KENNEY: Can The Center Hold Against the Extremes?

In This Issue: New Dominion Podcast; Can Local Democracy Survive the Local Demagogues... and MORE!

New Dominion Podcast - Meghan and Cori on Affordable Housing

Meghan Samples and Cori Blanch join Shaun Kenney discussing the outcome of the GRWC Regional Housing Summit and some critical first steps, as well as an in-depth conversation regarding the Fredericksburg community's reaction to events in the Gaza Strip.

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Creator: Levan Ramishvili | Credit: © Wally McNamee/CORBIS // CC 1.0

Quick — name the last great United States Senator.

For too many, we have to pluck back to the early days of the institution itself, when the Senate was a bulwark against partisan contagion meant for those who had survived the political — former governors, former ambassadors, and former congressmen who had transcended the factional and the vulgar. Daniel Webster comes to mind.

In the modern era, Senator Robert Taft and Henry Cabot Lodge dominated the early 20th century, with men such as Lyndon Baines Johnson, Everett Dirksen (who has a building named after him), Jesse Helms, Phil Graham, Bob Dole, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Strom Thurmond and Paul Simon revered as lesser yet still statesmen in their own right.

Few will remember Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, John Kerry, John Warner — the last of the Virginians to properly represent Virginia — John McCain and even George Mitchell as revered statesmen.

Yet it is Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) who should earn the crown as the last great United States Senator, known not only for his principles but for his enduring bipartisanship in an era which spat upon such nuance — and sadly still does today.

"The central conservative truth,” said Moynihan during his Harvard Lecture in 1986, “is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Classical liberalism in the tradition of Jefferson and Adams at its finest.

One of the most admirable traits of the Fredericksburg Advance is our commitment to a multipartisan stance — one that has shocked a fair number of readers and pleased a great many others. Yet when the shock is more of an electric current which would rather trade an open and healthy public square for a sterile and lifeless non-partisan viewpoint which seeks not to offend precisely because it is in service to those in power?

That is something I cannot and will not abide. Nor — and I say this as a warning — is it something that the other half of our community will abide.

Democracies Invite Demagogues For Reasons You May Not Want To Hear…

In short, I am a little bit sick and tired of how narrow my Democratic friends have become — and I’m angry about the way our discourse has devolved due to that narrowness.

Yes — I am placing blame.
No — it is not the fault of Republicans.
Yes — there is a reason why.
No — I doubt Democrats want to hear it.

Moynihan isn’t exactly a household name anymore. As time wears on, whether by our tastes or for lack of achievement, all the great statesmen of the last 100 years have either dissolved or been discarded.

Yet for those who admired the man and the institution of the US Senate? Moynihan’s legacy as a statesman, academic, professor, ambassador and bi-partisan charm remain an omnipresent feature of what an American Senator — and what American public discourse — ought to be.

Unfortunately, we have traded Moynihan for the muddle of our present-day leadership on both sides of the aisle and at virtually all levels of government — because that’s what the public rewards.

Two weeks ago, I was criticized by a Republican friend of mine for even exploring the idea of multipartisan perspectives, as it would give succor and aid to our enemies — our neighbors! — as I was told point blank:

“We are at war!”

Of course, for daring to point out that precisely half of our community was being walled out from our public education system and that the self-described proponents of democracy were behaving as anything but democrats, Spotsylvania Republicans were compared to Hitler. Nazis. Fascists. Segregationists.

Really?

Really???

I mean look — I’m no fan of banning books. I’ve gone on the record as opposing it, I have a long history of opposing book burning. Yet the very idea that the Spotsylvania School Board has to be hamstrung out of the gate rather than be allowed to fail or succeed on their own merits strikes me as utterly un-democratic and a total repudiation of what self-declared defenders of democracy claim themselves to be.

Does this make me literally Hitler! (TM) for pointing this out?

Apparently so — and I’m not so sure that makes me the bad guy here.

Even within these pages, Clay Jones compares Stafford supervisor Crystal Vanuch to the Ku Klux Klan and the Citronella Nazis in Charlottesville for the crime of opposing affordable housing. Never mind the merits or demerits of the type of housing Stafford might be tempted to build. Never mind the nuance of how housing impacts community. Never mind the old H.L Mencken remonstration against crime being caused by poverty as a certain type of slander against the poor. There is plenty to criticize, yet somehow, we lose something in the reduction of the question to open racists vs. open borders.

