Victor Davis Hanson was doubtless displeased with the election’s outcome. Though still not quite conceding the loss, Mr. Hanson applied himself to a new task: a frantic airbrushing of the Trump regime. Who knew that President Quarter Pounder with Cheese was so misunderstood and that the animus toward him sprang not from his actions but was merely a quibble over style? Mr. Hanson surpassed himself on this one. My response was printed by The Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Will Trump Ride Off into the Sunset?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 November 2020, A15; “Will Donald Trump Ride Off into the Sunset, Another Tragic Hero?” The Chicago Tribune, 11 November 2020 (www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-trump-legacy-victor-davis-hanson-20201111-t6aqm2ofb5cy5archlpuw5zo3a-story.html). If The Richmond Times-Dispatch posted an online version of this article, its search engine is unable to locate it. The link above leads to the version in The Chicago Tribune.
“Hanson’s Defense of Trump Rides Off on Wrong Trail,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 17 November 2020, A14 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters/letter-to-the-editor-nov-17-2020-hansons-defense-of-trump-rides-off-on-wrong/article_a9607437-092c-5b20-af96-0b94582b4d39.html).
To observe the length policy, the letter’s final paragraph was dropped before submission. Here it is:
Hanson likes cinematic references. Here is one for him: Harry Potter’s Professor Dumbledore and his Pensieve, a receptacle for storing memories for later reference and sharing with others. Hanson’s Pensieve, however, consigns his memories to oblivion. De rigueur for Hanson’s right-wing coterie is magical thinking followed by a deep drink from the River Lethe. The classical allusion should not be lost on Hanson. Then again, perhaps he has forgotten it.
As the 2020 presidential election neared, Style Weekly kindly offered me another and, I hoped at the time, final swipe at The Mad King. I seized it. Beyond that, this opinion concedes that Jonathan Freedland’s diagnosis of the rot in American political life was uncomfortably accurate.
“A New American Syllabus,” Style Weekly, 14 October 2020, 15 (www.styleweekly.com/richmond/opinion-a-new-american-syllabus/Content?oid=16616782).
Televised political conventions are inherently propagandistic; however, the backdrop of the coronavirus, The Benighted One’s exploitation of the Executive Mansion as a prop, and the hyperbolic expressions of fealty to His Sublimity, along with shaky production values, placed the 2020 Republican National Convention in its own subgenre. The unpublished letter below was written in response to The Washington Post’s account of the event.
Toluse Olorunnipa, “In Prime Time An Alternate Reality That Bolsters a Flagging Campaign,” The Washington Post, 28 August 2020, A1, A17 (www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-convention-falsehoods/2020/08/27/41a07f5a-e888-11ea-970a-64c73a1c2392_story.html).
And so the Republican National Convention has mercifully concluded. Toluse Olorunnipa ably exposes the convention’s dishonesty and the political desperation driving it. Beyond this, perhaps the convention’s most disturbing quality is how unsurprising it was.
Is anyone shocked that the clownish enablers who have flocked to Mr. Trump’s campaign would subject the nation to a bloated, low-rent analogue to Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will? Ms. Riefenstahl, whatever her defects, was a talented filmmaker able to impart a cinematic sheen to appalling totalitarian dreck. Even this dubious achievement evaded the Republican National Committee. It should be remembered that Ms. Riefenstahl, despite her considerable moviemaking skill, could not disguise the profound smallness of her subject and she indeed, regardless of her intentions, made apparent the banality of evil. The ham-fisted, reality-television-addled doyens of Trumplandia could not help but do the same. It is to be hoped that voters will not be deceived by Mr. Trump’s deluded medicine show.
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).
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?
In the beforetimes, when the coronavirus was just a gleam in a pangolin’s eye, I took in the odd concert. Richmond has a wonderful venue, the National, where I’ve attended many shows. The National has a sister venue – the NorVa – and I found myself in Portsmouth-Norfolk in May 2019 for a double bill: The Last Internationale (awesome!) and Tom Morello (transcendent!). It was an evening of music to move my pale white booty along with politics to take to the street. Check both out, if you haven’t.
While in town, I sampled the region’s local paper, The Virginian-Pilot. A letter in it defended the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 census. The newspaper took a pass on the letter I sent. The census remains vexing. The worst efforts to skew it – the citizenship question, President Id Personified’s call to purge the undocumented from the numbers used for reapportionment of legislative seats – were thwarted; nevertheless, the pandemic likely ensured a flawed count that will serve right-wing interests.
Maurice F. Conner, “Citizenship Status Is Needed,” The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_6b097382-772e-11e9-bb92-cbbec9217c7c.html).
Maurice Connor (The Virginian-Pilot, 16 May 2019, 12) rightly calls for Congress to address immigration reform and decries President Trump’s divisive rhetoric but he misreads the reasons why the citizenship question will potentially reappear in the 2020 Census after having been deemed unnecessary and counterproductive more than a half century ago.
