Trump’s Civil War Battle

In military terms, President Trump walked into an ambush yesterday when his Administration announced that it will “not even consider” renaming military bases that were named in honor of Confederate soldiers from the Civil War or, as we sometimes call it in the South, “the War Against Northern Aggression” or the “War Between the States.” The move will be popular among many in Trump’s base but there is a definite downside as well.

In a series of tweets, the president noted that bases such as Fort Benning, Fort Hood, and Fort Bragg have a long and distinguished history as the launching points for armies that helped to win two world wars. In his concluding tweet, Trump said, “Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · Jun 10, 2020

It has been suggested that we should rename as many as 10 of our Legendary Military Bases, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Benning in Georgia, etc. These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a...

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

...history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations...

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That’s a reasonable argument that appeals to a lot of people, particularly those with a nostalgia for Civil War and WWII history. That’s a group that includes me.

As I’ve written before, I come from a family that has been in the South since at least the early 1800s and I had several ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. My great-grandfather was a prisoner of the federal government at the notorious POW camp in Elmira, New York after the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was among the first integrated elementary school classes in my county in the early 1970s. When I attended the University of Georgia, I frequently drove past a historical marker near Athens memorializing the murder of Col. Lemuel Penn, a black army officer, by local Ku Klux Klan members in 1964. I currently live only a few miles away from Fort Benning.

When Gov. Zell Miller removed the Confederate emblem from the Georgia flag in 2001, I was against the move. At the time, I thought that it was mere historical reminder. Since then, I’ve changed my mind.

The flag that Miller changed in 2001 only dated back to 1956. The Confederate emblem was added that year to protest the sweeping civil rights advances. Rather than a nod to state history, the 1956 flag was a spiteful insult to a large share of Georgia’s population. As it turns out, a lot of the Confederate memorials date back to the Civil Rights era.

I still respect and admire many Confederates, imperfect as they were. Some were good men but they made the decision to support a cause that was evil. Although many argue that the war was about state’s rights, reading the Declarations of Causes for secession by the Southern states makes it apparent very quickly that the state right in question was “the subject of African slavery” as the document passed by Georgia stated.

What changed my mind on the issue was putting myself in the shoes of people on the other side of the argument. Not only is it understandable that black citizens would object to Confederate emblems and memorials, but a lot of whites do as well. There has been a lot of population shifting since 1865 or even 1956. A great many white residents of Southern states are just as offended by Confederate tributes as minorities are. My remembrance of my Southern heritage is not as important as national racial unity.

Enter Donald Trump.

President Trump’s tweets were in response to a statement by an army spokesman earlier this week that “The secretary of Defense and secretary of the Army are open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic.” In other words, no one was forcing the army to rename its bases. The army was voluntarily offering to do so. That is almost certainly a hint that the army prefers to change the names.

A better move by President Trump would have been to take a big swing at the fat, lazy curveball that the army pitched right across the center of the plate, by saying something along the lines of, “I call on Congress to rename bases that are named in the memory of Confederate soldiers. In light of our changing national culture on race, I feel that it is appropriate to rededicate these facilities to the memory of our great military leaders who helped lead our nation to victory in more recent wars.”

Instead the president whiffed at the pitch and got a strike.

While there are many passengers on the Trump train who will be elated to see that the base names will remain unchanged, Trump’s stance won’t endear him to black voters, moderates, or swing state voters outside the South. The move won’t even necessarily help a lot in Southern states where many white Republicans and conservatives are embarrassed by our Confederate history.

Trump already has the Southern states (minus Florida) locked up. Defending Confederate names won’t help him there but a Nixon-goes-to-China moment in which President Trump called for respectfully setting aside Confederate emblems would have been a boon outside of the deep-red states.

Instead, the president chose to deepen the racial divide. A great many Americans already view the Republican Party as racist and defending the honor of long dead Confederates is going to confirm that stereotype.

Likewise, the army had several good reasons for its readiness to change the names. For one thing, many soldiers serving on those bases are minorities and may have ancestors that people like Henry Benning, Braxton Bragg, and John Bell Hood fought to keep enslaved. Black soldiers make up 21 percent of army personnel, even though only 13 percent of the US population is black. It is not unreasonable that the army wants minority recruits to feel welcome.