How dumb is this argument? And if this is how dumbed down the argument is, how dumb are the answers going to be if we allow the discussion to be dumbed-down to this sort of anodyne reductionism which should embarrass any middle school cafeteria yet presents itself to us as politics?

Here’s how dumb the answers are going to be: Nick Ignacio, for handing out sample ballots designed to deceive otherwise well-intentioned voters who simply want to vote by crayon according to party line.

That’s how you get Nicked. That’s also how you get Trump, Obama, Biden, Youngkin, DeSantis, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and a whole host of demagogues who pretend to give a damn yet fix absolutely nothing. And why? Because they fight against institutions — held in thrall to the political left, mind you — too numb and too unfeeling to remember they represent the common good and not some artificial conception of the highest good.

Tough medicine?

Tough luck.

So how do we fix it?

Can The Center Hold Out Against the Extremes?

Yascha Mounk writes in “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time” how liberals — not conservatives — owe the nation a bit of a pause. Cancel culture is not a facet of the right but remains distinctly one of the left, where dissent becomes betrayal and the “short march through the institutions” has exposed corporate America as well as education, academia, bureaucracy, media and entertainment to the values of the progressive left — best expressed through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training (DEI) or Critical Race Theory (CRT) professionals.

So how do we fix this predicament? By tending to our own gardens. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott write in “The Cancelling of the American Mind” that the far left can only be beaten by the left, and the far right can only be beaten by the right. Institutions and corporations have a moral duty towards investing in intellectually diverse workforces; the post-liberal left and post-liberal right having more in common than either camp realizes.

Yet the catch here is that the political left — not the political right — holds the institutions in thrall. Which means there is a power relation at play where Democrats — if they are truly defenders of liberalism rather than democracy — have to make the first moves towards the ideals which they claim to aspire.

Democracy is a fragile thing, one that is prone to invite demagogues when mishandled. Pericles had his Cleon and Alcibiades; Biden — if he could be compared to Pericles — gets Trump and Hunter Biden. Insofar as the institutions have been weaponized against the other half of this country, Democrats have a solemn duty to wind that back and understand that this is not a both/and dynamic, but rather a cart/horse dynamic which is inimical to the very idea of liberal values.

One cannot pound the table hard enough on this point.

Failure to have the empathy to see this problem is to convince the political right in this country that we are indeed at war. That the left for all its pretenses really does hate us. That for those of us who are resisting the rise of the post-liberal right, that we are really fighting on two fronts against a post-liberal left who got the memo 20 years earlier.

I am assured this is not the case, yet it is awfully hard to reconcile when the mere criticism of left-leaning institutions is to compare Republicans to anti-Semites, Nazis, fascists, racists, and segregationists. Such rhetoric is familiar to anyone who has cracked the spine of a history book (provided you can still find such things in Spotsylvania libraries):

To vanquish is not to convince. To conquer is not to convert. You will conquer because you have brute force, but you will never convince, because in order to convince you need to persuade. You will conquer, but you will never convince.

I have spoken.

Convince me — don’t berate me — with an argument.

Not rhetoric or sophistry, but an argument which recognizes the valid claims of the other and then attempts to either incorporate or address those claims as a rational, thinking, empathetic and intellectually inclusive soul who doesn’t view every criticism as literally Hitler! (TM)

Otherwise, you will convince me and many others that there is no center — only that the extremes are your argument. Or as Bari Weiss has concluded over the last three weeks in the wake of left-wing protests defending Hamas — protests which began long before the bodies cooled and the Israeli Defence Forces responded to the single greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust — that this is all about raw power.

Facts are, local Democrats have some soul-searching to do as we talk about what truly matters. No — this is no excuse for the extremes and we should pledge to fight them in turn. Yet the power dynamic in our local institutions has to be recognized for what it is — and Republicans simply aren’t equally or fairly represented if we are constantly being compared to literally Hitler (TM) every time a question is raised. Or an election is won. Or an idea is expressed.

It’s old — and it is no way to talk to one another.

For myself, I will continue to fight for the honorable middle even at the expense of name-calling and especially as it concerns the local, and especially against the cheap off-brand local demagogues trying so desperately to matter by imitating national brands.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan remains the last of the statesmen who could work in a bi-partisan fashion to address the needs of a nation. Moynihan barely survived during his day and age for doing so. How many, I wonder, could imitate his example today and be rewarded with the honor of public service? Echoing Winston Churchill, if democracies elect the leaders we deserve, would we even recognize such leadership if offered for public consideration?

We used to be able to.

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