It was another Fourth of July weekend in Portsmouth-Norfolk, so there were editions of The Virginian-Pilot to read. In a letter written to respond to another letter, a gentleman named Ed Harvey defended the Electoral College’s antidemocratic bent. Mr. Harvey seemingly suffers existential dread of being ruled by California and was unconcerned with the distorting effects of the Electoral College on the heft of the individual ballot from state to state. One must wonder whether Mr. Harvey would feel the same if Ronald Reagan were still ensconced in the Golden State’s executive mansion. Cue the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles.” The Virginian-Pilot didn’t print my explication of the Electoral College’s perverse math.
Ed Harvey, “Thank Founders for Electoral College,” The Virginian-Pilot, 4 July 2019, 12 (www.pilotonline.com/opinion/letters/article_aed183e8-9d08-11e9-9483-7bd082037a0b.html).
Behind Ed Harvey’s support for the Electoral College’s anointing of Donald Trump as president in 2016 lurks a morass of undemocratic assumptions. Mr. Harvey blithely casts aside the ideal of one person, one vote without explaining why a vote cast in California should have only one third the value of one cast in Wyoming, the product of the Electoral College’s distorting impact on democracy. Is Mr. Harvey pleased that a vote cast in our own Commonwealth likewise had only a third of the weight of a Wyoming vote? (“Population vs. Electoral Votes,” FairVote [https://www.fairvote.org/population_vs_electoral_votes]).
Mr. Harvey’s apparent embrace of minority rule is troubling in an age of efforts to distort yet further electoral outcomes through high-tech gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation of social media, and meddling by malign foreign powers.
Mr. Harvey should bear in mind that the arc of the nation’s history bends toward the forging of a more inclusive democracy, whether through the Thirteenth Amendment (abolition of slavery), the Fourteenth (Black suffrage), the Seventeenth (direct election of Senators), the Nineteenth (women’s suffrage), or the Twenty-Sixth (suffrage for eighteen-year-olds). The Electoral College has subverted the will of the majority twice in the past two decades. Wouldn’t any thinking citizen want every voter to have an equal say in the outcome of the democratic process? Or are we to assume that Mr. Harvey’s attitude toward the Electoral College would be less sanguine if it had yielded a different result in 2016?
The Richmond Free Press in March 2019 ran a pair of articles touching on education, one of them a wire service report on the College Blues scandal, the other a story by Jeremy M. Lazarus on the mayor of Richmond’s resolve to improve the funding of the city’s public schools. The maladies assailing education from preschool to graduate programs are manifold and my ideas about the sources of the illness are well formed; perhaps there will be more about that later. Suffice it to say that it’s impossible to disentangle the issue from the country’s politics.
“Fallout Continues from College Admissions Scandal,” The Richmond Free Press, 14-16 March 2019, A1, A5 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/15/fallout-continues-college-admissions-scandal/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Stand By Your Plan,” The Richmond Free Press, 14-16 March 2019, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/15/stand-your-plan/).
“Gaming the College Admissions System and Defunding K-12 Public Education,” The Richmond Free Press, 21-23 March 2019, A7 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2019/mar/22/gaming-college-admissions-system-and-defunding-k-1/).
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.
People in fact did come to know Dave Brat and that’s why he’s the former rather than sitting representative for Virginia’s seventh congressional district. His meteoric ascent and equally spectacular flameout can be read as a prefiguration of Trumpian politics, an instance of a local political dynamic with national implications.
Some context is useful. From 2003 – when The Better Half and I moved into our house – until 2017, we voted in Virginia’s third congressional district and our congressman was Bobby Scott. We met him in 2010 at a house party held down the street in support of his reelection. He was glum. He had taken the “hard vote” – Barack Obama’s characterization – to pass the Affordable Care Act and knew that the Democrats’ majority was endangered. He survived, but Democratic control didn’t in a political slaughter of the innocents, a purge of Democrats who’d done the right thing. Some commentators equated it with the 1994 midterm election when Democrats who had backed Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase were decimated. Court-ordered redistricting in 2016 to correct racially motivated gerrymandering placed us in the fourth congressional district. Donald McEachin became our congressman. We’ve been well satisfied with our representation.
More to the point, our district borders on Virginia’s seventh congressional district. In 2000, just before our arrival in Richmond, Eric Cantor replaced the seat’s retiring twenty-year Republican incumbent. In short, he grabbed a safe GOP seat. A stroll westward from our house soon crosses the boundary between the fourth and seventh districts. Proximity to Mr. Cantor’s Republican bastion led to a peculiar phenomenon in my neighborhood, wannabe Cantor voters, people with Cantor yard signs despite inability to pull the lever for him. One can always dream I suppose. It’s not difficult to imagine what sort of people these are.
