Rumors Of Civil War: Democrats Say This Must Happen

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 

-- Matthew 24:6

The Gospels teach us there is a certain inevitability to conflict. Good will always be matched against Evil, and men will always be called to choose the side on which they stand.

Viewed against that backdrop, the civic strife that has dominated the legacy media in 2020 was always fated to happen. The accumulated disputes and disagreements of decades have, in such an hypothesis, coalesced into existential crisis of putative Good against seeming Evil.

That is one interpretation.

Another interpretation is that the orgy of violence that has racked cities from Portland to Kenosha to Minneapolis to Atlanta is not merely the boiling over of long-simmering disputes, but is rather the calculated design of malign actors as a pathway to political power. Disturbingly, this view of things is substantiated not by sacred text but by the headlines and reporting of the legacy media. When viewed as a whole and not piecemeal, the media coverage of the various riots and protests in this country presents a clear and deliberate moving of this country towards civil war.

America Is Diverse, Not Divided

Consider this headline on Bloomberg: "Election Shows That U.S. Divisions Are Only Growing Wider -- Social discord, partisan rancor and government sclerosis are about to get worse."

Or this headline in The New Yorker: "America’s Fever Is Still Rising"

Consider also this map of "Red" and "Blue" states based on the recent mid-term election results:

Or this map of Congressional distict results:

Where in either map is there a modern-day equivalent of the Mason Dixon Line, which set the northern border of the pre-Civil war "slave" states and then the northern border of the short-lived Confederate States of America? Where is the divide?

How many of the fifty states are wholly "Red" or wholly "Blue"? Even presumably "deep blue" California and New York have noticeable swaths of Republican Red.

Contrary to the breathless hyperbolic headlines, what these maps illustrate is not division but diversity. Both Republicans and Democrats look to Washington DC for national leadership. Both Republicans and Democrats, in seeking power within the Federal government, evince an awareness of a truly united nation. Implicit in all the electioneering, the preening, the posturing, is the premise that these United States are still as we proclaim to be in our Pledge Of Allegiance, "...One Nation...Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."

Republicans and Democrats do not agree on what constitutes "justice". Conservatives and progressives do not agree on what meaning we should have for "liberty."  Yet there is still much upon which Republicans and Democrats do agree, and we see this in the mid-term elections and the aftermath:

• Republicans and Democrats agree that elections matter.
• Republicans and Democrats agree that all votes are important.
• Republicans and Democrats agree that electoral outcomes set the agenda, the direction, and the tone of each administration and session of Congress. 
• By their politicking and even by their pandering, Republicans and Democrats alike acknowledge the eternal truth of Hamilton's assessment of American democracy: "Here, Sir, the people govern."

The legacy media--deservedly and derisively termed the "Fake News Media"--are championing a false vision of the United States. Through hyperbolic headlines such as mentioned above, through such blatant propaganda, they exacerbate disagreement into division. They have transformed worthy debates into "wedge issues" and then hammered relentlessly on those issues to produce the signs of division they so hypocritically bemoan today.

There are real issues and real disagreements among Americans. There are pressing issues for which our governments must devise solutions--our immigration system needs reform, our infrastructure needs repair--and there are real concerns about foreign policy, trade relations, healthcare, just to name a few. Americans do not see eye to eye on any of these issues.

Americans have never seen eye to eye on issues. Americans have disagreed and debated since the founding of the Republic. In virtually every decade since the Constitution was drafted in 1787, there has been passionate and partisan debate over contentious issues, ranging from the role of the Federal government to slavery to Manifest Destiny to the New Deal to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Americans disagreed over Operation Iraqi Freedom. Americans disagreed over TARP and the bank bailouts of 2008, giving rise to the Tea Party, and disagreed over Obamacare, resulting in the wave election of 2010.

Yet the Republic has endured. The government stands. We The People are still here.

That is something the Fake News Media and anyone else who would promote the propaganda of rampant rancor and petty partisanship would do well to remember. Despite their very best efforts, the Union is still standing.

