Hey y’all,
I did not want to write this week’s newsletter. Not because I don’t love talking to y’all – I do – but because it is so time consuming and there are other things I would like to work on. As I continue to balance other projects, this newsletter may grow shorter or change in format.
If y’all have any thoughts on what you would like to see (or what you don’t need to see), let me know. I don’t make any money writing this, meaning it is a passion project I do for myself and for you – my most loyal readers. Because of that, I value your input very much. I want to deliver a newsletter you want. So please, send me your ideas!
That said, if you do want to pay me for writing this newsletter, you can become a Patron for as little as $3 a month, make a one-time donation using PayPal, or buy me a book to help with my research. All contributions are greatly appreciated, no matter how big or how small. None are expected, though. This newsletter is and will remain free.
In the meantime, let’s talk Virginia. It was a bruising defeat for the Democrats, but as Jaime Lannister once said, “there are always lessons in defeat.” Of course, as Olenna Tyrell answered him, “you must be very wise by now.” You’d think Democrats would be wise by now but… ugh, let’s just get into it.
x. Skylar
On the Virginia elections…
There is no sugarcoating it: Tuesday’s elections were bad for Democrats. A quick rundown of why I think that was would include Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema standing in the way of progress, making it hard to tout any accomplishments. Those two make the party look dysfunctional and unable to govern, which objectively is a fair assessment. Given that part of why Joe Biden was elected last year was to bring back functioning government, the past six months have not been a good look for Democrats. Some will blame the Squad and progressives, but it is Manchin and Sinema who are setting all the roadblocks. So, I blame them.
There are other things, too, that went wrong in Virginia. Gas prices are up, and America is a nation of drivers. The supply chain crisis isn’t going away. My grandmother can’t even get her Gatorade, which she needs as her doctor limits her water intake. Americans notice these things, and rightly or wrongly, they blame the folks in charge.
Then there’s the fact that Virginia tends to be contrarian in its off-year gubernatorial elections. In nearly half a century, only one candidate has won the governor’s mansion when their party held the White House. That that man was Terry McAulliffe, who won in 2013 when Barack Obama was president but lost in 2021 when Joe Biden was president, diminishes the “couldn’t be helped” claims being made by everyone from your progressive auntie on Twitter to the president himself. But… it’s worth noting, I guess.
Most people think that Tuesday’s elections do not bode well for 2022. I am most people. The difference is, I never thought Democrats had a chance of doing well in 2022 in the first place. We lost seats in last year’s House races, which to me indicated that Republicans who were not called Donald Trump were still more electorally viable than the left had hoped.
Trump has not tainted the party the way many thought he had. Why? Because Americans don’t care about democracy. At least, not as much as they care about their material needs.
That sounds like a bold claim, doesn’t it? But consider the people in your own life. Not the chronically online or political nerds like me and, probably, like you who read this obscure newsletter by an obscure political writer. Rather, consider the uncle you only see at Thanksgiving. The coworker next to you who still has a Dilbert cartoon hanging in his cubicle. The moms who think no one knows it is wine in their thermos at your kid’s soccer game.
How many of them have mentioned January 6 to you? I’m guessing none. But I bet they’ve mentioned gas prices. Or how groceries are more expensive. Or how the shelves are empty. Or how they just want COVID to be over already. (Ugh, we all do, Dana. We all do. Pass the wine.)
Generally speaking – and this is really a tough pill to swallow for people like me, who believe strongly in our convictions – people don’t care about the things we political nerds want them to care about. Life is not an episode of the West Wing.
It is said of Mussolini that he made the trains run on time. Hitler stabilized the German economy. He got people to work and put food on the shelves. He also led to the wholesale slaughter of eight million people, including six million Jews, and the destruction of two continents. A thoroughly terrible and evil man. The worst in human history. But the German people at most shrugged as he did it, because at least there was bread and a stable currency.