Mr. Cantor was reelected repeatedly by comfortable margins. The Democrats fielded opponents, mostly sacrificial victims. An intriguing effort to unseat him came in 2002. Ben Jones, formerly “Cooter” on The Dukes of Hazzard and onetime US congressman from Georgia (1989-93), threw his hat into the ring. The theory likely was that a “yellow dog” Democrat had the best odds of chasing Mr. Cantor. It didn’t work; however, the margins narrowed a bit in Mr. Cantor’s later races.
In 2014, Mr. Cantor faced a primary opponent, Dave Brat, an economics professor at Randolph Macon College, a liberal arts school in Ashland, Virginia. Mr. Cantor must have sensed that Mr. Brat spelled trouble for him. An anecdote illustrates this. My Beloved and I live not far from the Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral, sponsor of a twice-yearly Greek festival. We usually attend it, mostly for the food. Mr. Cantor had released a pack of tee-shirted, well-scrubbed young minions, a Cantor teen brigade, to circulate through the crowd and encourage people to vote for him in the primary. I think they were giving away Cantor tchotchkes (no interest here, except for fashioning effigies). Mr. Cantor, needing to exert himself, was pressing the flesh in an unlikely locale. The majority of the festival’s attendees probably lived outside his district and he was blocks from Carytown, Richmond’s answer to Greenwich Village, the antithesis of a GOP stronghold.
Mr. Cantor’s concerns were not unfounded. Mr. Brat accomplished what no Democratic general election opponent had. Upon his defeat, Mr. Cantor resigned before the expiry of his term and made himself available to the Right Wing Lobbying Industrial Complex, ever the statesman.
How did Mr. Brat do it? He centered his campaign on immigration, channeled the Tea Party scorn for government bailouts and taxation, wrapped himself in the flag, and waved the scriptures around. He demonstrated that there was a vein of political angst to be mined. His Crassness exploited some of these same themes in 2015-16. When Melania’s Enduring Curse was installed in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Mr. Brat found his tribe and displayed a Trumpian taste for conspiracy-theory lunacy and dissembling. He lost his seat in 2018 to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. That his post-congressional gig is the Deanship of the School of Business at Liberty University should surprise no one. How better can Mammon and the Deity be served simultaneously?
In January 2018, before Mr. Brat’s loss to Ms. Spanberger, The Richmond Times-Dispatch published an op-ed by him in which he extolled his adherence to principle. It was too much to stomach. A response was sent to the paper. I was correspondent of the day again. Hip, Hip, Hurray. An attack isn’t ad hominem if it’s true.
Dave Brat, “Put Principles over Politics and Personality,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 28 January 2018, E5 (https://richmond.com/opinion/columnists/rep-dave-brat-put-principles-over-politics-and-personality/article_3d415539-7961-5784-8c5a-82f4f79015f7.html).
“Brat Should Hold Off on Self-Congratulation,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 February 2018, A10 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-feb-12-2018-brat-should-hold-off-on-self-congratulations/article_07f9a4d2-6ac7-5075-bdc1-959a64892110.html).
The letter submitted to The Richmond Times-Dispatch exceeded the word limit and the paper dropped its penultimate paragraph. Here’s what was in the original:
“Brat’s commitment to rule of law will perhaps be tested by the ‘memo’ being brandished by Representative Devin Nunes, the indifferently recused chair of the House Intelligence Committee. This committee has authorized the document’s release while suppressing a minority response. The committee, furthermore, ignores pleas from the Justice Department to vet Nunes’ handiwork, reportedly a farrago of distortions and half-truths, for classified materials. Why does the GOP engage in serial conspiracy-mongering rather than facilitating the Special Counsel’s work? Absent straw, Mueller will make no bricks.”
This letter was written in particular circumstances. The first anniversary of the “American Carnage” inaugural address approached. The GOP’s surrender to the “America first” onslaught and to President Small Hands’ faux populism was apparent, transactionalism stripped to its purest essence. For the Republicans, demolition of the constitutional edifice and open, nearly gleeful corruption and self-dealing were acceptable so long as the Federalist Society’s judicial nominees were jammed onto the courts and the affluent could stuff more money into their pockets through ill-conceived tax cuts. Grover Norquist’s infamous quip – that all the GOP required in a president is “enough working digits to handle a pen” – had proven too prophetic to amuse.
Personal context too is relevant. She Who Must Be Revered and I spent an extended Christmas holiday in California. My father-in-law’s death was a year past and my mother-in-law needed to be moved into an assisted-living apartment and to have her former residence emptied of belongings. It was decided – by whom I’m not certain – that The Better Half and I needed a vacation after this. Cancellation of a professional engagement had left The Beloved One with an unused hotel reservation in Earl’s Court, so a week in London was planned. Subsequent events told us that we might have contemplated before our departure the potential for the sunk cost fallacy being in play. The vagaries of travel soon intervened. Just as we cleared airport security in San Francisco, My Happiness began to feel unwell. We departed anyway, but she was ailing throughout our time in the United Kingdom.