America Voted, And The Winner Was...."None Of The Above"

The results are in, and once again the American electorate has voted for gridlock.

With a number of races still to be called in the House, the Democrats thus far have an absolute minimum of seats needed to control that chamber.  The Republicans, meanwhile have added at least 3 seats to their majority in the Senate.

The legacy media is already giving their typical partisan spin on the results: Dana Milbank at the highly left-leaning Washington Post titled his assessment "America Steps Back From The Abyss". Fox News, ever the reliable establishmentarian conservative outlet, reaches the opposite conclusion with "Thanks to Trump, the Blue Wave Becomes a Ripple.".

Ultimately, both are wrong.

One of the enduring myths of government in the modern era is the notion that Americans want government to do much. Historically, Americans take a dim view of activist government. Since World War II, there have been only 14 out of 37 sessions of Congress (including the upcoming session) where the same party controlled the Senate, the House, and the Presidency:

During that same period, America has had 20 sessions of Congress with a Republican President and only 17 sessions with a Democrat President. Republicans have controlled the Senate for 13 sessions and the House for 11 Sessions. Only once has America voted to give a President a unified Congress, and that was in 2002, when President George W. Bush was handed a Republican Senate to go with a Republican House. In 2010 and now again in 2018 the voters have responded to unified government by giving control of the House to the opposition party.

What America rejects is not so much Democrat and Republican politicians, but rather unified and effective government under either.  If there is any historical consensus among the electorate, it is for a Republican President with at least one chamber of Congress in Democratic hands. Partisanship is not the expressed will of We The People, not over the long term.

America's notion of good government, then, is not government that is either Democrat Blue or Republican Red. Good government in this Republic is Democrats and Republicans together addressing the nation's issues and attending to the nation's business.  Divided government produced the 1986 tax reforms under Ronald Reagan, and the 1996 welfare reforms under Bill Clinton.

In contrast, the unified Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson ended in the social upheaval and chaos of 1968. The unified Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter resulted in "stagflation" which ushered in the Reagan era. The unified Republican administration of George W. Bush authorized Operation Iraqi Freedom. The unified Democratic administration of  Barack Obama resulted in Obamacare.

America's experience of unified government does not encourage us to indulge in it often.

If there is an election mandate arising from the 2018 midterm election results it is this: Democrats and Republicans must work together, and the Congress must work with the President to conduct this nation's business. If there is an electoral rebuke to be derived from these results it is to the notion that either party is much trusted by the American electorate with untrammeled power.  America prefers government that does what is necessary but no more than that--Americans prefer government to do too little than too much.

When given the choice between Democrats in power and Republicans in power, the choice of We The People has been once again "none of the above."

Hopefully, our elected officials in Washington will understand this and will behave accordingly.

Hillary Clinton's Inevitable Victory? Election Returns Say Otherwise.

Edward Luce, of the Financial Times, has declared the 2016 Presidential election over except for the shouting, and declared Hillary Clinton the winner in a blowout victory--an amazing feat, given that the actual election itself is still six months away.

Luce' argument is that Donald Trump is the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee, that Hillary Clinton is assured of being the Democratic nominee, and that Donald Trump cannot help but lose horribly to Hillary Clinton in the general election. 

The first leg of his thesis is admittedly fairly sound. Donald Trump leads the Republican field, and is the only candidate with a plausible chance of securing a majority of delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot. 

The second leg of his thesis is slightly less certain, given that Bernie Sanders swept the 25 March primary contests in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii by huge margins (his narrowest victory was in Hawaii, where he won over 69% of the popular vote), and has now bested Hillary Clinton in the last 5 of 6 state contests. Hillary remains in the lead in both overall popular vote and in overall delegates, but in terms of the number of states each candidate has won, the race is far more balanced. Thanks to the Democratic party's large number (712) of so-called "superdelegates"--delegates not bound to any candidate but free to vote however they choose--the nomination remains within the grasp of either candidate. 

