hanson, moreover, breeds confusion through misleading political labeling. He has long equated “social democracy” with “socialism” and “socialism” in turn with “communism,” despite their manifest differences. He now tosses “progressivism” into his nomenclature cauldron to concoct a verbal witches’ brew intended to frighten political naifs.
What concerns fuel Hanson’s historical and political misapprehensions? Has the coronavirus too tellingly stripped bare fissures in the American social compact and vindicated the progressive social critique? Is the so-called Overton window – the spectrum of acceptable political discourse – opening too widely to be readily slammed shut again? Might a progressive running mate prove the Democratic Party the big tent it purports itself to be and further endanger the president’s electoral fortunes? Could it be the that the voters will not recoil from a progressive but embrace one? Hanson’s motives aside, the anointing of a milquetoast centrist will serve neither the Democratic Party’s nor the nation’s interest at this juncture.
As the spring 2020 semester lurched toward its online denouement, it was difficult not to think about the world that year’s graduating class would be confronting. The coronavirus, despite Donald the Obfuscator’s assurances, was not going away, the economy was in freefall, and uncertainty reigned. The closest recent analogue to these students’ circumstance was the class of 2009, the group whose prospects had been buffeted by the Great Recession. The class of 2020 faced a highly contagious, deadly disease and a depression-level economic dislocation. Nothing like that had ever happened to me; however, my grandparents had endured the Great Depression and there was perhaps a lesson to be had from their – especially my grandfather’s – experience.
I wrote a brief essay. It’s the most personal item on the blog. It was too long for an editorial, so the question was where to send it or even whether to send it. I contacted the editor of The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise and give him right of first refusal since the essay dealt with someone from the region. Radio silence ensued, so I withdrew it and sent it to Style Weekly. I should have gone there first. Style Weekly is Richmond’s alternative newspaper. It is a boon to the city that it survives online and especially in print when so many, like The Boston Phoenix and The Providence Phoenix, have folded. It’s been staple reading for me since The Better Half and I settled here.
“Lessons in Sacrifice,” Style Weekly, 20 May 2020, 11 (www.styleweekly.com/richmond/lessons-in-sacrifice/Content?oid=16027130).
Through March 2020 and into April, as the coronavirus spread, hospitalizations surged, and the death toll climbed, the fear it engendered grew as well. To this point, everything I had submitted to a newspaper or magazine had been written from the perspective of a concerned citizen with no special expertise. As it became evident that the coronavirus would be no fleeting event, expertise came into play. I knew a bit about the Black Death, the mother of all pandemics. If a comparison between the plague and the coronavirus might lend people perspective and allay their concerns in a small way, it seemed worth doing. I wrote an editorial-length juxtaposition of the two diseases. Although I was reluctant to mention an academic qualification – it’s the opposite of persuasive for some readers – it was relevant, so I included it. An effort was made to keep the tone non-partisan. I dispatched the thing to The Richmond Times-Dispatch and soon heard back from one of its opinion page editors. It would run in the Sunday edition. My exchange with the editor was pleasant. I had to provide a head shot. That didn’t thrill me, but The Better Half did as well as she could with the material given her.
“Coronavirus and the Black Death,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 April 2020, D1, D3 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-routt-column-coronavirus-and-the-black-death/article_c3f6f286-6efb-5ea4-86db-253d825cb5b0.html).
This letter was written at a watershed moment, the dividing line between the beforetimes and the way most of us, indeed nearly all of us, have lived for more than a year as we wait for the aftertimes and wonder how different they will be, for good or ill, from the beforetimes. Every meaningful moment has a context, whether personal or collective. This one had both sorts of backdrop.
In autumn 2019 I committed myself to teaching Norman and Plantagenet England at the University of Richmond. Since it didn’t require extensive new preparation and represented found money, it seemed like the thing to do. The return to the classroom was not jarring and the students were above par, so it was pleasant enough. However, a specter shadowed the semester. News of a dangerous virus in China made the rounds and parts of China were placed under a lockdown so draconian that – I was convinced – its like would never be tolerated in America.
