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?
It was inevitable that the letter-writing would lead to tinkering with an editorial. This spur for this virgin effort was The Grand Prevaricator’s tapping of the bellicose John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. This was not the choice of a chief executive determined to pursue a reasoned, sober foreign policy. Many hoped that President Stable Genius would never face a crisis for fear of an awful outcome. The installation of the incessantly saber-rattling Mr. Bolton magnified the chances for the genesis of crises where none need exist.
The piece is essentially a call for a Republican, any Republican, to restrain Mr. Trump. No one in the national GOP had done so to this point. The Richmond Times-Dispatch justifiably passed on it because it was double the length of a typical editorial. A pitch was then made to The Huffington Post, but nothing came of it. I then set the essay aside and never returned to it.
Freedland, Trump, Bolton, Lee, Chirac.
While in London in late 2017 I was reading local newspapers and stumbled across an editorial by a favorite writer, Jonathan Freedland (“The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017). As the first year of the Trump administration lurched toward its close, Mr. Freedland reflected on a book he had written two decades ago in which he had professed his admiration for the ideals enshrined in the United States’ founding documents and for the intricate constitutional mechanism devised by the nation’s founders (Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic [London: Fourth Estate Ltd., 1998]). In Mr. Freedland’s view, the colonies had purloined a revolution that by right belonged to the English, hence his call to “bring home the revolution” and reshape the United Kingdom’s government on the American pattern. On 2017’s penultimate day, Mr. Freedland was disillusioned. The first year of the Trump presidency had revealed inherent flaws in the American constitutional order and he despaired of its capacity, despite its manifold merits, to correct itself.
Saddened by Mr. Freedland’s loss of faith, I sent a letter to the newspaper, perhaps as much to “buck up” myself as Mr. Freedland and to assure our transatlantic admirer that, in the words of a British comedy troupe, “we’re not dead yet” (“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism’ and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29). The letter underscored the potency of the “resistance” to Mr. Trump and identified the ultimate corrective to his misrule: the electoral repudiation of his GOP enablers in the 2018 midterms, the removal of Mr. Trump through the ballot box in 2020, and a gradual restoration of normative political practice.
In the months since my sojourn among our British cousins, the United States’ circumstance has gravely worsened and Mr. Freedland’s outlining of a pair of defects in American governance grows in resonance. He asserted first that the proper functioning of the American constitutional system depends upon the election of a chief executive with personal integrity and an unwavering commitment to the public weal. By this standard, it is now incontrovertible that the incorrigible Mr. Trump is a lost cause. Appeal neither to reason nor common decency gives him pause. He stands as a moral and ethical cypher, a man deficient in understanding and allergic to principle, a living syllabus of our darker impulses, the untrammeled national id exposed and unleashed.
Mr. Trump now jettisons one after the another the members of the small and shrinking coterie of “adults” supposed to blunt his impulsivity. He liberates himself from relevant experience, informed opinion, and sober analysis. Still more vexing is his selection of former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton as his National Security Adviser. Mr. Trump is installing in this critical post the most unreconstructed, most unapologetic of the neoconservative Iraq War deadenders. A probable Islamophobe and a certain saber-rattler unable to pass the scrutiny of confirmation by a Republican Senate in 2005, Mr. Bolton was a leading light in the Project for a New American Century and among its members who ultimately insinuated themselves deeply into President George W. Bush’s administration. He was a signatory to this cabal’s infamous 1998 open letter exhorting President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power, three years before the 9/11 attacks and five years before Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction became the pretext for the greatest blunder in modern American foreign policy, a misstep whose toll in lost American credibility on the world stage still mounts.
Mr. Trump on his own abrogates American leadership in the community of nations and, when abroad, inflicts misinformed diatribes on America’s allies and seems at his ease only in the company of despots and thugs, a sadly embarrassing affront to every thinking American. Mr. Bolton will neither restrain Mr. Trump nor offer him sage counsel and likely will only encourage Mr. Trump to intermingle American foreign policy with his vanity, vindictiveness, and projection. One must wonder whether Mr. Trump’s personal peccadilloes – his ceaseless need to shift the narrative from his past and present transgressions – will become a driving force in foreign affairs. Be this as may, the elevation of Mr. Bolton near the seat of power pushes the hands of the doomsday clock a few clicks nearer to midnight.
Mr. Trump’s manifest deficiency as chief executive leads to Mr. Freedland’s other critique of the state of play in American governance, his understanding that the constitutional mechanism runs smoothly when political groups operate in good faith, accept the legitimacy of their opponents, and, at any critical juncture, prioritize the national interest above narrow partisan advantage. Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party is a paragon of political virtue but their defects are asymmetrical, the sins of the GOP active and those of the Democrats reactive. The Democrats in any event are in power in no corner of government. Restraint on an unfettered and perhaps unbalanced executive must come from the GOP. A few months back, one could hope that a drubbing in the 2018 midterms and a few electoral cycles in the political wilderness – an overdue pause for introspection – might return the Republican Party to itself. Mr. Trump’s mercurial conduct unfortunately eliminates the luxury of waiting for a gradual political realignment. Action is imperative. It is incumbent on the governing party to act. The Republican Party must demonstrate that, unlike Mr. Trump, it is not a lost cause.
The signs on this front are not encouraging. GOP senators and congressmen have by and large maintained a studied silence in the face of Mr. Trump’s antics. A few Republican senators – Messrs. McCain, Flake, Sasse, Corker, Graham – have from time to time uttered fine words but a concrete act to constrain Mr. Trump’s misbehavior and malfeasance is nowhere in evidence. The GOP seems to have forgotten a fundamental truth. Retired Sen. Harry Reid has recounted a reminder the late Sen. Robert Byrd gave his colleagues: “I don’t serve under the president; I serve with the president” (Carl Hulse, “Senator’s Farewell: ‘I Just Shake My Head,’” The New York Times, 24 March 2018, A11 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/us/politics/harry-reid-leaves-washington.html]). Do Republicans not recall that the legislature is a coequal branch of government and enjoys pride of place in the Constitution? The federal government is not a parliamentary system, though the GOP sometimes seemingly wishes it were. The political calculus in the US Senate is uncomplicated: A handful of Republican votes in concert with Democrats can serve as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s excesses. This would be less an act of courage than a minimal declaration of fealty to the American constitutional system.