The third leg of his thesis, however, suffers from some rather significant cognitive dissonance. While innumerable polls point to a myriad of problems Donald Trump presumably will encounter with various voter demographics, all polling is at best a projection of future behavior--respondents are telling pollsters how they will vote, not how they actually have voted. Actual vote totals in the Democratic and Republican primary contests thus far paint a far different picture of how the as-yet hypothetical Clinton-Trump matchup would go.

Here are the actual numbers. These are the total votes cast in both the Democratic and Republican primaries through 25 March 2016.

• Hillary Clinton has received 8,924,920 votes out of 15,323,340 Democratic votes cast.
• Donald Trump has received 7,811,245 votes out of 19,783,685 Republican votes cast. (Actually, the total Republican vote is underreported as Real Clear Politics, my source for these figures, is no longer reporting vote totals for candidates who have dropped out after the primaries began: Ben Carson, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush).
• Ted Cruz has received 5,732,220 Republican votes.
• Donald Trump has received more votes than Hillary Clinton in the following states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont.

These are raw numbers, without any filtering, editing, or normalizations applied. They do not take into account, for example, that up until the most recent primaries, Donald Trump has led the field in a four-way race while Hillary Clinton has only had to run against Bernie Sanders. There is no weighting given to the argument that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are fairly close in terms of policy proposals and ideology, and are jointly grouped by the commentariat as "insurgent" candidates. There is no prognostication of the impact of the "Bernie or Bust" movement among Democrats, asserting that if Bernie Sanders is not the nominee his supporters will not vote in November (or possibly might defect to likely GOP nominee Donald Trump).

With the primaries a little more than halfway done, Republicans have convinced over 4.4 million more voters to the polls and caucuses than the Democrats. The Republican turnout edge is equal to just under half of Hillary Clinton's vote total.

On the raw numbers alone, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton only by 1.1 million votes overall, although he outpolls her in twelve states.

On the raw numbers alone, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz combined outpoll Clinton in all but four states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Minnesota), and their combined vote total exceeds that of Hillary Clinton by in excess of 4.6 million votes--a vote margin that exceeds the Republican turnout margin. If only half of Ted Cruz voters are added to Donald Trump's total, Hillary Clinton prevails in only two more states, Louisiana and Virginia.

If one follows the commentariat model of counting Trump and Cruz as insurgent candidates, it is not unreasonable to presume that, come the general election, supporters of whomever of the two is not the nominee will support the other. Certainly the two are not far apart on such matters as immigration, healthcare reform, and confronting terrorism and radical Islamic jihad.

Regardless of what polling prognosticators predict, based solely on votes cast thus far, the most optimistic scenario for Hillary Clinton is a close race and likely a photo finish in the popular vote, with maybe a slightly larger edge in the Electoral College. But scenarios where Donald Trump wins convincingly in both the popular vote and the Electoral College are not at all unreasonable.

Hillary Clinton might win in November. So might Donald Trump. Neither candidate is assured of victory, and it is foolish of the commentariat to suggest otherwise.

If Democrats Draft Biden, They Justify Donald Trump

The news this week that Democratic Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has vaulted ahead of Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire polls has sent chattering class scurrying for cover.  It has also given renewed impetus to the "draft Biden" scenario.

Consider: Bernie Sanders is drawing large crowds at rallies around the nation--the largest of any political candidate on either side of the aisle, he's energizing a large part of the base of the Democratic party, and the response of the party leadership to his success on the campaign trail is to look around almost desperately for a more "suitable" candidate. The crowd favorite--the unquestioned crowd favorite, judging by the size of the crowds--has been deemed "unelectable" by the Democratic Party leadership.

The first primaries of the 2016 election season are still six months away, and candidates can rise and fall, and rise again many times in that time frame.  Howard Dean similarly energized crowds in the 2004 contest only to fade as the Iowa caucuses approached.  Moreover, on two occasions Sanders' rallies were upstaged by activists from the "Black Lives Matter" movement, and essentially driven from the stage by their tactics--and to prevent a third he has brought members of that movement into his campaign. To presume that Bernie Sanders has any sort of lock on the nomination at this juncture would be ludicrous.