Further, while the president notes that our military heritage is one of winning, the Confederates did not win. That was bad news for my ancestors who lived the war and then the post-war era, but it’s good news for me. I would not want to live in a Confederate States of America where, if slavery didn’t still exist, something along the lines of Jim Crow or Apartheid probably would. People who say that Confederate memorials are participation trophies are not totally wrong.

Finally, it is ironic that so many big military bases are named for people who became famous as rebels who tried to rip the United States apart. People who say that the United States is the only country that celebrates people who unsuccessfully committed treason are also not wrong.

So what to do about the situation? In my opinion, the fate of local memorials should be decided locally. Let people vote on whether to remove them. Some will go and some will stay, but honor the wishes of the local citizens.

National military bases are a different problem. Military bases in the South are not the property of the states in which they exist. They are the property of American citizens from all over the country. These bases represent the country as a whole and really should be renamed.

There is no shortage of victorious heroes to name them after. Fort Benning could be renamed after George S. Patton, the famous (and infamous) armor general of WWII. Patton actually lived on Fort Benning in 1941 and 1942 while he commanded the 2nd Armored Division there. A good namesake for Fort Bragg, a special operations mecca and home of the 82nd Airborne Division, would be Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, who led the 82nd in the first large-scale airborne assault in US Army history, the 1943 invasion of Sicily.

Renaming the bases could have been a moment when Trump called the country to national unity in putting aside the vestiges of a time when we were even more divided as a nation than we are today. Trump’s intransigence means a deeper racial divide, however, as the president forsakes the opinions of a majority of Americans to pander after the votes of a shrinking number of Confederate-Americans.

Originally published on The Resurgent 

The Insurrection Act: What It Says And How It Has Been Used

The nation got a shock on Monday afternoon when President Trump essentially threatened to invade riot-stricken areas with federal troops if governors and mayors did not handle the unrest to his approval. The basis for this threat is the Insurrection Act, a much-amended law first passed in 1807 that allowed the president to “employ… such part of the land or naval force of the United States” for the purpose of dealing with cases “of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory….”

The Insurrection Act provides an exception to the general ban upon using the federal military for domestic law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act holds that leaders who use “any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws” can be fined or imprisoned, “except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” (Discussion of posse comitatus always reminds me of the James Garner movie, “Tank” (1984), bastardized the term to “p-ssy communist” but that’s neither here nor there.)

As has been noted, the Insurrection Act was most recently used in 1992 during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. However, a major difference between the 1992 deployment and Trump’s threatened use of the military is that California’s Republican governor, Pete Wilson, requested federal help. In the current situation, federal military help has not yet been requested by any state governor.

The Insurrection Act was also used during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. In one of the most famous examples, President Eisenhower federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard and deployed the 101^st Airborne to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. In this case, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had ordered the National Guard to “preserve the peace” by denying nine black students access to the school in direct opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. Again, this situation is not directly analogous to the current situation since Gov. Faubus was refusing to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The Insurrection Act was used again in 1962 when riots broke out in Oxford, Mississippi over the admission of a black air force veteran, James Meredith, to Ole Miss. President Kennedy used federal agents as well as US Army troops and the federalized Mississippi National Guard to put down riots on the campus. This action, however, was conducted with the cooperation of Governor Ross Barnett, a segregationist Dixiecrat, who wanted to maintain civil order.

President Kennedy used the Insurrection Act twice more in 1963. In June of that year, he federalized the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama. In September, Kennedy again federalized Alabama National Guard troops to force school integration in the state. These actions were taken against the will of Gov. George Wallace, another Dixiecrat, who, like Gov. Faubus, was in violation of the Supreme Court ruling mandating integration. No regular army troops seem to have been used in these deployments.

In 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush used the Insurrection Act to deploy military police and National Guard troops to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands to quell widespread looting after Hurricane Hugo. It is not clear whether territorial government officials requested the aid but governmental authority seemed to have broken down after National Guardsmen and local police joined in the looting.