Should Republicans, nevertheless, require an example of political courage to emulate, they need not look far nor to the distant past. In 2001, Rep. Barbara Lee cast the lone dissenting vote in the House against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) and there was nary a nay registered in the Senate. Her opposition sprang not from pacifism but from her conviction that the legislature should not abdicate its oversight of the executive in making the most profound decision, to commit the nation’s treasure and its youth to armed conflict. She refused to grant the executive a blank check. To paraphrase Martin Luther, there she stood for she could do no other. The fullness of time has vindicated her adherence to principle. Would that a handful of GOP senators might muster the fortitude of a Barbara Lee.
Despite Mr. Trump’s willful misconduct, the nation still has friends abroad. The stock of goodwill has not yet been exhausted. Hope endures that the United States will return to the first principles that, while often observed imperfectly, made the American constitutional system admired and emulated. Jonathan Freedland’s distress at our present predicament underscores a useful truism: The outsider sometimes perceives us with greater clarity than we see ourselves. Friends also sometimes offer well-meaning advice, counsel that should not be summarily dismissed. The document though which thirteen colonies dissolved its bond to the British crown underscored the importance “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” as the nascent nation embarked on a fateful path. Perhaps in this moment America’s leadership should declaim less and listen more to what the world is saying to it. Nicholas Kristof recently acknowledged his experience of déjà vu, a feeling that 2018 seems uncomfortably like 2002 and 2003 (“I’m Worried Now, as Before the Iraq War,” New York Times, 22 March 2018, A21 [www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/opinion/iraq-war-north-korea-iran.html]). Mr. Kristof is not alone in this. The American political memory can be unforgivably short. As the drumbeat for intervention in Iraq moved to a crescendo, the late French President Jacques Chirac, a man with an abiding affection for America, warned that the country was on the cusp of a potentially momentous mistake. GOP congressmen in response replaced french-fries with “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria and the nation careered toward a grand foreign policy debacle. Must this partisan thickness be repeated? The time for both Democratic and Republican legislators to exercise the prerogatives and responsibilities of their offices is now. This cannot and must not be left to the election.
The 2016 election has been the rocket fuel propelling not just Trumpism but also the reaction to the President Spray Tan’s faux populism. If not for it, this blog wouldn’t exist.
As a nod to my grandfather, who worked at elections for decades, I was a poll officer on the fateful day and was at the precinct from 5:00am until after 10:00pm. I walked home having heard no results because use of cellphones was verboten to all but the precinct chief. Nonetheless, I sensed that it was not going well. Older hands among the poll officers reliably predicted when waves of voters would descend upon us and were surprised when an anticipated late-in-the-day surge didn’t materialize.
Experience as a voter also hinted that something was not copacetic. For The Better Half and me, election day is ritual. We drag ourselves to the polls before 6:00am to be among the first to vote. Sporting “I voted” stickers, we then have breakfast at our favorite diner. In 2008, our custom was partly thwarted; we arrived early but the queue already stretched beyond the middle school’s grounds and wound around the end of the block. Voting took longer, but the election’s historical gravity made the wait enjoyable. We even remembered to give one another a “terrorist fist jab” à la the famous New Yorker cover as we exited the polling site and made for the restaurant.
The crowd milling outside when the polls opened in 2016 was substantial but far short of 2008’s throng. Though anecdotal and impressionistic, this perhaps signaled a deficit in enthusiasm. In our left-leaning neighborhood, this didn’t bode well for the Clinton campaign. Ms. Clinton prevailed in Virginia but fell short of the expected margin. My niggling concerns became tangible when, once home, I found The Mistress of the House already trying to keep despondency at bay.
The shock, horror, and disbelief among Democrats have been well chronicled. A mass embarkation for the seven stages of grief began. Acceptance was elusive. The Orange Interloper’s victory did surprise me. When asked who would win, my response invariably had been “Hillary Clinton,” though my estimate of her as a candidate was low. Nonetheless, my reaction was less visceral than for most. I didn’t rend my garments, don sackcloth, and cover myself in ashes.
The question then is why the stunned-disbelief meter was turned to eleven for millions. Armchair psychologizing to me is abhorrent – it’s impossible to be in others’ heads – but I have suspicions about the sort of person who found The Prince of Mendacity’s victory existentially crushing. The dejection perhaps was keenest among those who see a political contest as a boxing match that, while inherently brutal, at least plays lip service to Marquess of Queensbury rules. Sometimes this is indeed the reality. Yet the political fray is often akin to professional wrestling where rules are honored in their breech. This can have appeal. Was it coincidence that The Small-Handed One has performed in World Wrestling Entertainment shtick? Who can forget his retweeting of a video in which he administered an outside-the-squared-circle pummeling to CNN in effigy? Many Democrats deem such political messaging as so far beyond the pale that they cannot comprehend how any voter pulls the lever for a candidate not just embracing but reveling in it. If these voters exist – I’m convinced they do – they may overlap considerably with people comfortable with the neoliberal political consensus in which one party refashioned itself into a less vivid version of the other in order to win a few elections, long-term consequences be damned. When Mr. Down Escalator lifted the veil on the base impulses festering within the GOP, horror ensued. This willful self-deception, unfortunately, feeds the impulse to stuff the genie back into the bottle and resurrect the more comfortable status quo ante, to tolerate the dog whistle so long as the bullhorn is silenced.
