LITCHFIELD: A Debate Worthy of the Name
In This Issue: Editor's Note | Ben Litchfield responds to Shaun Kenney | Odds & Ends at FXBGAdvance.com
Editor’s Note: Living Multi-partisanship
PBS News Hour former anchor Julie Woodruff is deeply concerned about the growing divide in American political and cultural life. “Bipartisan gatherings seem a relic of the past,” she wrote in March.
We concur. But a return to bipartisanship won’t fix what isn’t working in America, or in our communities. Multi-partisanship - a willingness to listening to all points of view - will. More speech, not less, is the answer to what troubles our Republic. Speech that we listen to respectfully. And speech that we disagree with, with integrity.
This is a founding principle of the Fredericksburg Advance.
Over the past two weeks, Shaun Kenney has written two pieces that some found long overdue in local media - a strongly worded conservative argument. Others have disagreed with his pieces, sometimes vehemently.
Today, Ben Litchfield answers Kenney with his take on those two writings.
The exchange between the two is a model for what multipartisan discussion looks like. Strong argument. Strong counterargument. And mutual respect toward each individual.
It’s precisely the type of discussion we all need to learn to have. As Litchfield concludes:
In sum, I think Shaun Kenney occupies an important space in our political discourse and I look forward to reading more of what he has to say in the Fredericksburg Advance even if I do not agree with most of it…. [And] my fellow Democrats should [not] write off what Mr. Kenney has to say …. It is our obligation as Democrats to respond to individuals like Mr. Kenney with more than insults, whispers, or those magic words that shut down far too many conversations. The public deserves a grand debate worthy of the name.
The Advance is committed to hosting that grand debate. And we thank Kenney and Litchfield for showing the way.
Debate Worthy of the Name: A Response to Shaun Kenney
Over the past few weeks, we have been treated to Shaun Kenney’s finger wagging at local Democrats without so much as a single response from any prominent Democrats. Certainly, there has been a lot of private complaining among friends, but no one has bothered to take Mr. Kenney to task in print for some of his more outrageous claims. He makes it seem as if local Democrats are single-handedly destroying democracy, civility, and ushering in a dark age of authoritarianism. By not responding to Mr. Kenney, Democrats cede the narrative to him and his supporters without so much as a fight.
I have no intention of letting that happen. I am reminded of the words of Justice Louis D. Brandeis that the solution to ideas that we find objectionable is “more speech, not enforced silence.” Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 377 (1927) (Brandeis concurring). Whether that silence comes from a well-meaning desire to maintain order in a polite society or the malicious workings of a censor trying to limit free thought, silence cheapens the marketplace of ideas. It is our duty as thinking people to speak up when we find the words of others to be unacceptable. And so, in that spirit, I offer my thoughts on Mr. Kenney’s recent jeremiads.
‘What the Spotsylvania School Board Gets Right’
In “What the Spotsylvania School Board Gets Right,” Mr. Kenney goes to great lengths to accuse local Democrats of intolerance for daring to speak out against the actions of the Spotsylvania County School Board. He refers to the public as an “angry mob” that is actively sabotaging the “conservative majority.” He writes that the “school board in Spotsylvania has a right to succeed or fail on their own merits rather than through deliberate and orchestrated sabotage – accept it.” For starters, local Democrats are not to blame of the dysfunction in Spotsylvania. The fault rests entirely with the Spotsylvania County School Board.
Mr. Kenney would know that if he stopped for a moment to ask why so many parents and caregivers show up at the monthly school board meetings when they could be doing just about anything else. It is because the Spotsylvania County School Board is not a group of public servants who, in Mr. Kenney’s own words, “will listen to a citizen complaint and act upon it as if their children lived in the same community.” It is a deeply partisan body that serves purely partisan ends. After two years of catastrophic learning loss for our students, what did the newly elected “conservative majority” do? Take up book banning.
The “conservative majority” on the Spotsylvania County School Board cannot perform basic functions like approve meeting minutes let alone maintain adequate staffing in our schools or provide legally required services to our students with disabilities. However, the body can move with lightning speed to ban works of literature that a single parent finds objectionable or implement a constitutionally dubious policy targeting vulnerable children. It should surprise no one that parents and caregivers are at their wits’ end over a school board that cares more about satisfying the “extreme” elements of the Republican Party than about the common good.