I am not comparing the good people of Virginia to Nazis or the Germans who enabled them. I am not even comparing Glenn Youngkin or the Republican Party to Nazis. There is no world in which that is a fair or equitable comparison. What I am doing is trying to explain to you this: not everyone who stood by as Hitler did what he did was a Nazi. The “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt called it.
I believe most people are good. I also believe most people are short-sighted. The big issues – democracy, the rule-of-law, economic and racial justice – that animate people like me and you don’t animate most people (and that is regardless of demographic).
That’s not an insult to them. I fully understand I am uniquely privileged in that I get to consider these issues for a living. Not everyone has time to worry about democracy. They’re too busy worried about living.
I’m paid to write my opinions on the news of the day. Most people are paid to flip burgers. To drive trucks. Stock shelves. Push paper. It is monotonous, tedious work that is both grueling and obscenely unrewarding – both in terms of job satisfaction and sheer dollar value. These people don’t have the time nor the luxury to consider the big questions for more than maybe, at most, half an hour a day while they watch David Muir read the news.
And they don’t want to spend their precious free time, what little of it they may have, researching structural racism or income inequality or the consequences of repealing Roe v Wade. Whether you think they should spend their free time doing those things is irrelevant (and I don’t, for the record). The point is they are not.
They have children to feed and cart off to football practice and cheerleading camp. They have elderly parents who need looking after. They are tired and just need a fucking nap. When they get home from a long day of work, they don’t want to watch Rachel Maddow prattle on about how democracy is in danger. They want to guess who the Beach Ball is on the Masked Singer. (It was Honey Boo-Boo and Mama June. I just checked.)
These people are the hardworking people America depends on, and they are right to complain about inflation and gas prices and the supply chain because these things have a tangible effect on the quality of their lives. It is the job of elected officials to solve these issues, whether they created them or not. If voters don’t like their plan – or didn’t hear it, or think they’ve not done a good enough job fixing the mess they hired these people to fix at the last election – they are within their rights to vote for someone else. You don’t get to decide what issues voters care about. Voters decide.
And honestly, I can’t blame voters for being upset. Democrats can’t even get done what they promised to get done. Look at Capitol Hill. The party is squabbling amongst itself over whether these hardworking Virginians (and Mainers and Texans and Alaskans and so on) deserve paid time off after a human being has been ripped from their or their partner’s body. What they have done – from the perspective of a voter on the ground looking around at empty shelves and rising prices – hasn’t been all that great. So maybe the last guy and his ilk weren’t all that bad, insurrection aside.
You may disagree with this analysis. I do. But voters didn’t, and part of that – most of it, I would say – is the fault of the Democrats. Terry McAuliffe always struck me as a weak candidate, but I don’t know enough about Virginia politics to really say. What I do know is that in an era where voters crave change (we saw that in Donald Trump on the right, in the way the Squad excites the Democratic base on the left), running a former governor who was also the campaign chairman for both Bill and Hillary Clinton is probably not your best idea.
But then, for the party of progress, Democrats stubbornly refuse to change. Nancy Pelosi has been the leader of the House Democrats since I was a junior in high school. I turn 36 in three and a half months. That’s roughly half my life. Likewise, Hillary Clinton had been a national figure for 25 years when she ran in 2016. Joe Biden has been in Washington since God was a boy.
Democrats always go with Old Faithful, even when Old Faithful has long since stopped being a reliable attraction. Our leadership is like a flip phone in a smartphone world – cutting-edge for its time, endearingly retro, but completely out of step with the modern era. We need to ditch our Razrs and upgrade to an iPhone.
That may be a conversation for another day, though. The point of this essay is simply that voters pick the issues, and they pick the people they want to fix those issues. Right now, Democrats aren’t fixing the issues people are concerned about. It’s time to start squabbling and start getting shit done. Last night, the House passed the infrastructure deal. So maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to course correct. Don’t hold your breath, but maybe cross your fingers.
