For societies aspiring to be liberal democracies, such as the United States, there are a number of characteristics they must meet, such as form of government, valuing the individual, using debate and reason to determine actions, rather than autocratic or theocratic means, etc. Let’s focus on the requirement to fully and honestly debate proposed changes to society, whether they be changes to the legal system, or to more informal facets of society.
A good example of such an issue and debate is gay marriage. Gay marriage was illegal in the United States until 2001, when it began to be recognized by various states, until the final SCOTUS ruling in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, which neutralized all laws opposing it throughout the United States. I remember the debates over the issue here in Minnesota, sparked by the proposal to add an Amendment to the Minnesota State Constitution to explicitly ban gay marriage in 2012; eventually, the proposal was defeated by 3.5 percentage points at the ballot box, after being both down and up in the polls.
But the point is that there was a debating aspect to it. We talked about it. Some people changed position. And, while many on the losing side proceeded to squeal loudly a number of absurd predictions, none of them have come true, and society has continued on with aplomb. Why? Because the issue’s depths had been plumbed, people had given it thought, and, in the end, we realized that no harm would come of it, while great good probably would. Gay marriages were performed, children were adopted or sometimes had naturally, gay divorces occurred, and suddenly we went from having an irrationally loathed minority to just another minority.
This post isn’t to rehash the gay marriage debate; it’s merely used as an example. Nor is it a shot at a Republican Party which has abandoned its responsibilities under the liberal democracy model of government that the Founding Fathers chose so long ago. It is enough to point at the actions of Republican Party leaders, such as Senator Mitch “No” McConnell (R-KY), and their en masse refusal to even debate certain Democratic legislative proposals, such as legislation concerning regularization of voting laws, or McConnell’s personal pride at having behaved very dishonestly when it comes to SCOTUS nominees and his supposed principles. These, as well as many other responses to problems, have left the Republican Party open to just condemnation on this point.
No, my concern is not the Republicans. It’s the Democrats and their allies.
Remember the Democrats screwing up a sure-fire win as Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) beat former governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) in the governor’s race? I suggested this was a gift to the Democrats, because, for the price of a governor’s seat and some seats in the Virginia legislature, it tells them that they have a problem.
But it’s only a gift if they get right down to studying their failure, to deriving and applying lessons from it.
I know there’s been at least some such study performed, although I haven’t seen the final results. But WaPo has just published a preliminary analysis of the demographic shifts in voting in Virginia, which went for Biden by ten points in the 2020 Presidential race, and while there are many factors involved in the race, the part concerning “White women” really caught my eye.
Julie Bowling, who lives in Amherst County, said she used to think of herself as a Democrat, supporting climate issues and social services, but this year felt like she’d started losing touch with the party.
Living in a region of Virginia she called the Bible Belt, the 55-year-old said Youngkin’s education stance — especially on transgender bathrooms — pushed her to vote Republican.
“The Democrats are swinging so far out of what I believe,” Bowling said.
Assuming this is representative – and WaPo knows enough to publish representative remarks – it marks a continued concern about the transgender topic, which can range from bathroom usage to the premature medicalization of the condition in immature humans, which is sometimes not reversible for those that are, as it’s termed, detransitioning.
Let’s focus on the bathroom issue. Remember, during the Obama years, that it was introduced as a civil rights matter, much to the outrage of the conservative side of the political spectrum. I was paying attention to the political scene at the time, if not as much as I do these days, and I do not remember any real debate of the matter from ground zero, by which I mean a conversation that starts with Say, what do you think about … rather than This new government regulation, substantially undebated, is being imposed …
Not a single word.
Granted, maybe I missed it. Maybe it was discussed in a dusty academic journal, settled, and then imposed.
But that would be inappropriate, wouldn’t it? The general public doesn’t know about the debate, and doesn’t get to take part, which is a vital facet of the concept of a liberal democracy.
If this is true, then I have to ask: Are the Democrats and their leftist allies truly committed to the crucial liberal democracy underpinning of the United States? Extend this to the education issue vis á vis racism, and the allegations that white children are being told by teachers that they’re responsible for enslaving black people as an inherent aspect of being white, and it’s not hard to see why the “white women” demographic moved to the right, especially given Youngkin’s distancing of himself from former President Trump.
Not because of the racism issue in education – I don’t even know if that actually occurred or was a Republican lie – but because, in essence, of the abandonment of a key pillar of liberal democracy. Public debate goes a long way to neutralizing allegations of autocratic & arbitrary government actions.
Speaking of Democratic / left of center woes, it’s not entirely clear to me that they’re willing to question themselves just yet. From the same article, I found this passage highly disquieting:
Jatia Wrighten, an assistant political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said Youngkin successfully weaponized education as a dog whistle, and she likened his use of critical race theory to the historical “Southern strategy” of employing White people’s racial fears in political campaigns.
“He activated White women to vote in a very specific way that they feel like is protecting their children,” Wrighten said. “White women felt like this was a way to protect their children from the unknown of critical race theory.”
She said there’s been a shift in recent years to think of White women as more liberal than they are. Although hundreds of thousands of pink hat-wearing women descended on Washington to protest Trump’s presidency at the women’s march in 2017, she noted, 55 percent of White women voters in 2020 supported his reelection bid.
Wrighten said that even in feminist movements, White women have historically worked toward their own progress — initiatives and policies that would help White women, but not necessarily always benefit women overall.
“White women have always had the privilege of being White,” she said.
Notice the deft assumption that it’s the voters that are at fault here, not the Democratic candidates or, worse, their Party. The implication is that this is still the result of racists, even though neither McAuliffe nor Youngkin are black. The “white women” are mislead by the evil conservatives, in essence, rather than following what they consider a rational judgment.
This strikes me as the judgment of the hubris-soaked and arrogant academic, unwilling to analyze their own ideology and methods. That’s exactly what the Democrats need to do, and, at least from Professor Wrighten, there is no sense of a self-consciousness of potential error on their part. The focus is on the enemy, which may turn out to be to the detriment of themselves.
But if they’ve abandoned the experiment of liberal democracy, they may have doomed themselves. After all, the common voter, for all of their flaws, have had the experiment of liberal democracy bred into them; if they feel that transgender bathroom issues skipped the debate portion of the national program, or a perversion of the educational program that, in their opinion, would prop up racism rather than destroy it, is being practiced, they will exercise their ultimate power, the vote, and dismay the Democrats, again.
The Republicans, full of fourth and fifth raters who cling to a mendacious and failed President’s knees, are a terrible and destructive carbuncle on the hide of the United States. Will the Democrats become the same thing, screaming about their virtue, lazily labeling dissents and criticisms as racist, and arrogantly descending into the pit of bewildering defeat because of it?
The United States can ill-afford that disaster. The Democrats and their leftist allies need to ask, Have they broken trust with the American public?