Whatever the wellspring may have been for this mass anguish, there were reasons, substantial ones, not to be gobsmacked by the election’s outcome. Brevity of political memory likely had bearing on this dumbstruck disbelief. The 2004 election hadn’t receded that far into the past. Had people forgotten that Bush the Younger prevailed both popularly and electorally, despite his deficiencies, his hollow promise of “compassionate conservatism,” and his war of choice heading south?
Had the Electoral College’s infernal magic been shoved down the memory hole by 2016? Even if many of 2016’s voters had been politically disengaged in 2000, there were more recent reminders of the Electoral College’s anti-democratic proclivities. Irony of ironies, for a time in 2012 some conservatives hyperventilated from fear that Barack Obama would lose popularly but win electorally. A conservative acquaintance fulminated about it: “They have to get rid of that damned Electoral College business.” A casual observer, moreover, should have been cognizant of the GOP’s fading ability to muster a popular majority in presidential elections. After Bush the Elder’s victory in 1988, the only Republican candidate to manage it was his son in 2004. These realities should not have been beyond the ken of an informed citizen in 2016. Since then, the Republican Party’s comfort with an Electoral College strategy, indeed its reliance on it, has been evident in its efforts to tinker with the 2020 Census and thereby alter the Electoral College’s math yet further in favor of Republican-leaning states, to say nothing of its broad campaign to making voting more difficult.
Had these horrified Democrats forgotten how disdain for mainstream candidates can spur voters to cast ballots imprudently? Support for an outsider’s bid can have disproportionate impact on an election’s outcome but it stands virtually no chance in a two-party system of effecting the change for which the disgruntled voter yearns. The quixotic quality of insurgent presidential campaigns is beyond contestation. Ross Perot’s candidacies represented the recent highwater mark for an outsider. He took 18.9 percent and 8.4 percent of the popular vote in 1992 and 1996 without garnering a single Electoral College delegate. Ralph Nader did even less well (2.74 percent) in 2000. Jill Stein (1.07 percent) and Gary Johnson (3.28 percent) occupied this lane in 2016 and the result speaks for itself. Whether any of these candidates was a spoiler is debatable; however, it is practically assured in the existing electoral system that a Democrat or a Republican will occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unless someone is an accelerationist – convinced that the path to Utopia requires making life miserable enough to jar the electorate from its torpor – the rational act is to vote for the less objectionable major party candidate regardless of the unpalatable choices on offer. As I tried to explain to some Nader voters after the 2000 debacle, a third party’s only avenue to national electoral pay dirt is cycle after cycle of grassroots organizing and still its prospects will remain dim so long as the Electoral College exists. Casting a ballot for a protest candidate is emotionally satisfying but strategically worthless. My votes for Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000 were nose-holding exercises. My enthusiasm for John Kerry in 2004 was minimal. My ballots marked for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 were ultimately disillusioning. Yet in each instance it was the right thing to do.
Beyond these historical and political realities, personal experience in 2016 gave me pause. As 4 July approached, The Better Half was out of town but I maintained our custom of spending the holiday in Portsmouth-Norfolk. On my drive there, a Williamsburg exit brought to me a Starbucks for a coffee-and-newspaper pitstop. Four middle-aged couples wearing MAGA gear then parked themselves in the café. Their boisterousness rendered eavesdropping unnecessary. They were exercised by a recent event, Bill Clinton’s excellent adventure on 27 June, barely a week earlier, when he had dashed across an airport tarmac to bend the ear of Attorney General Loretta Lynch while his wife’s use of personal email accounts and a private server was under investigation by the Justice Department. For the MAGA coffee-klatsch, this was indisputable evidence of a rigged probe. FBI Director James Comey’s scolding of Hillary Clinton without bringing charges a couple of days later (5 July) likely crystalized their suspicions. In any event, La Clinton’s slim opportunity to persuade such voters was lost. These people had been propagandized by right-wing media and were mired in the conspiracy-theory bog. For them, as for the columnist Maureen Dowd’s brother, Ms. Clinton was Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones incarnate, scheming malevolence personified. It’s noteworthy that these MAGA people seemed materially comfortable. They were not among the despairing, downtrodden lumpen masses. They in fact were comparing their DNA results. One acknowledged his not inconsiderable Neanderthal heritage. Hmm.
Living in the Old Dominion since mid-2001 and returning frequently to the Bluegrass have perhaps inoculated me against emotional desolation from displeasing political outcomes. Sojourns in Kentucky remind me of how far right the electorate in some places has moved, so far that these states are no longer active players in the Electoral College’s perverse calculus. Virginia’s politics since 2001 have been a practicum on the long, difficult slog of a state moving from nearly total GOP control – both US Senate seats, the governorship, the lieutenant governorship, the attorney general’s office, both chambers of the General Assembly – to parallel Democratic ascendancy in 2019. The configuration of the Commonwealth’s electoral districts is so partisan that it took not bare but substantial majorities to establish Democratic hold on the House of Delegates and the Senate, the Electoral College’s inherent gerrymander in microcosm.
My first coherent, substantial writing on the 2016 debacle was inspired by a friend living abroad. Parenthetically, every citizen should have the privilege of observing an American presidential contest while overseas, as I did in 1992 and 2000. On one hand, being insulated from wall-to-wall coverage of interminable primary and general campaigns is pleasant. On the other, few experiences are as mortifying as sitting among non-Americans for the 1992 Bush-Clinton-Perot presidential debates and especially for the Quayle-Gore-Stockdale vice presidential chin-wagging. How could educated, attentive outsiders not ask themselves, “Is this the best on offer from the globe-bestriding military, political, economic, and cultural hegemon?” The foreign viewpoint is an antidote to American self-involvement and self-regard. In 2000, as the disputed election ground on and on, an impish Italian television journalist quipped that another day had passed without an American president-elect and the world was somehow surviving. Furthermore, foreigners’ engagement in our elections indicts as apathetic the tens of millions of Americans who neglect to exercise their right. Because of America’s outsize international influence, for good or ill, many would dearly love to mark a ballot in our elections and cannot comprehend how Americans can be cavalier about it.