We, whatever the circumstance, were in London. A good deal of time was passed in our postage-stamp sized room but, whenever The Better Half rallied, we ventured out and took in the sights. I maintained a longstanding custom: a copy of The Guardian on weekdays and The Observer on Sundays. On the eve of New Year’s Eve, The Guardian ran an opinion by Jonathan Freedland, a favorite of mine among British commentators. Mr. Freedland has worked in the American Empire as a reporter and he offers a view of the United States from an outsider, a well-informed and mostly sympathetic one. He doesn’t engage in kneejerk anti-Americanism. This undergirds his credibility when he takes America to task. Nearly two decades earlier I had read his delightful polemic, Bring Home the Revolution (1998), in which he argued that the American Revolution snatched away an Enlightenment political movement that belonged by right to the British. In short, Jonathan Freedland “gets” us. His understanding of the American project surpasses that of many citizens, a shameful reality. He realizes that for all its messiness, contradictions, and hypocrisies, much in the American constitutional system remains admirable and worthy of emulation.
Mr. Freedland was disillusioned as 2017 waned. President Big Mac had pressure tested the Constitution and exposed its inherent shortcomings. The opinion emphasized the system’s reliance on honoring of political and constitutional norms. There too is a tacit assumption that American political leaders will conduct themselves with moral integrity and devotion to constitutional principles, not moral turpitude and civic ignorance. The Bridge and Tunnel President’s yearlong tenure had been a practicum in the capacity of an unscrupulous actor to subvert American governance.
Mr. Freedland’s credibility made the editorial a painful read. The Guardian’s guidelines for submissions resemble The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s, so, availing myself of a hotel notepad, I drafted a letter and sent it. Its thrust was that the game was not over; cards remained to be played. The constitutional system had undergone assaults more existential than that posed by a former host of a reality show. There were also glimmers of hope: The Special Counsel’s investigation proceeded, resistance continued, the elections in Virginia signaled a repudiation of The Donald, and the ballot box remained a potent weapon in the arsenal.
The letter appeared online on New Year’s Day 2018 and in print the day after, a speedy turnaround. My Better Half was unwell, so I hiked to a Marks and Spencer Simply Food on Kensington High Street to feed us and found the paper there. It’s satisfying to call He Who Must Be Ridiculed a fascist in print. The photo attached to the letter’s online version is a classic.
The verdict on the letter after passage of time is mixed. Much of Mr. Freedland’s diagnosis of America’s political ills is valid; more will be said about that later. Nonetheless, the ballot box was a bulwark against the worst abuses. There was legitimate fear of authoritarianism had President Yeti Pubes been reelected and this threat remains plausible so long as the GOP continues its canoodling with Trumpism.
Jonathan Freedland, “The Year of Trump Has Laid Bare the US Constitution’s Serious Flaws,” The Guardian, 30 December 2017, 31 (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/30/trump-us-constitution-weakness-founding-fathers).
“Trump’s ‘Clown Fascism” and the US Constitution,” The Guardian, 2 January 2018, 29 (www.theguardian.com/law/2018/jan/01/trumps-clown-fascism-and-the-us-constitution).
Jonathan Freedland mentioned the musical Hamilton, which he’d seen upon its London opening, as an example of American creative verve. One would be hard pressed to disagree. Because of The Most Excellent Spouse, I saw the original cast in the Manhattan in October 2015, then a touring production in Richmond, then the streaming version last summer. It was inevitable that it would reach London’s West End. I wondered, when I first saw it, how a British audience would respond because of the wicked comic portrayal of George III and because Alexander Hamilton was perhaps the most obscure of the principal founders for non-Americans.
I needn’t have been concerned. Jonathan Freedland’s was the prevailing critical and popular assessment. One afternoon, while in a queue at the Marks and Spencer Simply Food on Earl’s Court Road, I overheard the locals extolling the show’s virtues. Excitement for it was genuine and unqualified. It was the performance to see. To have a ticket was to be envied. Its graceful Atlantic crossing is a tribute to Lin Manuel Miranda.