The Bush Administration considered using the Insurrection Act in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Ultimately, President George W. Bush decided against using federal troops under the Act even though the Congressional Research Service determined that he had the authority to do so. The Bush Administration cited federalism concerns and the desire to avoid impinging on Louisiana’s sovereignty as a reason for not invoking the Act. After Katrina, the Insurrection Act underwent more revisions that specifically included natural disasters as a trigger for use of the federal military.

As it stands today, the Insurrection Act includes five parts. These are so brief that they can be included here in their entirety:

“Whenever there is an insurrection in any State against its government, the President may, upon the request of its legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened, call into Federal service such of the militia of the other States, in the number requested by that State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to suppress the insurrection.” [251 Federal aid for State governments]

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.” [252 Use of militia and armed forces to enforce Federal authority]

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—

(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or

(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” [253 Interference with State and Federal law]

“Whenever the President considers it necessary to use the militia or the armed forces under this chapter, he shall, by proclamation, immediately order the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time.” [254 Proclamation to disperse]

“For purposes of this chapter, the term ‘State’ includes Guam and the Virgin Islands.” [Paragraph 255 Guam and Virgin Islands included as "State"]

The letter of the law states that in paragraph 251 that states may request federal military aid, but paragraphs 252 and 253 give the president additional authority to intervene unilaterally. The law gives the President Trump the authority to deploy the US military to put down the riots, “domestic violence,” or to enforce federal laws.

There is a process to be followed, however. Paragraph 255 mandates that the president must issue a “proclamation,” typically an Executive Order, that orders “the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time.” As of this writing, President Trump has issued no such proclamation.

In summary, President Trump does have the authority under the law to order a military intervention to put down the riots. If he does so, however, he will likely be the first president to use the military to put down riots against the will of state governments that are not in violation of federal court orders.

Even though President Trump has the necessary authority to make such a move, what is legal is not necessarily a good idea. In the current situation, peaceful protesters have legitimate gripes against a judicial system that too often protects police who violate the rights of American citizens. As Erick Erickson and others have pointed out, there seem to be different groups at work. Often, it is not black protesters who are carrying out the violence but young, white radicals. The irony of using police and military violence against peaceful people who are protesting police brutality may be lost on President Trump.

And peaceful protesters are being violently dispersed. Most notably, the police attacked a peaceful crowd in Washington’s Lafayette Park with tear gas ahead of President Trump’s visit to St. John’s Church yesterday.

https://twitter.com/jcameronpeters/status/1267589143707574272?s=20

There have been other cases of indiscriminate violence by police as well. A Twitter video from Minneapolis shows police marching down the street ordering residents to get into their houses. When they see the Twitter user peacefully filming them on the porch of her house, the police yell, “Light’em up” and fire what appears to be paintballs at the residents. A Facebook video from Indianapolis shows police firing teargas at a crowd that is peacefully praying and singing.

https://twitter.com/sanosbo1/status/1267611059709448199?s=20

A better way of handling the situation would be to let the peaceful protests play out. Where local and state law enforcement cannot control the violent rioters and looters, the president could follow the example of previous presidents who federalized control of the National Guard to restore order. Regular army troops should be deployed into these hotspots only as a last resort unless state authorities request them.

By taking the initiative, President Trump is making the same mistake that the rioters make. Where most Americans sympathize with the cause of opposing police brutality, most also oppose the violent behavior, which diminishes support for the legitimate cause. Similarly, most Americans want the violence stopped but sending in the military would reframe the debate from whether the protests should be violent to whether Donald Trump is acting dictatorially. The optics look especially bad since the president has spent the past week inflaming tensions rather than trying to calm the situation.

While National Guard troops are commonly used in civil disturbances, the deployment of regular army troops to put down the violence against the wishes of state governments and without a violation of federal law would escalate the situation and could very well end up making problems worse. Considering that many of the riots are in swing states, the perception that President Trump is invading may well negatively impact the president’s re-election chances. There is a reason that presidents have used the military for domestic law enforcement sparingly.

Originally published on The Resurgent

The Riots And The Election

As we watch cities burn across America, the question on many minds, especially those not in close proximity to the violence, is how the riots will impact the upcoming elections. The conventional wisdom says that the violent uprisings will benefit Donald Trump and the Republicans and there is some empirical evidence to back up that notion. However, there are other factors at play as well.