Anyway, this old friend, like many, could not get her head around the result and asked my wife how a majority of white women could bring themselves pull the lever for Mr. Genital Grabber. She also wanted recommendations for articles that might bring into focus what had happened. She Who Must Be Obeyed relayed the queries to me. The email reproduced below, composed several days following the election, encapsulates what I was thinking then. Like any political opinion, time proved some of it wrongheaded while other bits hit the mark. It mostly holds up, though J. D. Vance continues to wane in my regard – more about that later. The Light of My Life, as is her wont, passed this along to a few people.
Aside from a paragraph excised because it touches on family matters, here’s the dispatch to our friend across the water. . .
Dear —–,
Joanna asked [me] to say something useful about what’s happened in god’s own country over the past few days. This email is no doubt far more than what you wanted and you are under no obligation to read any of it but I would have been scribbling something like this in my journal in order to come to terms with this dire, loveless, dispiriting election, so I might as well share it with someone. As Joanna has probably told you, I had a particular point of view regarding the election. I was a Bernie Sanders supporter because I felt Hillary Clinton was a poor choice in equal measures in reference to her political skills, her fundamental impulses, and the considerable Clinton baggage. I have also developed over the years fundamental philosophical differences with the Clintons. I was convinced that, as a candidate, she offered the Republicans and Trump in particular the best path to Pennsylvania Avenue. There was a reason why there were seventeen of those clowns in the Republican primaries and it wasn’t because she was a strong candidate.
As far as why so many white women voted for Trump, I don’t think there’s a simple, one-size-fits-all answer. For many women who are already Republicans, the false equivalence drawn between Hillary Clinton’s flaws and Donald Trump’s moral bankruptcy was likely adequate to concoct a sufficient rationalization for voting for him; they concluded that La Clinton was not less corrupt than Trump – even that she was actively evil – and that, even when they found Trump’s comments personally offensive, Clinton didn’t offer enough of a reason to abandon the tribal orthodoxy of the party. There are many women who will never be able to bring themselves to vote for a Democrat and especially for a Clinton. There may also have been a cognizance among these Republican women that the Republicans, as a shrinking minority party if demographic analyses are to be believed, need as much support as possible from numbskulls and unsavory people and his offensive speech was tolerable so long as it motivated ignoramuses to vote for him. One commentator I read expressed this in an interesting way: Trump’s supporters took his rants seriously but not literally while the press and elites in both parties took Trump literally but not seriously, at least initially, and this created the space for him to establish momentum. Beyond this, many women across the socioeconomic spectrum do accept the proposition that Trump’s misogynistic language merely reflects how most men communicate with one another when women aren’t around.
For women who aren’t Republicans and who even are from families that have voted Democratic for generations, the willingness to vote for Trump in great measure can be placed at the feet of the Democratic Party. In my view – this is something that Joanna has listened to me rail about for years and is thoroughly and justifiably sick of hearing – the party has been heading in a bad direction for decades and the Clintons and “Clintonism” have added impetus to this since the mid-nineties. The Democratic Leadership Council’s strategy of moving to the center and then even further right as the Republican Party progressed in its derangement yielded some political victories but the price was the party’s soul and principles. Working-class voters gradually concluded that they had lost their main champion and, sad to say, I don’t think they’re wrong. When someone is feeling acute economic distress, a demagogue (Trump) can operate effectively and an outsider of good conscience and aspirational message (Sanders) can also gather a following. Hillary Clinton, unfortunately, is the model for an establishment technocrat, the cold policy wonk who has little or no connection with the lives many people lead and the challenges with which they cope every damn day. Hillary Clinton offered nothing aspirational whereas Trump gave simple, emotionally satisfying answers to people’s sense of displacement, presented them scapegoats at which to direct their seething discontent, and offered himself as a near messianic figure uniquely capable of giving them succor when neither party establishment seemed to give a rat’s ass about them. When people are angry and suffering and feeling forgotten, they have little patience for niceties of tolerance and standards of politically-correct expression. Bernie Sanders could perhaps have channeled this rage toward some constructive reforms but we’ll never know that now. I suspect my frustration is showing. To paraphrase a far better writer than I am, the Democratic Party in its best days would afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted whereas now it tends mostly to confirm its elite membership in its preconception of its merited superiority and is left to ask itself why these grubby little people didn’t vote the way its elite knows they should have voted. I can also speak from some personal experience that many of these voters have a keen sense that the educated bi-coastal elite, of which you and I and almost everyone in our acquaintance are card-carrying members, looks down its collective nose at them. They feel our condescension and it motivates them to pull further into their shells and dismiss anything we might have to say. None of this is to suggest that they did the right thing in voting for the Donald – they certainly didn’t- or that they should be excused for their bigotry and willed ignorance – they certainly should not – but it’s not too difficult to have some empathy for their frustration. I am frigging frustrated myself.