On classroom culture wars…
You probably noticed that in the above section, I did not really touch on the role that Critical Race Theory or the conservative culture wars played in the Virginia election. There are three reasons for this:
1) I have not sufficiently studied the data to see if my theory, first put forth on Twitter, that the moral panic over CRT did turn out the GOP base and flip swing voters from Biden to Youngkin, though the initial data I’ve seen indicates this is so
2) I believe no one issue decides an election, and this is no different. It is probably much more important that Democrats address material needs than fight a classroom culture war
3) I will likely revisit this topic in more depth sometime in the future
But let’s unpack some of what I think is missing from the narrative, particularly that being propagated by certain American Marxists who fetishize the working class to the point they refuse to see any possibility of bigotry swaying their vote.
First, let’s define what the right means by critical race theory. I feel like, depending on who you ask, you’ll get a dozen different answers. This clip from a recent CBS News report, however, really sums up much of the opposition:
You cannot have an accurate understanding of 400 years of American history without understanding race. It is central to any telling of our nation’s story and has been since the first English colonists arrived and stole this land from the indigenous tribes and decided to racialize slavery so that the child of a slave woman was born into slavery and to treat slaves not as people, but as chattel. Both were novel to the American concept of slavery, differentiating it from most forms of slavery throughout human history where children of slaves were not necessarily born slaves, those slaves were seen as people and not animals, and slavery was not dependent on the color of your skin.
Marxists use dialectical materialism as a lens through which we view the world, including history. This means that history is the story of competing interests: feudalism vs capitalism, capital vs workers, and so on. We use a class analysis to understand these phenomena, focusing not on individuals but on groups, institutions, and systems. Doing so allows us to zoom out from the individual, see patterns emerge, and better understand the material reality of society.
I believe that any Marxist understanding of American history is one that understands race is central to our identity and society, both past and present. That does not mean that class does not exist or that white people can’t be poor and oppressed – class does exist, and many white people are poor and oppressed; in fact, I center much of my work around those people by virtue of writing about Appalachia, which is full of poor white people – but it means that zooming out from the individual and looking at the bigger picture, race is a major characteristic of that picture. It animates everything from patterns of poverty to graduation rates in institutions of higher learning to the prison population to and to and to.
Working class and poor whites have often benefited from this system of racial oppression, even if the benefits have been negligible at best. There is ample scholarship on the Jim Crow era to show that many poor and working-class whites felt a sense of pride in not being at the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak. They might be poor white trash, but at least they weren’t Black.
They enforced a system of racial segregation in part because of this feeling of superiority but also in part because they did not want to compete with the labor of freed Black Americans. It is why they burned crosses and lynched Black people throughout the South (and indeed the rest of America).
It is also why they rebelled against the use of convict labor in coal mines, fighting the 1892-93 Coal Creek War against the Tennessee state militia. Alex Haley once said – and I am paraphrasing something I heard Boomer Winfrey once quote him as saying – that Coal Creek was the first instance of the labor movement and the civil rights movement coalescing. That may be true. But the miners at Coal Creek weren’t fighting for racial justice. They were fighting to get imprisoned scabs out of the mines.
Public schools have, over the last 70 years, frequently been ground zero for battles over race. The wealthy whites of the South were able to exempt themselves from desegregation by founding segregation academies. Private schools proliferated after Brown v Board of Education, and in cities like Louisville and Nashville it is still common for middle- and upper-class whites to send their children to private (often religious) schools. Schools thus became a place of conflict between whites who couldn’t afford to opt their children out of integration and Black Americans.
This started in the 1950s with Brown, and it continued on into the 1960s and 1970s with arguments over busing. I am actually old enough to remember the controversy over busing being discussed and debated, even in the 1990s. That was not so long ago.
Republicans have been very good at using classrooms as a wedge issue and inciting moral panic over what is being taught in public schools for a very long time. Certainly, Nixon made busing an issue in 1972. Later in the decade, conservatives in California and across the nation would stoke a moral panic over gay teachers.
The War on Drugs entered classrooms in the 1980s with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign. In the 1990s and into the 2000s school prayer, Bible study, and *gasp* Harry Potter ignited the wrath of the Moral Majority and their fellow right-wing travelers. (Oddly, it’s now the left trying to cancel Harry Potter, showing how while a lot of things never change, some things do.)