There is no legal requirement that the census ask about citizenship. The Constitution mandates that the census count people, not citizens, because the nation has always been home to multitudes of non-citizens, documented and undocumented. The Census Bureau estimates that the question will reduce participation by non-citizens by 5.1 percent and cause an undercount of 6.5 million.[1]
Far more troubling is the probability that the resurrection of the citizenship question was politically motivated. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who initially asserted that the question arose from a Justice Department request, conceded last October that he had discussed the matter with then Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who encouraged Ross to contact Kris Kobach, [2] the Kansas secretary of state infamous for efforts to disqualify voters and for leadership of Trump’s farcical voter fraud commission. Beyond any dishonesty by Ross in congressional testimony, the question’s origin smacks at best of an attempt at demographic gerrymandering and at worst of the pursuit of alt-right, anti-immigrant policies through the vehicle of the census.
The Supreme Court should not permit Trump and his minions to corrupt yet another institution by politically weaponizing it.
[1] Dana Milbank, “Saving White Hegemony in Four Little Steps,” The Washington Post, 24 April 2019, A21 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-census-case-presents-how-to-preserve-white-hegemony-in-four-easy-steps/2019/04/23/ef2b6712-660b-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html).
[2] Glenn Thrush and Adam Liptack, “Wilbur Ross Changes Story on Discussion of Citizenship Question in Census,” The New York Times, 12 October 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/10/12/us/politics/wilbur-ross-commerce-census-citizenship.html).
After the 2018 midterm elections, President Good People on Both Sides took not days but just hours to send Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III back to Alabama. The dream was had ended for Mr. Sessions. It was a pleasure to see him depart; however, concern arose that his exile from the Trump archipelago represented the initiation of a purge that would endanger the Special Counsel’s investigation. The axing of the Gollum of the South and the elevation of the sycophantic Matt Whitaker to acting attorney general led Indivisible and other activists to stage protests across the country to demand that Robert Mueller be kept in place; I attended one in front of Richmond’s federal building. I sent a letter to The Washington Post in response to its reporting of Mr. Session’s banishment.
Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, and Josh Dawsey, “Trump Forces Sessions Out as Attorney General,” The Washington Post, 8 November 2018, A1, A10 (www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-resigns-at-trumps-request/2018/11/07/d1b7a214-e144-11e8-ab2c-b31dcd53ca6b_story.html).
“Exit Mr. Sessions, Enter Chaos,” The Washington Post, 11 November 2018, A26 (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-exits-chaos-enters/2018/11/09/27e2351e-e38e-11e8-ba30-a7ded04d8fac_story.html). (Scroll down).
The Richmond Times-Dispatch often prints syndicated columns by Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor and fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. I began to read some of his political opinions after the election from a commitment to peruse more right-leaning commentary to see how the election of Donald of Queens was being processed in those circles. His editorials seemed consistently dubious factually. When, in a single piece, he misleadingly asserted both that His Loathsomeness was making great strides with the Black electorate and that economic growth was substantially higher than under the Obama administration, a response was warranted. I took a dive into the data, my suspicions regarding Mr. Hanson’s factual claims were confirmed, and a letter was sent. The Richmond Times-Dispatch didn’t print the bit, but that didn’t alter a conviction I had formed. Mr. Hanson’s apparently willful, calculated distortions merited a rebuttal.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Trump Reaches Out for Black Voters,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 October 2018, A11; “Could Trump Win 20 Percent of the African American Vote in 2020?” The Providence Journal, 20 October 2018 (www.providencejournal.com/opinion/20181020/my-turn-victor-davis-hanson-could-trump-win-20-percent-of-african-american-vote-in-2020). 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.
Victor Davis Hanson engages in statistical sleight of hand to buttress his claim of burgeoning African-American support for President Trump.
An approval rating of 20% among African Americans in “some” unnamed polls provides grist for Hanson’s mill. He presumably relies on an August NAACP survey placing Trump’s rating at 21%; however, he neglects contemporaneous polls with lower figures (Gallup, Reuters, and YouGov/Economist, all 13%; Quinnipiac, 9%).[1] He ignores 3% approval and 93% disapproval found by Washington Post-ABC News [2] and does not trouble himself with the NAACP poll’s 79% disapproval.[3] Sober reading of the evidence places African-American support for Democrats somewhere between 85 and 90%, a range Hanson identifies as “usual.” His phenomenon is illusory.
Hanson’s assessment of the economic conditions undergirding his notional surge in African-American affection for Trump is likewise problematic. He cites a decline in African-American youth unemployment to 19.3% – a welcome development – but chooses for his comparative benchmark the highest figure from President Obama’s tenure, 48.9% in 2010, its Great Recession zenith, while forgetting that it fell as low as 23.2% (November 2015). A rate surpassing this Obama-era low has occurred nine times under Trump and was 29% this past April [4]. Hanson also plays fast and loose with measures of the nation’s overall economic performance when he places growth at “nearly 4 percent per year.”[5] Two facts emerge: Economic indices can fluctuate widely across short periods and Trump’s main economic accomplishment has been his inability to derail economic improvement that began years before his election.