The proof that the fault rests entirely with the Spotsylvania County School Board can also be found in who is showing up for school board meetings. Far from being an “angry mob” of local Democrats, the parents and caregivers showing up for school board meetings represent varying political viewpoints with most representing that “center” – or “honorable middle” – that Mr. Kenney has written so much about. Megan Jackson, who is running against incumbent Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, is hardly a member of the Democratic Party rank and file. Neither is self-described conservative Rich Lieberman.
If the Spotsylvania County School Board wanted to maintain even the smallest pretense that it serves the “common good” then they would not share parent communications with the SpotsyWire, an extreme right-wing rag aligned with the “conservative majority.” It is because the so-called “conservative majority” does not serve the common good. They serve their own purely partisan interests and they have no shame using their own media outlets to shame parents who speak out against them. Parents and caregivers have every right to object to their antics – after all, petitioning our government for redress of our grievances is a Constitutional right.
In short, they are reaping the chaos that they have sown.
Moreover, as a “small-d” democratic matter, I strenuously object to the idea that any elected body has a “right to succeed or fail on their own merits.” Popular government is messy. The public has every right to petition their elected officials and, if they do not feel like they’re being heard, to protest. Our nation’s history is filled with stories of individuals, tired of an unfeeling or unresponsive government, who took to the streets to demand change – who put their “bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levels, upon all the apparatus” to make the machine stop and think for a moment about their concerns.
I agree with Mr. Kenney that there is a line between protest and anarchy. But a few parents and caregivers speaking out against the Spotsylvania County School Board for ignoring the needs of their children so that they can satisfy purely partisan political goals hardly crosses that “line” – angry voters shouting at you is part of being an elected official. Like with any form of speech, there’s a time, place, and manner for it and I believe Spotsylvania County School Board meetings are the appropriate time and place – and, considering the abuses by this school board, the appropriate manner of speech.
‘Can the Center Hold Against the Extremes?’
In another piece, “Can the Center Hold Against the Extremes?”, Mr. Kenney faults cartoonist Clay Jones for depicting Stafford County Supervisor Crystal Vanuch as a bigot for making comments about being a “bright red line” against affordable housing. He decries that the political conversation is not about the merits of affordable housing but, rather, about whether Supervisor Vanuch said something racist. He writes “yet somehow, we lose something in the reduction of the question to open racists vs. open borders.” I agree that we lose nuance when distilling complex social problems into a Left-Right binary for consumption by the media.
But here, context is important. You cannot separate discussions of housing policy from questions about race. The official housing policy of the United States government for several decades following the New Deal was segregation and redlining. The consequences of that policy are still being felt today in Black communities across the country. Moreover, Black Americans are more likely to be denied access to mortgage credit, have their homes undervalued by appraisers, or have realtors steer them into less desirable neighborhoods. So, in the case of housing, whether Supervisor Vanuch said something racist or is a bigot has very important policy implications.
And, in the case of Supervisor Vanuch, Clay Jones hit the mark.
Supervisor Vanuch has a history of inflammatory and – yes – bigoted behavior. It was her actions on the Stafford County Planning Commission that cost taxpayers almost a million dollars to settle a religious persecution lawsuit. She crafted an ordinance the sole purpose of which was to deny the All Muslim Association of America, Inc., the use of their land for a cemetery and then withheld vital information from the Stafford County Board of Supervisors about potential conflicts of interest regarding that ordinance. When asked about the ordinance by another Supervisor, while litigation was ongoing, she said that she “doesn’t want to see a [expletive] Muslim cemetery across from her and she would rather die before she allowed her husband to be reminded of those people.” Those people.
In her deposition, Supervisor Vanuch admitted that her husband’s service-connected post-traumatic stress disorder was a factor that led her to oppose the cemetery. As someone who has friends and family suffering service-connected PTSD from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, I pray for her husband. But the Muslim community in Stafford County did not cause Mr. Vanuch’s injuries and to hold them accountable for the unspeakable acts of terrorists overseas simply because they share the same religion is bigotry plain and simple. Her actions were so blatantly wrong that the Trump Administration sued Stafford County for civil rights violations.