I was not overly concerned about the coronavirus. The US had suppressed potential pandemics, such as the 2014 Ebola scare, effectively enough. I may have contracted the swine flu (H1N1) during summer 2009 and, though no walk in the park, I survived. Beyond this, my sense of scale regarding the brutality of pandemics may have been distorted by overfamiliarity with the Black Death. My principal concern was for a Chinese student in the course. She was quiet, unfailingly polite, and only mildly at sea. I think she was from the Wuhan region and ugliness directed at Asian students was being reported.
Despite this background noise, the early weeks of the semester went smoothly. As spring break approached, the great turn came. The Better Half and I had long planned to visit family, for her a trip to the Left Coast, for me the biannual trek to the Bluegrass. As the break neared and reports about the virus grew more alarming, we discussed the merits of taking our respective journeys and concluded that it remained safe enough and that there might not be another opportunity to see people for a while.
She Who Must Be Obeyed departed a day or so before I did. I taught my final class on Thursday, 5 March, raced home, retrieved a rental car, and aimed it westward. As per custom, I spent a night in Lexington but, instead of staying downtown, I’d booked a room at a Candlewood Suites on the periphery, partly to save bucks, partly because The Boss and I had spent five months in a Candlewood in Richmond during The Great Radiator Incident of 2018. I drove to Elizabethtown the next morning and learned that the Commonwealth’s first confirmed case of the virus had been detected in Lexington while I was there. Wonderful.
This established the tone for my sojourn in The True Land of Lincoln. The information regarding coronavirus became more and more disturbing and The Chief Non-Executive’s statements and behavior increasingly unhinged. I was sent on a mission by The Better Half for supplies. The rental car’s trunk car was filled with toilet paper, paper towels, antibacterial wipes, pasta, and canned and jarred food. The peculiar reality, even in this early phase of the coronavirus, was that neither hand sanitizer nor rubbing alcohol sat on any pharmacy shelf. Had the aspiring eBay profiteer – the enterprising yet sociopathic gentleman from Chattanooga who purchased every bottle of hand sanitizer in every small town he could reach, including some in Kentucky – struck Elizabethtown? Need it be mentioned that bottles of bourbon found their way into the trunk as well? Yes, it need be mentioned.
The Mistress of the House returned to Richmond the day before I did. I arrived just in time to hear The Clueless One’s 11 March address to the nation.
For The Better Half and me, 11 March marked the beginning of living a different way. It had nothing to do with Donald the Unserious’s speech from the Oval Office. He’s an untrustworthy source, though his acknowledgment of a problem was revealing. A myriad of credible sources made it clear that rough skating was on the horizon.
There was no return to the classroom. The University of Richmond extended spring break for a week to ease the scramble of shifting from in-person to online instruction. Since I was responsible for one course and didn’t know when or whether I would be teaching again, my minimalist solution was to place videotaped lectures online and conduct discussion through electronic message boards.
The Precious One and I entered a personal lockdown in which our house became our realm and we ventured outside no more than necessary. We were among the privileged who could live that way during what became a full-blown pandemic. We waited it out until a vaccine was developed. So many others didn’t enjoy that luxury.
While I was in the Bluegrass, The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise ran a column by Martin Schram, a Tribune News Service guy, that assailed the cost of Bernie Sanders’ flavor of Medicare for All. It struck me as both factually challenged and wrongheaded, so a letter was sent. It appeared in print on 12 March, the day the new regime began for us.
Martin Schram, “It’s Time to Look at Figures Behind Talk,” The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, 8 March 2020, A6; “Let the Voters Eat Pie Charts!” The Grand Island (Nebraska) Independent, 9 March 2020 (https://subscriber.thenewsenterprise.com/content/news-enterprise-03082020). The above link leads to the e-edition of article in The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise. Access to this is likely limited by the newspaper’s paywall. If the paper posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The following link is to the version that appeared in The Grand Island (Nebraska) Independent (https://theindependent.com/opinion/columnists/let-the-voters-eat-pie-charts/article_87954042-5ffb-11ea-a512-f3617f84ed71.html).
“Analysis Offers Limited Look at Figures,” The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, 12 March 2020, A6 (www.thenewsenterprise.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-to-the-editor-march-12-2020/article_2105db42-b1f8-5e8d-b1ea-1f07face731f.html).