On one side, New York Magazine describes a new paper by Princeton Professor Omar Wasow, who studied riots of the 1960s and found that they provoked a right-wing response. Wasow found that nonviolent protests in the early 1960s resulted in increased sympathy for civil rights while increasing violence later the decade led to a backlash. Based on this argument, Donald Trump might stand to gain electorally from what many Americans see as an out-of-control threat to public safety.

Wasow found a statistically significant inverse correlation between violence and public support but looking at demonstrations in isolation may be oversimplifying the matter.

Lyndon Johnson was elected president in 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was re-elected in 1964 on a pro-civil rights platform. Throughout most of his time in office, LBJ enjoyed a much higher approval rating than Donald Trump. It was only from 1966 on that Johnson sank to the low 40s where President Trump has been mired for most of his presidency. Johnson’s deecline correlates not only with the increased frequency of race riots but also with America’s increased involvement in Vietnam. Like President Trump, LBJ faced more than one serious problem.

Johnson’s race problems mounted in his second term. Los Angeles suffered though the Watts Riots in 1965 followed by riots in Newark, N.J. and Detroit in 1967. Confrontations between police and black citizens were the cause of all three incidents.

If any year in recent history can rival 2020 for sheer, unadulterated American misery, it would be 1968. That year saw the Tet Offensive which severely damaged public opinion on the war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April which was followed by riots in more than 125 cities, and a Democratic convention in Chicago where protesters battled police in the streets outside the convention hall. By March, LBJ had had enough and announced that he would not seek re-election.

In the election of 1968, the law-and-order candidate, Richard Nixon, who also campaigned on a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Part of Humphrey’s loss can be traced to a third-party bid by segregationist George Wallace who carried five Southern states. The bottom line here is that even though public opinion was swayed against Johnson and the rioters, there was a lot more going in the 1968 election than the politics of public safety and race.

The same is true in 2020. In addition to the rioting, Donald Trump faces a pandemic and an economy that is suddenly in freefall. On top of that, the US is dealing with an increasingly belligerent China and a long, tough war in Afghanistan.

A big difference between 1968 and 2020 is that LBJ and Humphrey were liberals who faced a challenge by a law-and-order Republican. In 2020, the law-and-order president is the incumbent who is presiding over the riots. This is a huge difference that could mean a dramatically different electoral outcome.

Since Donald Trump is the sitting president rather than a challenger, voters may judge him based on his actions rather than his rhetoric. So far, the president has not done much. The first protests began on May 26, the day after George Floyd’s death, but the president has been conspicuously absent apart from a steady stream of tweets. For the better part of a week, the president has not addressed the country to call for calm, instead tweeting that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and suggesting that the protests were “professionally managed.”

Trump’s statements have been viewed by many as throwing fuel on the fire. Some, such as the “shooting” tweet and the another threatening White House protesters with “vicious dogs,” have racial overtones. In another statement this morning, the president attacked governors and big-city mayors facing the rioters as “weak” and accused them of “making yourselves look like fools.”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

 · May 30, 2020

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

....got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard - didn’t know what hit them. The front line was replaced with fresh agents, like magic. Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action. “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and....

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One of the few concrete steps that Trump has taken is to declare Antifa a terrorist group. The radical left group has a long history of violent behavior and has been implicated in the current uprisings. The move frees up law enforcement resources to combat the group but will do little to quell the riots in the short term.

Looking at the big picture, there are several possible outcomes for the riots. First, there is a possibility that the riots will have an impact similar to the Kavanaugh hearings of 2018. The Democratic treatment of Kavanaugh awakened Republican voters just in time to blunt what seemed to be a rising blue tsunami. The riots, especially if they last throughout the summer, may similarly galvanize Republican opposition and steer swing voters in the suburbs away from Democrats.

However, it is also possible that President Trump’s inability to rise to the occasion in a crisis will persuade voters that he needs to be sent packing. Mr. Trump was unpopular before this year and his lackluster responses to the pandemic, the economic crisis, and now the riots have not helped his case.

