Following the presidential election, the vaccines to ward off the coronavirus became a reality and hopefulness flowered for a close to what, through executive inaction, ineptitude, and disingenuousness, had become a needlessly grave pandemic. Despite this sign of better times to come, winter loomed and it promised to be brutal.
A sequel to the coronavirus-black death editorial for The Richmond Times-Dispatch from the preceding April made sense. There was also more grist for the mill. During the warmer months of 2020, a habit had developed: an hour or two each day on the front porch for reading by turns polemics and novels. The summer reading list included Albert Camus’ The Plague (a rereading) and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The opinion I wrote exceeded the canonical length but the editor at the newspaper found the space to run it whole. I’m thinking maybe a trilogy is in the offing as the vaccines take hold and the pandemic subsides, something focused more on social, economic, and cultural implications of pandemics, less about the diseases themselves. We’ll see.
“A Coronavirus Winter: Historical and Literary Lessons,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 18 January 2021, A13 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/david-routt-column-a-coronavirus-winter-historical-and-literary-lessons/article_f4f237e8-ad4a-5ef1-bf28-88bc669507c3.html).
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.
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.
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).
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).
Muddying the findings of the Mueller report became a cottage industry in GOP World. If obfuscation is the game, who better to enlist than Victor Davis Hanson? Ever the good soldier, he applied himself with gusto to a willful misreading – if there was a reading – of the Special Counsel’s conclusions. This was not a difficult letter to write, since George Terwilliger III had served as Mr. Hanson’s warmup act.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 May 2019, A9; Yahoo, 9 May 2019 (https://news.yahoo.com/progressives-face-bleak-post-mueller-103001666.html). 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 on Yahoo.
“Hanson Misrepresents Mueller Report Findings,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 16 May 2019, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/letters-to-the-editor-may-16-2019-hanson-misrepresents-mueller-report-findings/article_26be70e6-9913-57d2-88a5-e83a1a4b74ca.html).
Early in 2019, a local guy – Raymond B. Wallace – had an opinion published by The Richmond Times-Dispatch in which he fulminated about the distressing decline in quality of broadcast news, especially the cable news outlets. By decline, he apparently meant that the news was not being reported in a pleasing manner, and pleasing was evidently some version of Fox News. The reasoning was more than a tad motivated. Mr. Wallace also purports to outline the history of the spiral downward in reportage that he perceived. The secret behind offering a history of anything is knowing the history of something; the salient facts of this history seem to have evaded his notice. The Richmond Times-Dispatch didn’t publish my response to Mr. Wallace.
Raymond B. Wallace, “What’s Happened to Television Journalism?” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 11 January 2019, A9 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/ray-wallace-column-whats-happened-to-television-journalism/article_5d8598f6-9edc-548e-b68b-1e89bd73cec5.html).
Raymond B. Wallace’s excoriation of cable news suffers from lack of historical context. The genesis of today’s polarized cable news environment is not difficult to locate.
The FCC in 1987 suspended the Fairness Doctrine, under which the granting of broadcasting licenses was conditioned upon a commitment both to cover controversial matters of public significance and to present differing opinions regarding them. Efforts by the US Congress to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine legislatively were thwarted by President Reagan’s veto in 1987 and President Bush’s threatened veto in 1991. The quashing of the Fairness Doctrine fostered the proliferation of political talk radio and it is likely no coincidence that Rush Limbaugh’s show first went national in 1988.
The polarization was sharpened with passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Intended to foster media competition, the legislation has had precisely the opposite effect, the concentration of ownership of electronic media into progressively fewer hands. It likewise is probably not coincidental that Fox News went live eight months after President Clinton signed the bill.
Mr. Wallace seems curiously untroubled by elements of the media environment he decries: the nearly monopolistic domination of political talk radio by the right and the concentration of control of local electronic media into fewer hands, control responsible for the sad spectacle last year of dozens of anchors at Sinclair Broadcasting stations mouthing the same editorial verbatim in a “forced read.” One must wonder whether Mr. Wallace’s problem is less that each cable outlet has selected its editorial lane and more that some outlets have the temerity to gainsay and fact-check the notoriously mendacious Trump administration. Whatever the case, he asserts that a myriad of stories goes largely unreported except by Fox; nevertheless, I, no Fox viewer, was substantially informed regarding every story he cites. How could this have happened?
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]).
One thing can be said about George Will: He’s consistent. His effort to balance his contempt for President Smallhands and for the Republican Party that abets his atrocities with his distaste for the left, indeed for anyone not of his ideological stripe, turns him into a logical and factual contortionist. In this editorial carried by The Richmond Times-Dispatch, he makes broad, broad strokes with his false-equivalency brush as he strives to demonize antifascism, progressivism, and popular protests. The opportunity to take another run at Mr. Will was to be relished. I did. The Richmond Times-Dispatch took another pass.
George Will, “So Much to Protest, So Little Time,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 August 2018, A9 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/george-will-column-poor-portland-progressives-so-much-to-protest-so-little-time/article_7142b880-f77c-5118-b2db-f5d7a38c9df4.html).
George Will’s message is muddled. Unraveling his larger point is difficult: Comparing Oregon’s dismal history of race relations with actions of progressive activists in Portland? Insinuating that all counter demonstrators are “antifa”? Equating early twentieth-century Klansmen with activists publicly opposing white nationalists and other extremists? None of this withstands scrutiny.
Progressivism vexes Will but it seems oppressive only to those who feel their privilege threatened. Personal experience in rallies, marches, and counter-protests tells me that participants, with few exceptions, are concerned citizens who abhor violence and are merely exercising their First Amendment rights. Conflating all antifascism with “antifa” is interesting rhetorical legerdemain but anyone sensible likely harbors antifascist sentiment. Furthermore, President Trump’s flirtation with authoritarian tropes legitimizes progressives’ concerns about the country’s direction.