This is another crack at an editorial that never took off. I was teaching Norman and Plantagenet England at the University of Richmond and the Plantagenet portion spoke to me in a way it hadn’t theretofore. President Supersize Me was much on my mind because of his “acquittal” in the impeachment trial early in February 2020. Henry III of England seemed a little “Trumpy” to me in ways big and small; moreover, the sense of limited executive authority as understood by Simon de Montfort and the rebelling barons, to say nothing of their courage and commitment to their cause, offered a counterpoint to the behavior of the national GOP, a contrast further sharpened by subsequent events.
I put a thing together and sent it to a couple of outlets (The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot), who passed on it but were nice about it.
A Medieval Presidency?
2020 seems to have completed President Trump’s seduction of the Republican Party. The unwillingness of GOP senators and representatives to rebuke Trump in the impeachment process for disregarding rule of law, violation of constitutional principles, and flouting of political norms was telling. Now congressional Republicans largely stand aside while the president removes inspectors general, interferes in judicial processes, smears his predecessor with baseless conspiracy theories, and employs the military against peaceful protestors.
A cottage industry devoted to finding historical analogies for Trump’s misbehavior has emerged. Does he belong with the twentieth century’s totalitarian despots or does his clownishness place him alongside tin-pot dictators of banana republics? Or is he a throwback to the Ur-tyrant of the American mind, England’s George III?
One of George’s medieval predecessors may be a more apposite historical precursor. Henry III (r. 1216-72) was the successor to John of Magna Carta fame and father of Edward I, the Longshanks, the opponent of Braveheart’s William Wallace. Henry had exaggerated personal qualities. He loved sumptuous living and was enchanted by construction projects. He built castles and palaces and rebuilt and enlarged Westminster Abbey, all the while fussing over furnishings. He judged character poorly and surrounded himself with foreign favorites, to his English barons’ displeasure. He took advice only from a small, intimate circle except when he dispensed even with this and made decisions unilaterally. His autocratic tendencies were barely concealed.
His arbitrariness and profligacy reached a crisis when he agreed to purchase the kingdom of Sicily for his younger son. Unable to raise enough money, he asked his barons for an extraordinary tax. This request engendered baronial resistance led by his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. The barons compelled Henry to accede under oath – a grave commitment in the medieval mind – to the Provisions of Oxford (1258). Henry was obliged to consult a council of barons on state matters and to “parlay” three times a year with a larger council in a “parliament.” The immediate crisis passed, Henry voided his promise and left his opponents with little choice but to submit or fight. The barons bested Henry at Lewes (1264). Henry and his son Edward were captured, the latter made hostage to ensure the king’s good behavior. Simon and the barons became England’s de facto rulers for fifteen months.
Political poems reflecting the baronial viewpoint appeared, the most famous perhaps “The Song of Lewes.” The “Song” underscores how a king must govern for the community’s benefit and honor the rule of law: “We give first place to the community; we say also that the law rules over the king’s dignity; for we believe that the law is the light, without which. . .he who rules will wander from the right path. . .” The poem’s broader community was the king’s natural counsellor: “Therefore let the community of the kingdom advise; let it be known what the generality [of the people] thinks to whom their own laws are best known.” Indeed, the leader’s submission to the law would not weaken but ennoble him: “And this constraint [of a free law] is not one of slavery but is rather an enlarging of the kingly faculty. . .” The “Song” emphasizes where the ruler’s focus should be: “And let the king never set his private interest before that of the community. . .” “He who does not know how to rule himself will be a bad ruler over others. . .” The “Song” leaves a disquieting impression: The barons, many of them little more than semi-literate armed thugs, surpassed the Solons of today’s GOP in understanding rule of law and separation and balance of powers.
The story has a coda. Edward broke his confinement, rallied his father’s supporters, and defeated the barons at Evesham (1265). Simon died in battle and his corpse was hewn to pieces. For the earl’s supporters, his remains became sanctified and the field where he perished hallowed ground. Miracle-stories spread. Henry could not abide this and in the Dictum of Kenilworth (1265) mandated that “[t]he injurious damnable acts of Simon and his accomplices. . .are nullified and have no force” and that “the vain and fatuous miracles told of him by others shall not at any time pass any lips. And that the king shall agree strictly to forbid this under pain of corporal punishment.” Simon’s rectitude, courage, and commitment to good governance were “fake news” to be suppressed. Henry had learned no lesson, though at least the barons had tried to instruct him. Would that the same could be said of today’s GOP. The Republican Party seems capable only of narrowly transactional impulses. Its abdication of its responsibility to the community leaves that community of voters to restrain Trump by every legal means and to ensure his departure from office.