Indeed, Bernie Sanders does not yet enjoy a broad base of support among minority voters--a key constituency of the Democratic Party; as late as July, his favorability rating among non-whites was still at a lethally low 25%. Having been twice on the receiving end of minority activist antics can hardly be seen to help strengthen that number, although it is also possible that embracing the Black Lives Matter activists within his campaign will help him connect better with minority constituencies.

It is also true that Bernie Sanders has refused to formally align with the Democratic Party before now; a self-identified Socialist, he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate but is nominally an Independent.  Whether that presents a credibility concern for him either with the Democrats or with the general electorate, should he win the nomination, remains an open question.

What is not an open question is that Bernie Sanders is surging in the Democratic polls, just as Donald Trump is leading in Republican Polls.  Indeed, the Washington Post has noted the odd parallels between these two campaigns from outside either party's mainstream, and then rather condescendingly wrote off both candidacies as transitory phenomenon, concluding that "this too--and these two--shall pass." The candidates grabbing not just the headlines but also the attention of the nation are not those from either party's rank and file--Bernie Sanders for the Democrats, and for the Republicans Donald Trump, followed (in some order) by Carly Fiorina, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson. The reality of the moment is that what these candidates are saying--and how they are saying it--is of far greater interest to Americans than the rhetoric coming from the more conventional candidates who have thus far thrown their hat into the ring.

It may very well be that Bernie Sanders' main selling point among Democratic voters is that he stands outside the status quo of Democratic politicians. His political career has been defined by his quirky refusal to embrace the apparatus of a political party, maintaining a stance as a political independent throughout his terms in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. At the very least, that notion of independence is being consciously articulated by Sanders' supporters. In a supreme political irony, a career politician has cast himself as the outsider and the agent of meaningful--and in this case liberal--political change, and the voters are rewarding that stance handsomely.

Whatever one makes of Bernie Sanders' politics or his proposals, that he is reflective of voters' desire to alter the status quo cannot be denied. In this coming presidential election cycle, the public demands different candidates, with different themes, different messages, different backgrounds. Even more than 2008, the animating force in the coming Presidential contest seems to be a rejection of the status quo, and a rejection of those who represent the status quo.

Which is why the chief beneficiary of any serious effort at this stage to draft Joe Biden into campaigning for President is likely to be....Donald Trump.  A career businessman who has never even run for elective office before (despite having flirted with a run for President in 2012), a recurring theme in "The Donald's" stump speech is a mantra he's repeated for years: "Nobody owns me". While Donald Trump is campaigning for the Republican nomination for President he has no grand affiliation with Republican party politics or the Republican party machine--and indeed has donated liberally to both Democrat and Republican candidates in the past, and has spoken out in favor of Democratic as well as Republican party policies. In his unapologetic attacks on illegal immigration, on bias in the media, and on the cronyism of both major political parties, Donald Trump has put forth an image of independence that so far has been matched by only one other candidate: Bernie Sanders.

By contrast, Joe Biden is someone who has been near the apex of Democratic leadership in Washington for decades, a two-time Presidential candidate who chaired Senate committees literally for decades prior to becoming Vice President in 2008. Regardless of his stance on issues, or his personal priorities for holding elective office, Joe Biden is nothing if not the ultimate insider. He is the status quo personified, the very thing voters on both sides of the political aisle are fervently rejecting.

If Bernie Sanders continues to dominate Hillary Clinton in the polls, and if the New Hampshire primaries draw near with him still enjoying a front-runner aura among Democrats, and if the Democratic Party leadership continues to respond to his success among Democratic voters by looking for anyone who can be a more "electable" alternative to Bernie Sanders, might that not broaden Donald Trump's appeal? If the Democrats throw Sanders under the proverbial bus, might that not create an opening for a Trump candidacy to woo erstwhile Democratic voters with his bombastic rhetorical pledge to "Make America great again," rhetoric that is every bit as populist as Sanders' own verbal assaults on economic, political, and racial inequality?

The Democratic Party would do well to consider the consequences of its actions. The alternative to a "President Sanders" might very well be a "President Trump."