I don’t whether Joanna has mentioned this to you, but, in case she hasn’t, I made a trip to a verdant corner of Trumplandia (the lovely Commonwealth of Kentucky) during the weekend before the election to visit my mother and my brother Ron and his new family (second wife and her two daughters from her previous marriage). My time in the Bluegrass mostly confirmed much of what I’ve mentioned above. On a positive note, my mother told me when I arrived that she was voting for Hillary Clinton. Her main reason was Trump’s absence of experience in foreign policy, a mildly surprising rationale. She found his statements about “taking their oil” deeply problematic. My mother can be really aggravating sometimes but she has a solid moral core that leads her to make good decisions in elections. Good for Mom. She also mentioned that, although she’s pro-life, she can’t accept the absence of exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother. During this presidential campaign, she’s been fairly courageous in her own way. At the Southern Baptist church she attends, virtually everyone is voting for Trump, among them most of her closest friends. Some of them have told her that no woman should ever be president, an attitude that emanates from the pulpits of many Southern Baptist churches. When I was growing up, the theme of the Fathers’ Day sermon was invariably how the wife should happily submit to the headship of the husband. A corollary to this of course is that no woman should ever be in a position of authority over a man. I have heard many Baptist preachers fulminate on how the emergence of women from the household into the public sphere has been the source of every social ill in America. These attitudes are far from dead in some parts of the country. Couple this with the conviction that La Clinton is the Whore of Babylon, then pulling the lever for Trump becomes very easy for these women.
* * *
In terms of things you might want to read, books have set forth the complexities of the situation better than articles. The best polemic on the Democratic Party’s meandering path away from its values is Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? There are several books that offer good explanations for why so many voters feel angry and abandoned. Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism examines the way the fruits of economic recovery have been distributed (maldistributed ?) and makes some practical suggestions about how income inequality can be addressed. In the paperback edition, there’s a table on p. 162 that illustrates better than anything I’ve seen why so many people feel left behind. A popular and in some respects beautiful book that has hit the bestseller lists is J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Vance is a conservative politically; however, his description of his experience growing up in eastern Kentucky and Ohio rings very true to me. A legitimate criticism is his undervaluing of the racism of some of the people he describes; nonetheless, he offers a good portrait of the cultural circumstance in which Trump’s message resonates. He’s become a popular talking head on every cable news network regardless of its political slant. An excellent, somewhat Thompsonesque account of the misery in the rustbelt is Charlie LeDuff’s Detroit: an American Autopsy. A good and frightening assessment of the Sisyphean task confronting the Democratic party if it wishes to return to the electoral promised land is David Daley’s Ratfucked: the True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy. It deals with the Republicans’ successful efforts to gerrymander states and create quasi-permanent majorities for themselves. It’s depressing. The Republicans have been playing three-dimensional chess while the Democrats have been barely in the game. The outcome of the election is not going to improve the Democrats’ prospects. As you know, the backlash against elites is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Owen Jones, a very smart guy who writes for The Guardian, assesses the demonization of working people in the United Kingdom in The Establishment. I’ll stop here since this is beginning to look like a reading list for general exams.
On a fun note, I have a musical recommendation for you and especially for Paul. I don’t know whether Joanna has mentioned this to you, but I have for years been a huge fan of an outfit called the Drive-By Truckers. They are sort of Americana/Alternative Country/Southern Rock. They come to Richmond on every tour and I attend their shows if I’m around. In fact, I took my brother to one of their concerts in Lexington, Kentucky, just days before the 2012 election. They played this past Friday in Richmond and I planted myself about eight feet away from the center of stage and refused to move. It was a fantastic show. They are touring in support of their new album – An American Band – which is being compared in its timeliness to Green Day’s American Idiot. The Truckers were in fact Colbert’s musical guest on The Late Show on the night of the election and that was no coincidence. The album is fantastic and the Truckers did a full live performance of it for NPR and it’s available online. They also did one of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts. In these strange, disturbing times, it’s a comfort to see some good art pushing back against deepening philistinism.
* * *
Yours warmly, David
In the paragraph excised from the email, there was a buried gem worth excavating and presenting here. While I was in the Bluegrass, some sentiments were expressed piecemeal and unironically in my presence regarding the value and consequences of higher learning: “. . .college-educated people are snobs, academic types barely work for a living, these people are no smarter or better informed than anyone else, college is just not as hard as it used to be, these people will mislead you if not lie to you, etc., etc.”
That just about says it all. The strange wisdom one gains through travel, so broadening.
Before descending into the recent political morass, some preliminary posts may offer clues about my worldview and contextualize what follows. In 1986 I was taking my time completing an MA at the University of Kentucky and needed a summer job. I answered a newspaper ad and was hired as a copyeditor and news-of-record reporter at The LaRue County Herald News, a weekly based in Hodgenville, Kentucky.
It wasn’t an overly taxing job. Once a story had been typeset, I took the proof to comb it for typos, poor orthography, grammatical errors, and transgressions of format.
The other task entailed walking to the courthouse and summarizing the week’s transfers of property and civil and criminal court proceedings. This was educational. “Do not publish” sticky notes pasted on pages in the deed books revealed how desperately some local worthies wanted their machinations in real estate to be kept under wraps. David Lynch’s characterization of small-town life rings true. I ignored the sticky notes. Reporting on the courts, I was threatened with a lawsuit for the first time in my life by a father convinced that I had persecuted his son by publishing the boy’s arrest, arraignment, and assignment of a court date on a marijuana charge. At least the threat was leveled with “Christian love,” or so the gentleman insisted.
The paper’s editor realized these responsibilities were not enough to occupy my time. She handed me a newspaper style guide – I think it was the one for the Associated Press, maybe The New York Times – and told me to peruse it at my leisure. By summer’s end, it was nearly memorized, time well spent.
I was still intermittently idle, so I was given a story to report. Mary Lowe – a Hodgenville resident and a schoolteacher at Fort Knox – was lobbying in Washington to halt a plan to shutter base schools at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell and scatter their students across nearby county systems. A gracious and elegant lady, she invited me into her home and sat for a lengthy interview. The remaining information for the story was gathered over the phone. One call was a chat with the local congressman, William Natcher, a Democrat who eschewed campaign contributions and never missed a vote across four decades in the House (1953-94). That’s old school.