A third possibility is that in the dumpster fire news cycle of 2020, in which bad news is posted at an alarmingly fast rate, that other crises will have replaced the riots by November. There seems to be a good chance that, by the time we get to the polls, the riots may seem as distant as impeachment does today. The president was acquitted by the Senate less than four months ago but it seems like a different lifetime.

The one thing that we can know for sure is that no one knows how all this is going to turn out. We have opened a Pandora’s box and there is no telling what will come out of it or where it will take us. Anyone who thinks they know for sure is deluded.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Your Vote Won't Decide The Election So Feel Free To Vote Your Conscience

A paradox of our democratic system is that people obsess over the elections in which they have the least effect and ignore the ones where they have a greater chance of making a difference. That thought came up a lot this week after Rep. Justin Amash announced his third-party campaign for president.

One of the frequent objections that I saw is, “I like Amash but this election is too important to vote for him. I want to vote for [insert major party candidate name] to ensure [the other major party candidate] doesn’t win.”

There is a flaw in that logic, however. The problem is that your vote for president is almost worthless.

A presidential election is a two-stage election. In the first stage, it is essentially 50 separate state elections to determine electors. Following that election, the 538 electors vote to elect the president.

So, let’s think about it. A statewide election is when your vote is worth the least because of the large pool of voters. In the last presidential election, your vote would have been valued at somewhere between 1 in 13.2 million in California, the most populous state, and one in 250,000 in Wyoming, the most sparsely populated state. In neither state, would changing one vote – or even a few thousand votes - have made a difference.

In fact, in all but about five swing states, the outcome might as well be predetermined. Most states are tilted so heavily to one party or another that there is almost no chance that they will flip. This year, it looks as though Arizona, the perennial swing state of Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin will decide the election for the rest of the country.

So, you’re thinking, if I live in a swing state, my vote could make a difference. Probably not, thanks to the Electoral College, which further waters down your individual vote. This year’s presumed swing states have from 11 to 29 electoral votes, which represent from about two to five percent of the total electoral vote tally. The odds of your vote making a difference are not good, even if you live in a swing state, because of the small electoral delegations and because one person’s vote has never swung an entire state.   

In 2016, one of the closest presidential elections in our history, 10 states had results that were within four percent of the vote. Nevertheless, the difference between Trump and Hillary was still in the tens of thousands of votes in most cases. The closest state, New Hampshire with a difference of 2,701 votes, went to Hillary so changing the outcome there would not have affected the Electoral College outcome.

Because of our two-stage system, it isn’t uncommon for elections to be close on a popular vote basis but one-sided in the Electoral College. In terms of popular vote, the closest presidential election was in 1880 when James Garfield defeated Winfield Scott Hancock by only 7,368 votes. However, Garfield won the Electoral College handily by a margin of 214-155.

The reverse is sometimes also true, as it was in 2016. In 1824, no candidate received a majority of the electoral vote. Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, but the House of Representatives selected John Quincy Adams as the new president.

Four years before Garfield’s victory, Rutherford B. Hayes lost the popular vote by a 250,000 vote margin but still eked out an Electoral College victory by one vote. Even in that close election, it would have required changing hundreds of votes to flip any state, however. The closest state elections were Colorado, with a difference of 889 votes, and Florida, with a difference of 922.

Florida also figures prominently in one of the other closest presidential elections, the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. This election also came down to one state, Florida, which Bush won by 537 votes. The Supreme Court eventually stopped the recounts but subsequent studies show that Bush would have won anyway.

The bottom line here is that throughout American history, there has never been one presidential election that turned on one person’s vote. 2020 is unlikely to be the first.

My argument here is not against the Electoral College. I believe that the founders’ idea to add the second stage was an inspired plan to prevent populous states like California, New York, and Texas from deciding elections at the expense of the Wyomings and Rhode Islands of the country. Further, the 2000 election showed the benefit of containment. Imagine the Florida recount spread across 50 states rather than just one. My argument is simply that one person’s vote is not going to make a difference, particularly if you live in a state that doesn’t swing (and the majority of states are not cool and freewheeling like that).

From my own example, in Georgia, one vote for president was worth one out of more than 4 million votes cast in 2016. The difference between Trump and Hillary was more than 230,000 votes. One person voting their conscience would not swing the state. For that matter, 230,000 people voting their conscience probably wouldn’t swing the state because third party candidates often pull from both major parties.