All of this is to say simply that classroom culture wars work. The right knows this. It is why they keep starting them. The panic over CRT is no different. And I think it worked for Glenn Youngkin.
This doesn’t mean that everyone who voted for Youngkin is a foaming-at-the-mouth racist. I don’t believe that for one second. But no one exists in a vacuum. We are all products of our culture and our history. Some boogeymen historically work very well to frighten white voters. “They’re corrupting your kids!” is one of them.
You can never have working-class solidarity in America unless you understand race and work to eradicate racism. Race has been used very effectively by capitalists and rightists to divide the working-class throughout our history, and 2021 is no different. Earlier this week I tweeted, somewhat glibly, that white people scare easy. It’s a generalization, but one with more than a kernel of truth to it as I believe Tuesday’s results show.
Any Marxist worth her or his salt knows all this. Be wary of anyone who claims to be a Marxist but also dismisses right-wing scaremongering over CRT as being a fantasy of the left or anyone who fetishizes the working-class to the point they believe they can do no wrong. Their failure to apply a class analysis to issues of race – or anything, really, outside of class itself – is a red flag. They are drenched in neoliberal individuality on everything else, and that is dangerous. Buyer beware.
What I’ve been up to…
For The Independent, I wrote about the viral videos and images from Hazard High School which showed girls dressed as Hooters servers and boys dressed in lingerie and wigs while performing for teachers. No, really. I know, I was horrified too. What horrified me almost as much – though not quite, because few things are as horrifying and outrageous as minors giving authority figures lap dances – was that the right tried to paint this as an example of the loony left run amok. This is Hazard, Kentucky for God’s sake. The most leftwing person to come out of there was Daniel Mongiardo, and he was practically a Republican.
Continuing with my coverage of the Hazard High School story, I wrote about the dangers of defending tradition for tradition’s sake at 100 Days in Appalachia. Some community members there in Perry County did defend the “Man Pageant” as something they’ve been doing for years. I don’t remember ever hearing about this when I lived in Leslie County, but even if it was going on 20 years ago, that is no reason for it to keep going on. Some traditions deserve to die.
I’m excited to share my first piece for the Daily Yonder, a website dedicated to telling the stories of rural America! I wrote about how the PRO Act – something I have previously covered in this newsletter – would be a boon for rural workers. I’m sad that it hasn’t gotten more coverage (the infrastructure bill has sucked up all the oxygen, though obviously that’s very important too), so I appreciate the Yonder letting me write this. I hope to write more for them in the future, possibly on a monthly basis. Stay tuned!
What I’ve been reading…
The Washington Post had a timely story on how the Wampanoags, the tribe who helped the settlers at Plymouth Colony not die, regret that decision. It’s a very American story about the genocide and mistreatment of the native populations of this country, as well as their continued struggle to reclaim their land and assert their identity and sovereignty in the 21st century.
Tom Peck, The Independent’s political sketch writer, had a very brutal but entirely accurate takedown of the Prime Minister and the entire Conservative Party’s handling of the Owen Paterson debacle. tl;dr Conservative MP Owen Paterson was found to be in breech of parliamentary rules by being paid by a company he then lobbied ministers on behalf of while serving as a member of parliament. Boris Johnson then ordered all his party’s MPs to vote to change the rules so that Paterson would not face any punishment – probably not out of loyalty to Paterson but to help himself down the road. Worse than a blunder, this is straight up corruption.
It’s not really something I “read,” but rather something I watched. This CBS News report on the moral panic over critical race theory is very enlightening. It’s about 50 minutes long, but worth the investment of your time.
What I’ve been listening to…
I can’t remember if I have shared Mary Chapin Carpenter before, but I’ve been on a real kick listening to her music over the past couple of months. If I have, here’s a repeat. If I haven’t, have a listen. What a remarkable singer-songwriter.
A picture of the puppy…