What amazes is Will’s failure to mention the two men murdered on a Portland train in May 2017 when defending two teenage women of color from a racist tirade by an alleged white supremacist. Will’s reference to the Faulknerian epigram on the past’s omnipresence is on point but perhaps not as he intends. Trump has emboldened white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates, movements meriting relegation to the past yet moldering in the present’s dark recesses. Does Will believe that this should pass without rebuttal by citizens of good will?
Will’s distaste for Trump has made him a man without a country politically. He has abjured the Republican Party, but his affinity with the right seems intact, his compulsion to demonize the left is unshaken, and his safe port appears to be the framing of questionable equivalences. Will is fond of apothegms. Perhaps he should ponder the words of conservative icon Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
The Richmond Times-Dispatch in the summer of 2018 picked up an article by Desiree Zapata Miller, a sometime columnist for The Charlotte Observer. Ms. Zapata Miller hyperventilated about the hateful treatment Democrats were doling out to The Jackanapes in Chief and to all Republicans. She cited the nefarious influence of Saul Alinsky on Democrats’ tactics. It was as absurd as any opinion I had ever seen in print. I produced an editorial-length response to it and submitted it to The Richmond Times-Dispatch. An opinion-page editor informed me that the paper didn’t accept editorials in rebuttal to editorials and encouraged me to cut it down and submit it as a letter, so that’s what I did.
Desiree Zapata Miller, “Dems Have Become Party of Haters,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 11 July 2018, A11; The Charlotte Observer, 6 July 2018 (www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article214362199.html). If Ms. Zapata Miller’s editorial appeared in the online edition of The Richmond Times-Dispatch, the newspaper’s search function seems unable to locate it. The link here is to the online version in The Charlotte Observer.
“Don’t Overlook Trump’s Role in Demise of Discourse,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 24 July 2018 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/letters-to-the-editor-july-24-2018-zuckerberg-is-wrong-to-allow-holocaust-deniers-a/article_b87295fc-37bf-509d-a818-576ad5e2a377.html). (Scroll down).
Unwarranted Demonization of Democrats.
Ms. Desiree Zapata Miller’s call for civility in political discourse is welcome (“Democrats Have Become the Party of Haters,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 6 July 2018, A11) but her characterization of Democrats demands a rejoinder. Her editorial is replete with accusations but virtually barren of particulars.
When Ms. Zapata Miller charges Democrats with systematic harassment of President Trump’s supporters as a tactic to frighten and intimidate them, she engages in a dubious brand of right-wing argumentation. Isolated instances in which a Democrat has an arguable lapse in politesse, though nothing outside the pale of constitutionally-protected expression, become grist for hyperventilating stereotypes of Democrats and for insinuations that a grand, dark conspiracy is afoot. Her editorial, moreover, exposes an unfortunate tendency to label any gainsaying of Mr. Trump on fact or policy as hatred. Ms. Zapata Miller should rest assured that the left does not hate Mr. Trump’s supporters but only wishes for the scales to fall from their eyes so that they can soberly assess the damage Mr. Trump inflicts on our politics and institutions.
Regarding Ms. Zapata Miller’s specific claims: She presents Mr. Trump as a grand dispenser of truth yet seems unaware that by this past 1 May, his 466th day in office, he had uttered upwards of 3000 lies or half-truths, more than six daily. The pace of his mendacity is accelerating (Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Had Made 3001 False or Misleading Claims So Far,” The Washington Post, 1 May 2018 [www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/05/01/president-trump-has-made-3001-false-or-misleading-claims-so-far/]). She blames President Obama for the absence of immigration reform yet forgets that the bipartisan Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 cleared the Senate 68 to 32 but was denied consideration by the GOP-controlled House. Mr. Obama’s 2014 executive order creating DACA was a response to the House’s legislative intransigence and was greeted with howls of constitutional overreach from the right. Does she not recall that Mr. Trump then rescinded even this and left DACA recipients in limbo? Her political amnesia extends to the Republican Party’s inability, despite full control of Congress and the White House, to produce even a shadowy simulacrum of immigration reform.
I must, however, thank Ms. Zapata Miller for prodding me to read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. I, a Roosevelt Democrat, received the book from an old friend, a Reagan Republican, as a gag birthday gift during our college days and yet, somehow, I reached nearly threescore years without turning its pages. Perusal of it convinces me that Ms. Zapata Miller has neither read it seriously nor understood it. One must wonder whether it falls into a well-established genre: books infrequently read, especially by the right, yet selectively mined, misrepresented, misinterpreted, and decontextualized in order to frighten children.
The undiminished capacity of a decades-old how-to manual for community organizing to induce spitting apoplexy on the right is a marvel. Mr. Alinsky’s goals – to aid the powerless in gaining a voice by working within the political system and to foster positive change – indeed seem less threatening than the words of the late GOP Senator Barry Goldwater in accepting his party’s nomination for president a scant seven years before Mr. Alinsky put pen to paper: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Does Ms. Zapata Miller believe that Democrats should mutely, even blithely, accept Mr. Trump’s indisputable undermining of democratic norms, his courting of autocrats, his denigration of allies, his ceaseless attacks on the fourth estate, his manifest conflicts of interest, his self-dealing through public office, his tolerance of governmental corruption, or his stunning dishonesty? To do so would be an irresponsible dereliction of citizenship. Ms. Zapata Miller should congratulate Democrats for their public spiritedness, not demonize them. And I would welcome having that proffered cup of coffee and chat with her.