The finished product was lengthier than the editor had anticipated. She grumbled about the Herald News’ inability to compete with The (Louisville) Courier Journal in human interest stories, but she ran it as it was. It was gratifying that my grandfather, not given to praise, told me he liked it, since he had inspired my reading of newspapers. Even better, Ms. Lowe was overjoyed. She came to The Herald News office to thank me and paid me a sterling compliment: “You earned your degree!” The unconcealed chagrin of The Herald News‘s main reporter, an inveterate eavesdropper, was a bonus.
As I read the thing now, some of it is cringeworthy; nonetheless, it’s difficult not to muse about a path not taken. My regard for journalists, especially print ones, has always been high. As a teenager, I watched the Watergate hearings and read Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men. I still screen the book’s film treatment occasionally to remind myself of the power of good journalism. The summer at the newspaper was a scant year before the Reagan administration dismantled the Fairness Doctrine and cleared the way for the adoption by the electronic news media of its infotainment, ratings-driven model, a pox on American political life. My arc, however, was already set. I was bound for more graduate study. Nonetheless, working at a newspaper still seems like a decent way to live.
A couple of years ago I took photographs of the article from the bound copies of The Herald News in the LaRue County Public Library. I noticed that it shared the front page with a photo of Wallace Wilkinson, who was pressing the flesh in Hodgenville shortly before announcing his candidacy for governor. I doubt that this image and accompanying article made much of an impression on me in the moment; however, it illustrates how smaller, nearly sub rosa events, both personal and public, can have profound implications.
I needed summer employment a year later and took a job at Wallace’s Books in Lexington, the college textbook company that Mr. Wilkinson founded after dropping out of the University of Kentucky. It became the linchpin of his substantial fortune. We summer warehouse inmates referred to the operation, not so affectionately, as “Wally World.” It certainly was no amusement park. Perhaps more about that at another time.
Mr. Wilkinson had indeed declared his candidacy and the Democratic primary fell during my term of employment. I suppose Mr. Wilkinson deserves thanks for enabling me to make a political statement through inaction. As the primary approached, the warehouse’s toiling masses were summoned and told by a supervisor that there would be a march and rally downtown in support of the boss’s candidacy. We were invited to participate, in effect to be paid partisans for a day, though we were under no obligation. The supervisor said, “I hope y’all come. I think Mr. Wilkerson is a pretty good guy.” I didn’t. His barebones platform emphasized a pledge to impose no new taxes and to inaugurate a state lottery. Seven years into the Reagan presidency, my view of tax policy and especially of supply-side economics was already formed. I had read David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics. I, moreover, considered state lotteries appalling. I stayed at the warehouse. Virtually every other worker headed downtown. Unstaffed, the place ground to a halt, so I passed the afternoon examining piles of incoming used books and preparing a book order. An employee discount was the lone fringe benefit at Wally World. I ordered a rack of Penguin paperbacks over the summer, so many that an observant supervisor expressed appreciation for an employee who valued books since they were his vocation.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Mr. Wilkinson’s ultimately successful bid was managed by a relative unknown, a man named James Carville. This is where Mr. Carville made his bones. It is fair to wonder whether he would have helmed Bill Clinton’s presidential run in 1992 had this earlier campaign gone sideways. This throws into relief the mercenary impulses of the political consulting class: Mr. Carville’s first success was shepherding a candidate who, as a Democrat, was a Ronald Reagan fanboy.
Mr. Wilkinson’s career epitomizes the maladies that have metastasized in American politics: As a businessman, he refused to pay sales taxes for his bookstores throughout the 1960s (a prefiguration of Jeff Bezos and Amazon?). He acknowledged his use of deceptive advertising. His businesses in 2001 were found to have been under water since 1992 and kept alive only through a marshalling of loans analogous to check kiting on herculean scale. He invoked Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination more than seven score times when deposed on the matter. He died bankrupt in 2002. As a politician, he inspired campaign reform legislation through his lavish spending. His Republican gubernatorial opponent characterized his lottery scheme as “Alice in Wonderland” economics. His nephew – his appointment secretary – was convicted of extortion. His wife mounted a failed run for governor in an unsubtle scheme to circumvent term limits. His memoir boasted of his contempt for political norms. He was a poster child for Democrats who sidled away from the party’s New Deal and Great Society values, who animated the Democratic Leadership Council (once chaired by Bill Clinton), and who narrowed the Overton window. Beyond this, Mr. Wilkinson today might be called “Trumpy.”
This has run longer than intended, but perhaps it offers some tiny wisdom: Attend closely to the thin end of the political wedge while the ax head’s downward arc can still be pushed aside.
Anyway, here’s the bit from The LaRue County Herald News —
A LaRue County resident heads a lobbying delegation to the United States Congress. Mary Lowe, of Hodgenville, a veteran teacher in the Fort Knox schools, has led a group of five other teachers to Washington on three separate occasions in an attempt to persuade the House Armed Services Subcommittee not to eliminate funding for the Fort Knox School system.
Lowe first became aware of plans to close all schools on the nation’s military bases last December. On December 3, Public Law 874, the proposal which would close these schools, was approved by President Reagan.
According to William Natcher, Kentucky’s Second District congressman, “last year, in 1985, there was no objection (to changes in these schools) from any source. It was moving right along because the date was 1990. . .When it began to look as if they were going to move as quickly as possible, the local districts became alarmed.”
On May 9, the General Accounting Office issued a draft of the proposal by which these schools would be switched to other jurisdictions. Copies were sent to all concerned parties, including the superintendents of the school systems that would be affected.
In late August, a final vote upon the recommendations contained in the Government Accounting Office proposal will be taken in the House Armed Services Subcommittee for Facilities chaired by Rep. Ron Dellums of California. It is toward that vote that Lowe has directed her lobbying efforts.
Lowe believes that closing these schools, especially those at Fort Knox, would create a no-win situation for the three entities that would be most affected, the teachers and staff, the students, and the regions in which the schools are located.