One must ponder the reasons for Hanson’s unscholarly reading of evidence. Is he enlisted in Trump’s post-truth cadres? Is he endeavoring to manufacture a self-fulfilling prophecy through statistical obfuscation? If the GOP believes its prospects with the African-American electorate are sunny, then why the efforts, especially in Georgia [6], to suppress votes?
[1] Ramsey Touchberry, “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Among Black Americans Is Actually Too Good To Be True,” Newsweek 17 August 2018 (www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-black-americans-1078598 [accessed 19 October 2018]).
[2] Washington Post-ABC News Poll, Aug. 26-29, 2018, published 4 September 2018 (https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/politics/washington-post-abc-news-poll-aug-26-29-2018/2324/ [accessed 21 October 2018]).
[3] Paul Bedard, “Blacks’ Approval of Trump Reaches a High of 21% and NAACP Charges ‘Racism,’” The Washington Examiner, 7 August 2018 (www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/blacks-approval-of-trump-reaches-a-high-of-21-and-naacp-charges-racism [accessed 19 October 2018]).
[4] The rate under Trump was 24.8, 24.6, 28.7, and 26.5%, February-May 2017; 25.5%, November 2017; and 24.3, 27.2, and 2.78%, January-March 2018. “Unemployment Rate: 16 to 19 Years, Black or African American, Percent Monthly, Seasonally Adjusted,” Federal Reserve Economic Data, Economic Research Division, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000018 [accessed 19 October 2018]).
[5] GDP did rise 4.2% in the second quarter but was 2.8, 2.3, and 2.2 percent in the preceding three. Hanson’s math is fuzzy. By his reasoning, Obama could have trumpeted similar growth in 2014 from second and third quarter rates of 5.1 and 4.9% despite bookending figures of -1.0 and 1.9%. Bureau of Economic Analysis New Release, “Gross Domestic Product: Second Quarter 2018 (Third Estimate); Corporate Profit: Second Quarter 2018 (Revised Estimate,” 27 September 2018, p. 7 (www.bea.gov/system/files/2018-09/gdp2q18_3rd_3.pdf [accessed 19 October 2018]). “Quarterly Growth of the Real GDP in the United States from 2011 to 2018,” Statista (www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-chance-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/ [accessed 21 October 2018]).
[6] Astead W. Herndon, “Accusations of Voter Suppression as Some in Georgia Begin to Cast Their Ballots,” The New York Times, 20 October 2018, A15 (www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/us/politics/georgia-voter-suppression.html [accessed 21 October 2018]).
There were good tidings in Virginia in the late spring of 2018. The US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the redistricting done by the GOP in 2011 for the Commonwealth’s House of Delegates was racially motivated and ordered a redrawing of the lines. Jeremy M. Lazarus of The Richmond Free Press reported the story and I sent a letter to underscore that this was happy news but that the battle to ensure proper access to the ballot was not over. Rereading the thing, I would amend it. I, like some others, made too much of the decline in Black participation in presidential voting from the high level of 2012 to a lower one in 2016. The larger problem is the appallingly low participation by voters of all backgrounds, an apathy that paves the way for the minority rule conservatives covet.
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Federal Court Orders Redrawing of State House Districts by Oct. 30,” The Richmond Free Press, 28-30 June 2018 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2018/jul/01/federal-court-orders-redrawing-state-house-distric/).
The order by the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to redraw districts for the Virginia House of Delegates is welcome news. The unsubtle gerrymandering perpetrated by the GOP-controlled General Assembly in 2011 contributed to Democrats remaining in the minority (49-51) in the House of Delegates despite having won the statewide vote by a near landslide last November.
No one, however, should assume that the matter is settled beyond contestation. The state GOP may choose to appeal the decision. Should the US Supreme Court intervene, the omens are not promising for advocates of voting rights. The court’s refusal last week to act in cases involving gerrymandered US House districts in Wisconsin and Maryland, coupled with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, President Trump’s vow of a speedy nomination, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise of a lightspeed confirmation, will likely produce a Supreme Court less inclined to rule against cynical efforts to abridge the right to vote and to intimidate and discourage qualified voters.
The Supreme Court’s changing complexion jeopardizes the hard-won gains made by African Americans and potentially will undermine LGBTQ rights, women’s control of their own bodies, collective bargaining by workers, curbing of corporate misconduct, and a host of other priorities. The most effective defense against the unraveling of a sensible progressive agenda remains the ballot box. Regaining control of the House and, if possible, the Senate by Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections is crucial and no voting demographic is more important than African Americans. Colbert King noted recently (“Decades of Progress Are Threatened,” The Washington Post, 30 June 2018, A15 [www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/decades-of-progress-are-in-peril/2018/06/29/b93edcaa-7bbb-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html]) that African-American participation dropped to 59.6 percent in 2016 from 66.6 percent in 2012, a decline that contributed materially to Donald Trump’s ascent. The president has crowed about this very fact to his adoring crowds. Erosion of rights, especially the right to vote, is best warded off by their continuous and informed exercise at every level of government.