Diatribes of Jay: How Purity Subverts Strategy

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“I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” — Will Rogers Let me begin by stating the obvious. It’s horrible that two of the three highest elected officials in Virginia, both white men, admittedly appeared in blackface decades ago. It’s even more horrible that the senior of them—no less than the governor—allowed a photo of a white man in blackface standing next to a white-robed and pointy-hatted KKK figure to appear on his own page in his medical school yearbook.

What makes this all especially horrible is that it occurred long after Dr. King and the civil rights movement, not to mention the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, had shown us how badly this sort of thing has butchered our history and stunted our growth as a democracy. And today we recognize the KKK for what it is: a domestic terrorist organization that, over its long history, has killed far more of us Americans than Al Qaeda killed on 9/11.

The governor can’t seem to remember whether or not he was in that photo. I can remember a trick I pulled with my own name under a group photo in my high-school yearbook from 1962. That’s almost fifty-seven years ago. And I’m not a pol whose career and electability depend on remembering names, dates and places.

So, yes, the emergence of evidence of past racism, or at very least extreme racial insensitivity, among the highest ranks of Virginia’s elected officials is indeed horrible. So is the apparent tendency to lie about it or obfuscate it, rather than come clean.

But I’ll tell you what’s even more horrible than all of this. It’s the prospect of Virginia’s state government turning red again, when demographic shifts and enlightenment seem finally to be turning it irrevocably blue.

It’s the prospect of the Dems failing to turn Florida, Georgia and North Carolina blue by 2020, and so failing to achieve a durable Electoral College majority of 273 votes without any Midwest states but Illinois, which is a Democratic stronghold. It’s the prospect of voter suppression based on race, which has tarnished this nation for over a century, continuing to subvert our national credo for yet another decade. It’s the possibility of scoundrels who just don’t want members of minorities or poor people to vote, and who lie about their true motives, getting away with it again and again, in the twenty-first century.

According to Mark Shields [set the timer at 6:08], every black lawmaker in Virginia endorsed Ralph Northam for governor. If so, it’s impossible to believe that Northam exuded the faintest aroma of voter suppression. And isn’t that the biggest battle throughout the South and red states today? Ask Kris Kobach. Ask Stacey Abrams. Ask Andrew Gillum.

So what we have here is a Democratic strategic blunder of the highest order, a willingness to sacrifice the main battle, if not the whole war, for a symbolic victory. As Mark Shields also said [set the timer at 1:08], if was as if the Dems in Virginia had formed a circular firing squad.

But how, you ask, could the Dems know in advance that the Lieutenant Governor also would be subject to credible accusations of a different sort, amounting to criminal conduct? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. Even with a Democratic Lieutenant advancing to Governor, the prospect of a Democratic Governor and Attorney General of Virginia stepping down under accusations of racism would have been—and still could be—a disaster for the cause of reform in the South. And the cause of reform in this nation as a whole depends primarily on reform in our South.

At a deeper level, the whole debacle suggests a different but more insidious side of racism. Why didn’t the two affected white officials and those Dems now calling for their resignations get together in private and work out a strategic solution? Aren’t they all supposed to be on the same team, fighting an organized political party in which racism, white supremacy and voter suppression have come to reside?

With a little hurried consultation in private, three things might have happened. First, there might have been an honest agreement on the facts of the long-ago transgressions, as the two white men best recalled them. Second, there might have been a consensus on an apology sincere and abject enough to satisfy all but extremists. Third, there might have been a resolution of censure in the Virginia legislature, to set down a marker for the future and a draw a clear line for handling these situations, more of which are likely to emerge. But the solidly Democratic executive branch that whites and blacks had worked so long and hard together to assemble in Virginia would have endured.

Why didn’t this happen? I can think of only two possible reasons. First, enough racial suspicion may exist even among experienced Democrats to have suppressed cooperation. Second, the Dems may have unwittingly absorbed enough of Trump’s dysfunction to seek to try and resolve every issue in the “court” of public opinion. In other words, demagoguery may have replaced deliberate and rational political strategizing even among Democrats. If so, God help us as a nation.

Whatever the real reasons for this debacle, one thing is certain. The vote suppressors, white supremacists and haters know what they want and are much better organized. They don’t fight among themselves, at least not publicly. If progressives, Dems and anti-racists don’t get better organized and stop fighting among themselves—if they can’t work together even in the face of monolithic betrayal of our American egalitarian tradition—the redemption of this nation, which has already waited a century and a half, will have to wait yet another decade or two.

That means another term of Trump and who knows what might follow. If there’s a better motivator for cooperation and strategizing among Dems, I can’t think of it.

Endnote: The Temptation of Twitter. Among others, I have sometimes called “social media” like Facebook and Twitter “instruments of the Devil.” The more I see them in action, the more apt that description seems to me, and the more the adjective “social” seems both inapt and inept. There is nothing “social” about Tweeting or posting on Facebook.

A truly “social” response to an event like the Virginia debacle would have involved four steps. First and foremost, it would have involved deliberations by a group of Dems who know, respect and value each other and have power to affect the result. Second, it would have involved privacy, the sort of closed meetings in smoke-filled rooms that characterized party politics before direct primaries opened the Pandora’s box of demagoguery. Third, it would have involved time—on a human, not digital, scale—for people to think, consider and arrive at a conclusion in a group. Finally, it would have involved the resolution of a group of people working together, with all the compromise and conscious, mutual assumption of risk that working together entails.

A Tweet demanding that Northam resign involves none of these things. It involves no consultation, just words hurled through the Internet without any group consideration. The Tweeters involved don’t even know who their audience is, let alone respect or value them. There is no privacy: the whole point of Tweeting is to get your first lonely thought out there among the masses and receive your personal dopamine hit from pressing “Enter.” There is no time for deliberation, just the semi-automatic process of a Tweet going viral, which of course augments the dopamine hit. Finally there is no satisfaction of working together, let alone compromise or conscious assumption of risk. There is just the fleeting joy of getting your first impression off your chest.

This is politics?

When I think of the process, I picture a classical Devil, with horns and a long red tail, whispering in the Tweeter’s ear. “Do it!” he says. “Press the button! You’ll have had your say, and it will be out among the masses, worldwide, in milliseconds. You won’t even have to wait fifteen minutes for your fame. And you needn’t bother to run it by your staff.”

The political party that first realizes how much better many heads are than one, and how much thinking requires more than 280 characters—and that first outlaws this sort of random, thoughtless Tweeting—will have an insuperable advantage over all those who revel in their fleeting viral fame and transient dopamine rushes. Such a party will have the same advantage as the first ape general who understood that a battle is not a big free-for-all, but can be organized.

Our democracy will continue to founder like a truck with two broken axles unless and until we put the “social” back in politics, as people, not digital circuits (or nerdy megalomaniacs like Zuckerberg) understand it.

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Diatribes of Jay

09 February 2019

How Purity Subverts Strategy

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