A final fact about Jonathan Freedland. During a subsequent journey to the United Kingdom (September 2018), I was browsing in a bookstore on Tottenham Court Road and my eyes alit on a paperback entitled To Kill the President. Its cover image was a stars-and-stripes festooned pistol. It seemed like something for the moment, so I examined a copy. The author was Sam Bourne, a nom de plume of Jonathan Freedland, who in his other life cranks out thrillers. The novel has an alternative title – The Plot Against the President – and cover – the White House instead of a firearm – doubtless a concession to American sensibilities. I am curious to know the chronology of the book’s genesis and completion. The president under threat is a barely disguised version of The Mendacious One. The book reached print in June 2017, barely five months after the inauguration. Was Mr. Freedland inspired by The Perambulating Eructation’s candidacy but considered his election an implausibility and devised the plot as a flight of fancy? Or did he think that Mr. Crude Imposition might pull it off and consider his storyline quasi-plausible? Or was the novel mostly written speedily after the 8 November debacle? The paperback traveled to the US in checked luggage. It’s an airport novel no American should read in an airport.
Virginia’s off-off-year elections in 2017 were in the news as a barometer of popular sentiment after nearly a year of Trumpian rule. The Commonwealth was especially suited for this test. It had voted Democratic in three consecutive presidential contests, had two Democratic senators as well as a Democratic governor; however, its statehouse remained in Republican hands. A wave-category outcome sufficient to fracture GOP control of the House of Delegates would signal disenchantment with Queens’ Gift to the World, especially as a result from south of the Mason-Dixon line, the lone jewel of the old Confederacy a chagrined Sun President had been unable to duct tape onto his diadem.
The Democrats had a good night. Ralph Northam became governor, Justin Fairfax lieutenant governor, and Mark Herring attorney general; the Great Embarrassment lay in the future. The Democrats made substantial gains in the House of Delegates. The Republican advantage shrank from twenty-two to a single seat, then jumped to two seats when drawing of lots determined the winner of a putatively tied district. Had fortune smiled on the Democrat, the party would have wrested away control of the chamber. Nevertheless, there were encouraging changes. The incoming class of Democratic delegates boasted the nation’s first transgender state legislator (Danica Roem), a Democratic Socialist (Lee Carter), and much diversity beyond that. A friend from Manhattan, she of the senior women’s book club, expressed it best: “Thank you, Virginia!”
The letter below comments on The Richmond Free Press’s election coverage. The pleasing outcome did not bestow laurels on which to rest. The GOP would mobilize to pad its bare majority and deploy every tool available, including underhanded ones. Margins are fragile in a state gradually shifting its party allegiance. When the letter was composed, control of the House of Delegates remained uncertain. To satisfy my curiosity, I fed raw numbers from the House of Delegates races into Excel and discovered that the Democratic candidates in aggregate had taken nearly ten percent more votes than the Republicans statewide but could still conceivably fall short of a majority of seats. That’s what happened and that’s the crux of the matter.
Nonetheless, the hope engendered in Virginia in 2017 would be realized in 2019.
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “Virginia Elects Democrats to Top Posts, Other Offices,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/its-sweep/).
Jeremy M. Lazarus, “House of Delegates to Become More Diverse,” The Richmond Free Press, 9-11 November 2017, A1, A4 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/10/house-delegates-become-more-diverse/).
“‘There Is No Space for Complacency,’” The Richmond Free Press, 16-18 November 2017, A9 (http://richmondfreepress.com/news/2017/nov/17/there-no-space-complacency/).
Virginia has off-year elections for statewide offices and state legislative seats. Kentucky does this too. This depresses turnout, probably a feature, not a bug. The only upside to this custom is that it makes the Commonwealth a gauge for the electorate’s mood; more about that later.
The off-off-year elections also ensure an extra season of bloviating punditry. As the 2017 election neared, The Richmond Times-Dispatch printed an unsigned editorial asserting that the US Supreme Court could not and should not do anything about gerrymandering of federal and state legislative seats. The newspaper adopted this stance just as litigation arising from toxically, almost comically, gerrymandered Wisconsin reached the high court. Interesting timing, that.
The Supreme Court’s decision hinged on the whims of Anthony Kennedy, who had long dithered by braying about his need for a precise measure of the bias driving gerrymandering. This reads to me as motivated obtuseness. He balked yet again and soon afterward retired, his work done. The Supreme Court’s present composition likely will make this the final opportunity for the high court to address the issue. It’s just another step in the normalization of minority rule. Sigh. For whatever it’s worth, The Richmond Times-Dispatch gave me another gold star. Be still my heart.
“Gerrymander Is Awful. The Supreme Court Isn’t the Answer,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 5 October 2017 (https://richmond.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-gerrymandering-is-awful-the-supreme-court-isnt-the-answer/article_fc6ab70e-8ec9-5d09-b92c-928ae9f71023.html).
“Today’s Gerrymandering Is Undemocratic,” The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 October 2017, E2 (https://richmond.com/opinion/letters-to-editor/cod-oct-22-2017-todays-gerrymandering-is-undemocratic/article_45384630-bf60-500e-924b-6f9faa241a30.html).