The proposal to close the schools stems from a jurisdictional change in Washington. From their inception, the schools had been financed by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which later became the Department of Health and Human Services. The funding for this department comes from the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations, currently chaired by Rep. Natcher.
In 1981, jurisdiction over these schools was transferred to the Department of Defense. Lowe says that “the Department of Defense decided that it was in the business of defense, not education, so they decided that they wanted to transfer the operation of these section 6 (military base) schools to the state in which each school was located.” If the DoD proposal is approved, the school systems at both Fort Knox and Fort Campbell, as well as 15 others, could be under different operation by July 1, 1990.
According to Lowe, there are three possible outcomes for the Fort Knox schools. The schools could be closed and the students bused to the nearest state facility. In the case of Fort Knox, the majority of the students would be placed in the Hardin County system and the remainder would be bused to Meade County. Fort Campbell students would be sent to schools in Christian County, Ky., and in Tennessee.
Another option would be to permit the local school districts to utilize facilities already located on military reservations. In the case of Fort Knox, the land in the military reservation was ceded by the state to the federal government and federal law prohibits any local agency from working on federal property. Lowe said that the constitutional issues involved probably would prevent the use of that alternative.
Lowe thought that the best solution would be to restore the control of these schools to Rep. Natcher’s subcommittee. Rep. Natcher agreed. Natcher said that, “If the schools were in our committee there would be no problem. . .Some of the schools want to be transferred to local school districts. I’m against this in Kentucky. . .Those that don’t want to go to the local districts should go into the Department of Education for funding.”
Should Lowe’s worst fears be realized and the schools are actually closed, the alternatives for Fort Knox’s 250 teachers and 213 other staff members would not be promising. Only a very small percentage of these people could opt for early retirement and the rest could stand to lose significant retirement benefits.
Teachers in the Fort Knox system are treated as out-of-state teachers. They would be allowed to purchase 10 years of retirement benefits, but, Lowe said, “the cost would likely be between 20 and 30 thousand dollars, which we would have to pay in a lump sum to the Teacher Retirement System.”
Cuts in salary are also not out of the question for these teachers. Currently, their pay is comparable to that of teachers in the Louisville-Jefferson County metro area. If they are transferred to the Hardin or Meade districts, some would be paid approximately $2,000 less per year.
Also, the teachers would be allowed to transfer only 10 years of teaching experience into a Kentucky school district. Sixteen percent of Fort Knox’s teachers have over 20 years of experience. In the case of Lowe herself, she would lose 10 of her 20 years as a Fort Knox teacher and her pay would be comparable to that of a Hardin County teacher with only 10 years of experience.
Also, Lowe noted, there is no guarantee that the local districts would hire these teachers. In fact, there is a strong disincentive to hire many of them. Seventy-three percent of Fort Knox teachers have a master’s degree or some other higher degree, demanding higher pay, which would effectively price them out of the local market. It would be far less costly for the local school systems to hire teachers as they graduate from college and allow them to finish their master’s degrees as they teach.
Nor is Lowe the only LaRue County resident who could be affected by a change in the Fort Knox schools. A number of LaRue Countians either teach at Fort Knox or are members of the school system’s staff. These Fort Knox employees have expressed varying degrees of concern.
Laura Underwood, a 33-year teaching veteran at Fort Knox, said that she is not personally affected because she has the necessary number of years to retire, but that teachers with 20 or 25 years in the system stand to be significantly hurt by loss in benefits.
Peggy Rice, a high school librarian, was greatly taken aback by the possibility of the schools closing, but said that “you can’t continue and work staying upset.” She said that “Kentucky stands to be the big loser in all of this. . .because of the influx of 8000 more students.” According to Rice, military families living on post at Fort Knox are not considered Kentucky residents; therefore, they do not pay Kentucky taxes. If the students at Fort Knox and Fort Campbell are placed in local systems, they will receive educations for which their parents provide no support with their tax dollars. She is also concerned with the possibility of being required to interview for jobs in the local system as any prospective employee.
Other LaRue County residents employed by the Fort Knox system are Edwin Lobb, Ann Miles, Sherilyn Bell, Danny Flanders and Don Ford. Louise Rosen, a recent retiree, would not be affected.
Lowe says that “Kentucky has taken some excellent steps in education reform by making some changes that are progressive. . .and what the federal government is proposing is giving Kentucky 8,000 more students (4,000 from Fort Knox and 4,000 from Fort Campbell) whose education the state must now finance.”
According to Lowe, another problem that the Department of Defense is ignoring is the special needs of students from military families. Most of them are transient. Students who spend their entire high school career at Fort Knox are rare. And many of them have pronounced emotional problems resulting from frequent absence of a parent. Teachers in such cases often become surrogate parents, and these emotional problems, not dealt with correctly, can seriously affect academic performance.
Lowe believes that the local school systems do not have the facilities or the funds to deal with these problems. Fort Knox has 12 full-time guidance counselors, more than the entire Hardin County system, a system that serves many more students. There are special teachers for gifted students, 11 reading improvement teachers, and a full-time nurse in each building of the school system.
Many students from military families come from bilingual families and Fort Knox provides courses in English as a second language to aid them. Full-time aides are now on staff to provide day-long care for children with severe handicaps.
Lowe does not believe that these needs could be met by the local school systems, especially in light of the fiscal problems they all now are experiencing. Even without an influx of students from Fort Knox, the Hardin County system grows by 350 to 400 students per year and the system needs around 12 million dollars to come up to standards for classroom space. Only one to two million is expected from the legislature.
Even officials of the Hardin County public schools admit that the system could not easily receive these students. Kay Sharon, Coordinator of Community Relations for the Hardin County schools, says that if Fort Knox students are transferred to her system, she “would hope that the federal government would make some provision because we don’t have enough funding as a county-wide system.”