[1] “The Song of Lewes,” in E. Amt (ed.), Medieval England 1000-1500: A Reader (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 253-61.
[2] “The Miracles of Simon de Montfort,” in E. Amt and K. Allen Smith (eds), Medieval England 500-1500: A Reader, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 248-50. “Dictum of Kenilworth 1265,” The National Archives (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magna-carta/dictum-of-kenilworth/ [accessed 16 February 2020]).
I continued my survey of the Bluegrass’s print journalism in late September 2019. The Ukraine story was developing by the hour and dominated cable news. The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, a regional daily, approached the story unconventionally. By picking up an Associated Press story by Dmytro Vlasov and presenting no other coverage, the only news its readers received was that the Ukrainian president was miffed by the release of the written record of his conversation with President CrowdStrike. The accumulating substance of the affair wasn’t mentioned. Welcome to the “news” in Red State America, I suppose. To The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise’s credit, it printed my critique of its news judgement.
Dmytro Vlasov, “Ukrainian Leader Bristles at Release of Trump Transcript,” The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, 27 September 2019, A6; Associated Press, 26 September 2019 (https://subscriber.thenewsenterprise.com/node/426409/, ). The above link leads to the e-edition of article in The (Elizabethtown) News Enterprise. Access to this is likely limited by the newspaper’s paywall. If the paper posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The following link is to the Associated Press’s online version (https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-international-news-joe-biden-politics-6454968c0e3642b59ffbece30abeefd4).
“Questions Selection of Ukrainian Story,” The (Elizabethtown) News-Enterprise, 7 October 2019, A6 (www.thenewsenterprise.com/opinon/letters_to_editor/letters-to-the-editor-oct/article_0ef65466-8050-5176-8371-7cb1944d53f4.html).
By the time I departed for the biannual hajj to the Bluegrass, The Gaslighter in Chief’s conduct had become so egregious that Nancy Pelosi could no longer temporize on doing something about it. I had my customary I-64 sleepover in Lexington and bought a copy of The Lexington Herald-Leader. The paper had picked up The New York Times’ reporting by Nicholas Fandos on the speaker’s announcement of the opening of an impeachment inquiry regarding President Perfect Conservation’s alleged shakedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. I did a riff on Representative Adam Schiff’s soliloquy regarding what is “okay.” The Lexington Herald-Leader was not sufficiently amused to print it.
Nicholas Fandos, “House Opens Impeachment Inquiry of President Trump,” The Lexington Herald-Leader, 25 September 2019, 1A, 2A (www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/democrats-impeachment-trump.html). If Lexington Herald-Leader posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version that appeared the The New York Times.
This past week’s torrent of events demands an updating of Representative Adam Schiff’s litany of questions to his colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee on 28 March. The GOP members of the House and Senate should ask themselves whether it is okay that a president’s personal attorney dabble in foreign affairs outside of official channels. Is it okay that a president pressure a foreign head of state to gather and perhaps even to concoct damaging information on a domestic political opponent? Is it okay that a president, whether tacitly or explicitly, dangle the provision of congressionally appropriated assistance as a carrot or the withholding of it as a stick to compel the head of state to bow to his wishes? Is it okay that a White House flout the whistleblower statutes and stonewall Congress in its performance of responsible oversight of the executive branch? Would any of this be okay if done by any Democratic president or White House, past or future? The nation waits and watches. It is a sad reality that the GOP’s answer may already be easily enough guessed.
Is it any surprise that Victor Davis Hanson, as a personal project, endeavors to perpetuate a hoary conservative fable: Socialism is precisely equivalent to rule by Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and Castro and even uttering the word socialist will transform the US of A into Venezuela overnight. “The gentleman doth protest to much, methinks.” Hyperventilation such as Mr. Hanson’s says one thing to me: His fear is not that a more expansive safety new won’t work but that it will. The Richmond Times-Dispatch printed this response to Mr. Hanson.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Historical Ignorance: Why Socialism and Why Now?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 30 August 2019, A9 (www.providencejournal.com/opinion/20190831/my-turn-victor-davis-hanson-why-socialism-and-why-now). If The Richmond Times-Dispatch posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version that appeared the The Providence Journal.