Nor is her opposition to affordable housing about quality of life or concerns about crime. It has everything to do with the fact that, in her mind, lower-income voters are more likely to vote Democratic and she does not want to see more Democrats moving to Stafford County. She has said so herself and would likely admit it proudly as a self-described “Trump Republican.” So, perhaps Mr. Kenney will forgive those of us who read Supervisor Vanuch’s comments about being a “bright red line” against affordable housing in context of who she has shown herself to be – a partisan hack who has no problem using her office to discriminate against minorities.
Supervisor Vanuch is hardly a victim of “woke extremism.” If anything, she is the victim of her own actions. No one should seriously be surprised that members of the community read her “bright red line” comment about affordable housing to be a wink and a nod to the white hood-donning and citronella torch-carrying elements of our society. That is the type of politics that she trades in. She is the dime-store version of politicians like George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Donald Trump who inflame racial animosities and weaponize them against people who have asked for nothing more than to be treated fairly and – yes – equally.
Mr. Kenney would do well to rid his own house of the corruption within it and he can start with the likes of Stafford County Supervisor Crystal Vanuch. Maybe then, reasonable minds can come together to debate the true merits of affordable housing including how we address the racist history of housing policy in the United States. Republicans and Democrats have done so before including the passage of the landmark Fair Housing Act of 1968 which garnered 161 Republican votes in the U.S. House of Representatives and 29 Republican votes in the U.S. Senate. If we empower those “reasonable minds,” on both sides, we can do so again.
Closing Thoughts
I want to close this piece somewhat differently than most polemics. I’d like to end in the spirit of comity. There is much to commend in Mr. Kenney’s writing. His advocacy for the “common good” against self-serving politicians on the “extremes” is worthy of attention even if I disagree with the “center” versus “extremes” narrative that most politicians are pushing these days. Far too often, what is described as “center” ends up looking a lot like the politician and a lot less like the voting public. For example, I have received far too many mailers from Tara Durant labelling Joel Griffin as an “extreme progressive” while casting herself as some kind of centrist.
I agree with Mr. Kenney that most people want “good schools, good roads, honest pay, education worthy of the name, decent health care, and a vocation — not mere employment — in a career they don’t hate —” and that our country would be far better off if politicians legislated towards these common goods rather than to satisfy purely partisan interests. I also agree that our political discourse is deeply broken – perhaps irreparably so – and that the “dumbed down trench warfare” of the modern political parties is hurting our country. It is no wonder that an increasing number of voters describe themselves as “Independent” and wash their hands of “both sides.”
As someone who sees the structural inequalities in our country and the rising lack of economic mobility, I also have no patience for politicians who “pretend to give a damn yet fix absolutely nothing.” Every year, candidates talk about protecting healthcare yet where is the funding for the social workers implementing our public healthcare programs? A social worker recently told me that they are so overworked that their strategy for processing Medicaid appeals is to deny even meritorious appeals and require the individual to reapply. Virginia’s unemployment insurance program is one of the worst in the nation yet we pretend to care about workers.
In sum, I think Shaun Kenney occupies an important space in our political discourse and I look forward to reading more of what he has to say in the Fredericksburg Advance even if I do not agree with most of it. That does not mean that I will not take him to task when I think he misses the mark. Rather, it is because I respect Mr. Kenney that I feel compelled to do so.
Nor do I think my fellow Democrats should write off what Mr. Kenney has to say as the ravings of a “right wing nut job.” I think it is our obligation as Democrats to respond to individuals like Mr. Kenney with more than insults, whispers, or those magic words that shut down far too many conversations. The public deserves a grand debate worthy of the name.
Benjamin Litchfield is the former Chairman of the Stafford County Democratic Committee, a member of the Seventh Congressional District Democratic Committee, and a former candidate for the Democratic nomination for Senate District 27. He is the current Aquia District Representative on the Stafford County Utilities Commission.
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Ben, thank you for this well written response. Many agree with your statements and welcome them in the Advance.