As you are no doubt aware I am
the recipient of newsletters and missives as well as requests for funds from both
the Democrats and leftist causes. I have known for awhile that the overlap
between them has never been as universal as one suspects, but the notifications
I have received about Tuesday’s elections make that crystal clear.
Now even the most radical
political junkie and the most devoted Democrat might be unaware that there are
elections going on this year. It is 2023 and almost all elections –
Congressional and statewide – take place in even numbered years. (Let’s leave
Presidential out of this for now.) The missive that both parties have sent over
the last year have been almost entirely devoted to statehouses, judicial
elections, and referendums. However, if
you do receive notifications from the major parties, you might know that there
are two states with gubernatorial elections this coming week: Kentucky and
Mississippi.
Because America has divided
itself into red states and blue states and both parties seem more interested in
winning in their own countries rather than picking off ones in the other the
casual Democrat might not be aware that the current governor of Kentucky Andy
Beshear is a Democrat. And they’re just as unlikely to know the name of the
Democrat challenging Republican Tate Reeves for the governorship in Mississippi,
Brandon Presley. It is also likely that if the Democrats would spend more money
in the Kentucky race to help the incumbent rather than do so for Mississippi,
despite the fact that Reeves is involved in multiple scandals, including one
involving state welfare.
And if you’re notification
about elections was entirely based on your readings of leftists, you could
be forgiven for not knowing about either race. There certainly has been very little polling in
either state about it for the last several months and what we see is very surprising:
Beshear, who had a formidable lead over his Republican opponent a month ago has
dropped to dead even in the polls and Presley has surprised everybody – myself included
– by running essentially dead even. The most recent poll, from two weeks ago,
shows that Reeves is only ahead by a single percentage point: 46% to 45%, the
rest undecided. Reeves has managed to make up a nearly seventeen point deficit
from July 7.
The latter statistic is
incredible, though it really shouldn’t be. Despite Mississippi having been ruby
red on the Presidential map since Reagan’s first landslide, Democrats have been winning the governors
race steadily until 1992. Ronnie Musgrove actually became Governor and served
until 2004. So you would understand why the Democrats have been fundraising
like hell to engage an upset.
The thing is, I’ve been
paying attention to progressive newsletters for almost all of this year and the
Mississippi governor’s race has almost never come up. And I think there’s a
good reason that while Democrats want to win the governor’s race, the
progressives are indifferent to it. And it is that divide that really shows the
left’s intolerance and their inflexibility to compromise.
Now I’m not going to pretend
for a moment that Mississippi deserves some kind of privileged place among the
50 stars. Just on a racial perspective, I could argue based just on their
records in Presidential elections alone in the 20th century,
Mississippians will always vote for the most racist candidate.
In my article on Strom
Thurmond’s 1948 run for the Presidency, Mississippi was one of four states he
carried and outside of South Carolina, he got the most votes in that state. In
1964, it was one of five states to vote for Barry Goldwater with 87 percent of
the vote. In 1968, it was one of five southern states that George Wallace
carried. However, Mississippi earns the crown for being the most racist state
because in 1960, a group of unpledged electors chose to give Mississippi’s
eight electoral votes to Harry Byrd in order to try and move the House to choose
a candidate more favorable to segregation. Alabama and Louisiana gave some of
their electors, Mississippi alone gave all of them.
And this is at the Presidential
level. Ross Barnett was no better than so many of his fellow segregationist
governors and some of the greatest violence in the Civil rights struggles took
place in Mississippi. The violence against James Meredith when he attempted to
integrate Ole Miss, the assassination of Medgar Evers by Bryon De Le Beckwith, in
which it took more than thirty years for him to be sent to prison, the murders
of three civil rights workers who wanted to register Mississippians to vote in
1964, the battles that people like Fannie Lou Hamer had to endure to get a Mississippi
delegation to the Democratic convention that same year and those are just the
low points in a battle of ugliness.
Mississippi has always been
one of the most racially divided states in the union as well among the most
corrupt. The scandal involving TARP that was revealed in the Reeves
administration is just the latest in a long line going back almost since the states
founding. It has always ranked near the bottom of so many categories –
education, adult literacy, child poverty – and always at the center of so many
hate crimes against every one who isn’t a white straight male. Mississippi, in short, suffers from the kind
of problems that progressives say our by the far worst examples of America as a
society and desperately need fixing.
Except… that never applies
to Mississippi or indeed almost every state in the Deep South. At least that is what I tend to grasp from so
many leftists on this blog, in more reputable institutions and indeed the blog
that represents progressive causes. To them, they view Mississippi and every
state in the Deep South as at best, a cautionary tale and at worst, states that
got what they deserved.
I can not tell you how many
times I have read columns making this very argument. As far as the left is concerned,
every single person in the South is a gun-toting, Bible belting, woman beating,
kindergarten dropout, white sheet wearing, Confederate decal on every item of
clothing who uses every slur when they breathe and think that Hitler was right
about everything. And that’s just what
they are in public.
They will make very clear
about all the horrible wrongs going on in Mississippi and every southern state but
not to mourn, but to fundraise. As far as the left is concerned, Mississippi is
a third world country that people like them would never donate money to help
its children even if they would give it to starving people in Africa. As far as many our concerned, everything
wrong with America is in the South. Some people at this blog have said as much
out loud. I honestly think that at the end of the Civil War that they would
have preferred that Lincoln (the only Republican they sort of like) had used
his second Inaugural not to say, “With malice towards none, with charity
towards all” but rather “We’re gonna build a wall starting at the Mason-Dixon
Line and make the Confederacy pay for it.”
