Youngkin, McAuliffe, and Democracy in America (Take 2)
Race-baiting by both sides? Buying an election? And we call this democracy!
Shock outcome in Virginia! A neophyte multi-millionaire Republican has defeated a former Democratic governor in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 percent last year.
Well, all the pundits will weigh in now, and every possible interpretation will be given, but all will reinforce what the pundits already believe to be true, or want to be true. I only want to address two factual matters related to this election; unlike some of my better known colleagues, I have not come down from Mount Olympus or Mount Sinai to do this.
First and foremost, race was a factor in this election. That’s clear because the polling showed a dramatic shift in favor of Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate, after a debate in which McAuliffe refused to defend parents’ rights to opt out of certain reading assignments for their children in school if they (the parents) found the material objectionable. This was related to an earlier case when a Virginia parent objected to her son, apparently an honors English class high school senior, being assigned Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison’s books, albeit fictionalized, have been praised for shedding light on racism in America for an audience that may not have understood this history well enough. Morrison, an African American woman who died in 2019, won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize in her life, meaning she enjoyed both national and international renown.
The parent had objected to violent rape scenes graphically depicted in Beloved, but some observers alleged race was behind the objection. I’m not a mind reader, so I don’t know what the parent was thinking, but the McAuliffe campaign strongly implied that race – not sex and violence – was the real objection to the book by the mother (and others).
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
The above quote, made by McAuliffe during the last televised debate of the campaign, became a kind of casus belli for voters during the weeks leading up to the vote last night. Youngkin’s ads relentlessly played the audio and video during their ads, and in the last days of the campaign McAuliffe fought back with ads of his own that claimed he’d been quoted out of context. Additional ads suggested that Youngkin wanted to “ban” books outright, and various Democratic politicians echoed a claim that Youngkin wanted to “ban” Toni Morrison’s Beloved in particular.
Folks, there were dog whistles coming and going. The suggestion was that Youngkin and his supporters didn’t want Beloved because it was an anti-racist book by a Black writer, not because of the sex and violence in the book (and certainly most high school seniors today already know plenty about sex and violence), and McAuliffe played up this belief in its promotions without explicitly calling Youngkin or his supporters racists (i.e., a dog whistle). Further, the McAuliffe campaign provided no evidence that Youngkin wanted to “ban” any books; at worst, he supported a parent’s right to keep his or her child from reading this or that book. But, it was Toni Morrison’s book at the center of the debate, not some other book that may have had nothing to do with race. That would be the case for saying Youngkin was engaging in his own dog whistle.
Back to the now infamous McAuliffe quote: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” To a certain extent, most parents would agree with McAuliffe. I don’t think they would say teachers shouldn’t come up with a math curriculum, or a geography curriculum, and so on as long at the curriculum would stick to known facts, credible sources and good research into those fields. Do you know calculus well? I don’t either. Do you understand the basics of quantum mechanics? I hope physics teachers do because I don’t understand it well. We count on professional educators to teach these disciplines to our children.
Nonetheless, it is literature and history that are most likely to be controversial. This is where everyone is “fragile.” We don’t teach religion much in the schools, even “comparative religions,” for the same reason. One person’s “truth” very likely will be different than another’s “truth.” Teaching about sex is right up there with such potential controversies, but so is any discussion of race, of course.
I think McAuliffe may indeed have meant that teachers should be free be to teach in areas that require expertise and training and which are not controversial, but Youngkin was perceptive in knowing that teaching controversial subjects was another matter. For voters who already don’t like Big Government and don’t like so-called elites telling them what they should or should not believe, McAuliffe’s unfortunate words were red meat. It’s no coincidence that polling showed a shift to Youngkin and away from McAuliffe after the now infamous quote.
Money Talks
Now, for the other objection I have with this campaign, and it’s an old one: Millions of dollars were spent on it, by both sides. Youngkin, a multi-millionaire businessman who hasn’t held elective office before, was easily capable of funding his own campaign if he wanted to, but apparently didn’t have to. According to a report in Forbes last month, the Republican had access to $42.3 million dollars in campaign contributions, while McAuliffe had made a $44.5 million haul for his campaign.
It’s disgusting, folks. All my adult life I’ve seen people fight for campaign finance reform. There are good books written about this. There are non-profits dedicated to pushing campaign finance reform. We’ve supposedly had campaign finance reform of sorts in the past. Yet the Virginia gubernatorial campaign will rack up nearly $100 million in total expenditures when all the bills come do. In next year’s races for the House of Representatives, as well as one-third of our Senate seats, the tally will be in the many billions of dollars for all campaigns combined.
I must refer to former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s appearance on the old David Letterman late night talk show. The former PM noted that there are limits on how much money can be spent on elections in the UK, as well as a time frame for when campaigns could be conducted. He was promoting such policies for us, the United States, you know, the former Colonies. I think the only joke here is that he had to make his appeal on a late-night comedy show.
This is where I’ll limit my punditry and opining. I’ll leave all that and more to others who will warn that Trump is back, or that the Democrats have to do better with Middle America, or that racism is alive and well in America, or that Virginia isn’t really a bellwether for the rest of the country anyway, or that McAuliffe just ran a poor campaign, or whatever.
But until we can talk openly and honestly about race and public policy in this country, and so long as it takes lots of money to get out the votes, our democracy will continue to suffer.
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You hit the nail on the head -- money and power. I wonder how media platforms have a role in perpetuating the use of mega funds for campaigns. Even with campaign finance limits, politicians find ways to spend money. We wish our media ecosystems were different. We have also lost the public space for open, civic discourses.
exegesis:
In the UK schools, too, this writer is at the centre of some controversy. On the matter of "frailty" or snowflakes, performances of Shakespeare now carry a "government health warning"*; the Globe theatre warns punters that Romeo and Juliet carry scenes of suicide and sex, and Macbeth has scenes of extreme violence. Titus Andronicus stands no chance.
* Not really an actual government health warning, this is a much-used euphemism in the UK for caution.
I note the beginnings of a push-back this side of the pond, there is a growing realisation that small, very small, minorities are commanding all the headlines; institutions are folding like origami - caving into their demands, and this only serves to reinforce the demands.
Every voice is valid, it seems; my truth is every bit as meaningful as the truth.
On the matter of statues and literature and art and the like from the past we should remember:
"History is another country, they do things differently there.