Such funding, however, would not likely be made available, according to Rep. Natcher. He says that, within the General Accounting Office proposal, the students would be treated as any other student and the local systems would receive only the money that federal education funding formulas presently allow for each student.
“Any reasonable person would conclude that the result could be a steep erosion of educational quality and sharp decline or even disappearance of needed school services not only for the Fort Knox pupils but also for those pupils located in the surrounding school districts,” Lowe said.
Lowe took her first trip to Washington on Feb. 6 of this year. She met with Rep. Ron Dellums of California, chairman of the house committee that will make the final recommendation on the Section 6 schools. She also met with Rep. Natcher and almost every other member of the Kentucky Congressional delegation. Lowe said that on the whole they were well received, with Sen. Wendell Ford and Rep. Carroll Hubbard being especially helpful.
In March, Lowe and her colleagues returned to Washington to deliver personally a progress report to Rep. Natcher and to Sen. Ford’s staff.
After the March meeting, Lowe coordinated a large letter writing campaign in support of the keeping the Fort Knox schools open. Teachers, students, and local residents enthusiastically made their opinions known to the Kentucky congressional delegation. Many of the transient residents of Fort Knox and their relatives sent letters to their congressmen in their home districts. Lowe believes that this letter writing helped to increase awareness of the issue.
Lowe made her most recent trip to Washington in April when she testified before Rep. Natcher’s subcommittee.
As a lobbyist, Lowe has received high marks. Rep. Natcher said that “Mary Lowe is making every effort to represent her schools and teachers in an excellent manner.”
No final decisions will be made until Rep. Dellums’ subcommittee opens hearings in August. Lowe said she hopes to be asked to Washington then to testify once more.
Since April, Lowe has continued her lobbying efforts in other quarters. In an attempt to increase grass-roots support, she has contacted, by her own count, between 150 and 200 local civic groups throughout the area, including a number in LaRue County. She says that there is much interest in any changes occurring at Fort Knox because they usually have consequences for the entire region.
Lowe has also directed her efforts at certain key state officials. She said that Gov. Martha Layne Collins, State Supt. of Education Alice McDonald and State Sen. Joe Prather have all pledged their support. Lowe has also contacted a number of candidates for office and they have promised to aid her if they are elected.
Lowe has also been invited to attend a meeting of representatives from all the military base school systems across the nation in August at Fort Bragg, N.C. Deputy Assistant Sec. of Defense Barbara Pope will also be there.
In all respects, Lowe appears to be an excellent choice for a spokesman. A native of Simpson County, she is one of five children, several of whom are active in the teaching profession. She began her college education at Kentucky State University with the intention of eventually attending law school, but she finally settled upon a degree in elementary education.
She began her teaching career at Georgetown Elementary in Hodgenville in 1960. Soon thereafter, she married her husband William. When the LaRue County schools completed their consolidation and Georgetown Elementary was closed in 1966, Lowe moved to the Fort Knox school system, where she has taught since. During her 26-year teaching career, she has completed a master’s degree at Western Kentucky University and has served for seven years as the president of the Fort Knox Teachers Association.
She is member of the First Baptist Church, the League of Women Voters and the Hodgenville Women’s Club. She said she hopes to become involved more actively with these groups once the Fort Knox matter is resolved.
As I was putting the finishing touches on the materials for this post, I went to the online version of the The LaRue County Herald News to see whether its archives were digitized. No luck there; The Herald News has a light digital footprint. However, a search turned up two newer stories about Mary Lowe.
The first was an appreciation of her to commemorate Black History Month in February 2013. It detailed her serendipitous path to her first teaching job at Georgetown Elementary, also known as the Georgetown Colored School, in Hodgenville in 1960. By all accounts, she was a wonderful instructor who had to contend with the remnants of the separate and decidedly unequal accommodations that Black students and teachers endured. She left for the Fort Knox school system when the Georgetown school was closed in 1966 as the final step in fulfilling the requirements of Brown v. Board of Education and the completion of the consolidation of the LaRue County school system.
The second story appeared in August 2013. Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes namechecked Ms. Lowe in the kickoff speech for her unsuccessful campaign to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell. In 1988, Ms. Lowe became president of the National Association of Section Six Educators, the organization for teachers on military posts. She traveled to Washington that year to lobby for the right of teachers in military schools to bargain collectively. And therein lay an instructive anecdote. She took her case to Senator McConnell. According to Ms. Lowe, he said, “I can’t do that. I do what the President tells me to do when it comes to a vote in the Senate. I can’t do that.” As she turned to exit, the senator “came from around the desk and put his hand out to shake my hand. Somebody came out to snap my picture. . . .There it was in the paper – an example of how the senator works for his constituents. I never felt so insulted.” Mr. McConnell’s shabby treatment of constituents was evident during his first term and has never flagged, as underscored by Matt Jones in Mitch, Please! How Mitch McConnell Sold Out Kentucky (and America Too). No voter unable to brandish a corporate campaign contribution need apply. Ms. Lowe was more warmly received by Representative Natcher, who for her “ranks among the best.”
In 2012, Mr. Lowe became the vice president of the LaRue County Democratic Women’s Club. In every respect, she’s a person after my heart.
The 2013 stories are found at www.laruecountyherald.com/content/teacher-learned-along-her-students-georgetown-school and www.laruecountyherald.com/content/grimes-mentions-hodgenville-woman-campaign-speech.
The Bourbon Progressive feels compelled to have a slash of Elijah Craig in honor of this great lady. Wherever you are, here’s to you, Mary Lowe!
One more thing: The story about Alison Lundergan Grimes, Mitch McConnell, and Mary Lowe was written by Linda Ireland, a past editor of The LaRue County Herald News. For me, she’ll always be Linda Powell, the girl who sat behind me in junior American History and senior English. If you by happenstance see this, Linda, kudos on the story. I hope you are well and prosperous.