Not even Thaddeus Stevens would have gone that far but I know the left:
to them he wasn’t radical enough.
Of course that gets to their
other problem: they also need the South to be there. Otherwise, who would they
in their ivory towers look down on? As long as all of the people that represent
everything you loathe are in the same place, then you always have something you
can look down with righteous indignation and say: “This is what will
happen to America if you don’t vote for Democrats!” As I’ve mentioned many on
the left have little use for Democrats, thinking them negligibly the lesser of
two evils, but they will never like a Republican. And since they have combined
the Republican official with the voter, they can dismiss them all as part of
the same noxious package. They like to
make it clear that every state in the Union has blue segments and a national
divorce is impossible. But that doesn’t change their intolerance any more, or
writing off the people who are suffering in these states – which include all
the parts of their coalition – as part of the same noxious package. They’ve made in clear in other articles that
the best thing any one can do who lives in a red state is move to a blue one. If
you are too poor or unable to do so, well, it’s basically your fault for living
there.
And this gets me back to the
Mississippi gubernatorial election and the larger problem progressives have.
Democrats, to be clear, understand that to be a national party, they have to be
a big tent. They also understand that what works in New York or California can
not work in Texas or Georgia and definitely won’t work in Mississippi or
Alabama. The problem is, to a
progressive, words like moderate and compromise are, in most
case, more obscene that conservative. Which is the reason the
progressives haven’t mentioned Brandon Presley – and may not want him to win.
In a world with abortion
rights front and center, Presley has made it clear that he is pro-life. So in
that respect, he is no different than Tate Reeves. I realize someone reading
this will condemn Presley and stop reading right now. I’m not wild to even bring this issue up but I
do think it is worth considering in the context of the problems a state like
Mississippi is facing.
First the Mississippi state
legislature is bicameral. Both the Senate
and House are under Republican control. The Senate currently has a majority of
36-15 Republican . The house of representatives is 75 to 46 Republican. It
takes a two-thirds majority in both houses to override a veto in the state of
Mississippi. Right now, the Senate has that and the House nearly does. So
assuming any Democrat gets elected to the governorship, there is a very good
chance that the legislature will still control the agenda, barring some kind of
statewide Democratic sweep on both houses which is to say the least, nearly
impossible to imagine. In other words, if a pro-choice governor was elected
and put abortion rights on the agenda, it would never get through either house
if it was even introduced into law, which is almost certainly wouldn’t be.
Second of all to win a
statewide election in a state like Mississippi, one can not run a race like
someone would in Pennsylvania or Maryland.
The black vote would never be enough to get you elected, and there is
unlikely enough votes from other minorities to get you in. That means by
necessity, you must try to court that dreaded term ‘the white-working class
voter.” This was something that Democrats
were able to do throughout the South until the 1990s, but as the party has
increasingly embraced the left, it’s become nearly impossible to do.
Presley has an opportunity.
Given the immense dissatisfaction with Reeves – and to be clear, Reeves has a four
percent approval rating in some polls -
Presley could win. Reeves won election last time by just five percent of
the vote. He has run on an immensely progressive platform for someone from
Mississippi. He wants to expand Medicaid, which most red state governors won’t
except. He wants to fund public schools better, and most Republican governors
want to cut it. He has made it clear that he wants to improve health care
across the state. All of these things
could help him with Republicans who wouldn’t normally back a Democrat.
The thing is progressives
across the board have an all-or-nothing attitude. One Mississippian said that
while she wants Presley to win, she is not voting for him:
“I want a better
Mississippi. I do. But that better Mississippi includes all Mississippians. I
don’t want a little piece anymore. I want my plate to be full…I’m tired of
crumbs.”
Consider what this statement
means in a larger context. Basically it argues that with some progressives, given
a choice between having nothing or something, they’d rather have nothing. A
crumb is not nothing. It might keep you alive a little longer, it might help
some people survive. But if you only want a full plate and would rather have
nothing instead of that, then it says a lot about who you are as a person.
To be clear there are Republicans
who are supporting Presley. And I have a feeling that’s another reason progressives
don’t want them. Purity above all else. This sums up progressives better than
anything a conservative could say. Given
an option between helping making Mississippi a better place for some people or
doing nothing and letting a corrupt governor possibly win a second term and
enacting a Republican agenda, there are some progressives whose indifference
makes it very clear what they prefer. This would be reprehensible from some one
who didn’t live in Mississippi. For someone who lives there, it’s practically a
crime against the state.
But this is just a reflection
of progressives across the country. Given the option of having small incremental changes that are possible or
putting your time and energy behind sweeping changes that have no chance of
getting anywhere in our country, all
progressives prefer the doomed cause. Because then they can blame a rigged
system, Republicans, every part of our democracy, geography – everything but
their own inflexibility. Trying to fix
the problems of our society will involve playing the long game and progressives
don’t even want to play the short one. And that can be seen in every way in
their view towards the South and Mississippi.
If Presley manages to win
the governorship, it will be a huge victory for him, Mississippi and the Democratic
Party. What it will not be is a victory for progressives. They will take credit
of course, even though they had nothing to do with it, but internally they’ll say: “Oh shit. Compromising
and reaching across the aisle works.” Then they’ll shrug and go back to
endorsing Senate races in Tennessee and Missouri and to everything in their
power to help progressives win the nomination rather than moderates who might
win the general. Because in the eyes of progressives, it’s better to lose big and
stay true to your ideals then compromise and win. Especially in a place you love to hate on but
would never go to.
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