“Hanson Offered Outdated Analysis of Socialism,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 7 September 2019, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/letters-to-the-editor-sept-7-2019-drug-price-discrepancy-infuriates-reader/article_24217b96-d6da-5b7e-bcd7-be6acf1a4ca0.html). (Scroll down).
It was another Fourth of July weekend in Portsmouth-Norfolk, so there were editions of The Virginian-Pilot to read. In a letter written to respond to another letter, a gentleman named Ed Harvey defended the Electoral College’s antidemocratic bent. Mr. Harvey seemingly suffers existential dread of being ruled by California and was unconcerned with the distorting effects of the Electoral College on the heft of the individual ballot from state to state. One must wonder whether Mr. Harvey would feel the same if Ronald Reagan were still ensconced in the Golden State’s executive mansion. Cue the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles.” The Virginian-Pilot didn’t print my explication of the Electoral College’s perverse math.
Ed Harvey, “Thank Founders for Electoral College,” The Virginian-Pilot, 4 July 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_aed183e8-9d08-11e9-9483-7bd082037a0b.html).
Behind Ed Harvey’s support for the Electoral College’s anointing of Donald Trump as president in 2016 lurks a morass of undemocratic assumptions. Mr. Harvey blithely casts aside the ideal of one person, one vote without explaining why a vote cast in California should have only one third the value of one cast in Wyoming, the product of the Electoral College’s distorting impact on democracy. Is Mr. Harvey pleased that a vote cast in our own Commonwealth likewise had only a third of the weight of a Wyoming vote? (“Population vs. Electoral Votes,” FairVote [https://www.fairvote.org/population_vs_electoral_votes]).
Mr. Harvey’s apparent embrace of minority rule is troubling in an age of efforts to distort yet further electoral outcomes through high-tech gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of social media, and meddling by malign foreign powers.
Mr. Harvey should bear in mind that the arc of the nation’s history bends toward the forging of a more inclusive democracy, whether through the Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery), the Fourteenth (Black suffrage), the Seventeenth (direct election of Senators), the Nineteenth (women’s suffrage), or the Twenty-Sixth (suffrage for eighteen-year-olds). The Electoral College has subverted the will of the majority twice in the past two decades. Wouldn’t any thinking citizen want every voter to have an equal say in the outcome of the democratic process? Or are we to assume that Mr. Harvey’s attitude toward the Electoral College would be less sanguine if it had yielded a different result in 2016?
The Grey Lady failed to smile again, this time by proxy. June of 2019 found me in the Golden West and The (San Jose) Mercury News had picked up a David Brooks column. It’s difficult not to wonder whether Mr. Brooks assumes that no reader recalls who William F. Buckley Jr. was. Mr. Man-and-God-at-Yale was many things; a paragon of tolerance wasn’t one of them.
David Brooks, “The Generation Gap and the Imminent GOP Apocalypse,” The (San Jose) Mercury News, 5 June 2019, A7 (www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/opinion/republicans-generation-gap.html). If The Mercury News posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above is to the version in The New York Times.
David Brooks correctly diagnoses the demographic and electoral buzzsaw into which the GOP is pushing itself through its stance on “immigration, diversity, (and) pluralism,” but he misses the mark on two points. Progressive multiculturalism is in no wise pessimistic. It merely recognizes that the sine qua non for redemption, whether for individual or society, is acknowledgment of and contrition for past misdeeds, something Mr. Brooks, with his boundless capacity for moralizing, surely understands.
Mr. Brooks, moreover, does not acknowledge how a calculated brand of intolerance has been inextricably woven into the Republican Party’s DNA since the adoption of the “Southern strategy.” The GOP has no credibility to assert an “optimistic multiculturalism.” It is rich that Mr. Brooks mentions in this context his “mentor” William F. Buckley Jr., a man whose homophobia is enshrined on videotape (see Gore Vidal) and whose racial attitudes cannot withstand cursory scrutiny.