But Dave, you say, that recent poll reported in the Atlanta Journal shows that Georgia may be a swing state this year. Shouldn’t you vote for a major party to make sure your preferred candidate wins?

My answer to that is two-fold. First, I don’t really have a preferred candidate among the two main candidates. I have never been a Trump supporter and the past four years have confirmed my doubts and fears about both his character and his ability to govern. Trump’s record on policy is decidedly mixed and, in my opinion, his positives are far outweighed by his negatives. Biden is of better character, but, as a conservative, I have trouble backing him because of his liberal platform.

Second, if Georgia is really in play this year, it likely means a Biden blowout. For public opinion to swing to the point where Biden can realistically hope to win deep-red Georgia, it would mean that the normal swing states have already swung to Biden, ensuring an Electoral College victory.

Bottom line: My vote still doesn’t matter.

Before I close, I do want to point out that voting is a sacred duty and when I say your vote won’t make a difference, that argument is specifically aimed at presidential elections. In senatorial and other statewide elections, the weight of your vote is similar to the first-stage, popular vote in your state presidential election. Because there is no Electoral College in these contests, your vote counts more than a vote for president.

Your vote is even more valuable in congressional and local elections both because there are fewer eligible voters and because fewer people who can vote in these elections actually do. This is especially true in years when there is no presidential election. As I said at the beginning, it’s a paradox.

Each congressional representative represents about 747,000 Americans and not all of these people are eligible to vote. That means that your vote for Congress carries far more weight than in most statewide elections. In my congressional district, only about 292,000 people voted in 2018. The numbers get more favorable as the jurisdictions get smaller. Some local elections are decided by one vote and several have ended in ties.

You should educate yourself on the issues and candidates and cast your vote, but don’t obsess over the presidential election where your vote has the least impact. Vote for president but also vote for candidates down the line where your vote really can make a difference.

It’s difficult to waste a presidential vote that is mathematically almost worthless to begin with. In my view, the real wasted vote is one cast for someone who you don’t believe would make a good president. If neither main party candidate meets your approval, cast your vote for the third-party candidate of your choice and let the two big parties know that you prefer “None of the Above.” If enough of us start rejecting both parties, they may start paying attention.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Pandemics Are Not New. They Are Just New To Us.

The Coronavirus pandemic has had America in its grip for weeks. As some Americans isolate themselves from the virus and others lament the restrictions, one obvious point is that our collective national memory has lost sight of the fact we, as a nation, have been here before. Even if we don’t remember it, the United States and its various parts have suffered through many epidemics and pandemics of infectious diseases before. In fact, especially before the introduction of vaccines and antibiotics, pandemics and epidemics could almost be considered a way of life, occurring every few years.

In our own time, we have seen the HIV/AIDS pandemic but that differed from COVID-19 in two important ways. At its peak, HIV was much more lethal than Coronavirus, but it was also much less contagious and took longer to kill. Although AIDS killed millions around the world over several decades, it was easy to avoid becoming infected. You couldn’t catch AIDS from a cough or a sneeze.

We have seen other pandemics as well. Influenza pandemics went around the world in 2009, 1968, 1956, and 1918. Most of these pandemics killed relatively few people but the 1918 Spanish flu was responsible for an estimated 50 million deaths worldwide, including 675,000 Americans.

Some of you may have heard older friends and relatives talk about the Spanish flu pandemic. My grandmother was a young girl at the time and told my mom about her memories of the pandemic. My grandmother’s family took in another young girl who lost both her parents to the 1918 flu. Unlike most strains of the flu, which primarily kill the old and young, the H1N1 strain that caused the Spanish flu pandemic killed many healthy young adults.

The fight against the Spanish flu, a pandemic that had its origins in the US, used many of the same strategies as the fight against COVID-19. Although the lead in containing the Spanish flu was taken by city and local authorities rather than state and federal officials, the cities that fared best reacted quickly by closing schools, churches, theaters and banning public gatherings. Several studies reported in National Geographic found that cities that were early adopters of that era’s social distancing strategies had death rates 50 percent lower than those who did so later or not at all. The experience in 1918 also showed that lifting restrictions too early could cause a second wave outbreak. Obviously, these restrictions were dropped after the crisis had passed.

Going back even further, there was yet another flu pandemic in 1889 that killed a million people worldwide. There were also wave pandemics of cholera in the mid-1800s and 1910 with similar death tolls.

Beyond the pandemics, there were also localized epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, and scarlet fever. If you read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you may remember a reference to smallpox in which Huck keeps two slave-hunters away from his raft by convincing them that his family has the infectious disease. Other Western novels contain references to white men giving blankets contaminated with smallpox to the Indians. The plot device has its roots in a real incident in 1763 in which the British attempted to induce a smallpox epidemic on Indians laying siege to Ft. Pitt in Pennsylvania. This early attempt at biological warfare is the only known such effort and apparently failed, but Europeans did accidentally wipe out 70 percent of the Native American population when they first brought smallpox to the New World in the 1600s.

Since our forebears were more accustomed to dealing with epidemics and pandemics than we are, we must now relearn the old lessons. Smallpox, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and cholera are no longer diseases that concern us. An obvious question is why we don’t still suffer through epidemics of these diseases the way we do the flu.

The answer is vaccines and antibiotics. In 1757, Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine in history to fight smallpox. Yellow fever has been almost eradicated through a combination of vaccines and mosquito control. Scarlet fever and cholera are treated with antibiotics. While there is also a flu vaccine, the flu virus mutates so rapidly that a new vaccine must be created for each year’s prevalent strain.

The second tactic that our great-grandparents used to fight pandemics was isolation. Quarantines have been around for hundreds of years. The origin of the word “quarantine” dates back to the 1300s when the bubonic plague, more famously known as the “Black Death” was ravaging Europe.

Science Friday tells the story of how the death of about one-third of Europe’s population from the Back Death inspired the port of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia) to impose a trentino, a 30-day isolation period, on ships arriving from plague-stricken ports. When the 30-day period was increased to 40 days, the quarantino gave birth to the English word, “quarantine.”

Contrary to a popular meme going around, quarantines are not an isolation of the sick. By definition, they are isolation of people who are infected or who have been exposed to infectious diseases. As with COVID-19, victims of pandemics past could spread the disease to others long before they showed symptoms and became visibly sick.

The strategy of isolating the infected goes back far beyond the bubonic plague. For example, the Levitical laws of the Bible, written down thousands of years before Christ, instructed the ancient Israelites to cast out people with certain diseases for specified periods until they were once again clean. In the Christian Post, Scott Brown notes that Jews in Europe who practiced the Biblical guidelines suffered lower death rates than the gentile Christians who did not.

A major challenge of our time is that both tactics used against pandemics are under assault. COVID-19 will eventually be defeated with a vaccine. However, the anti-vaccination movement in the US has gained steam in recent years. It is an open question whether anti-vaxxers will accept a Coronavirus vaccine or take their chances with the virus, especially since many deny that COVID-19 is as serious as medical experts claim and some even deny that it is a pandemic.

Similarly, many Americans are resisting the social distancing measures that have been introduced to slow the spread of COVID-19. From day one, they have chafed at the need to stop public gatherings where the virus is spread and accused people who wear masks and gloves of being afraid.

Now, the pandemic skeptics are going a step further by holding protests aimed at reopening the economy. During many of these rallies, protesters crowd together without masks or protective gear, practically daring God and the virus to strike them down.

While most Americans are anxious to get back to work, as Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, facts don’t care about your feelings. In this case, the fact is that a dangerous viral pandemic is at peak levels around the country.

Restarting the economy now would be akin to dancing outside in a thunderstorm. There’s a chance that you won’t get struck by lightning but the elevated risk makes it very likely that you will. The danger is so high that most people, people with normal levels of common sense and self-preservation, would say that taking the risk would be both unnecessary and foolhardy.

There is a lot of irony in the current situation. One such bit is that, despite our technological advances, we are reduced to fighting the virus the same way that viruses have been fought for hundreds of years: With isolation and researching a vaccine. A second bit of irony is that, in our educated world, both strategies are being undercut by people who reject the scientific consensus and refuse to take a vaccine, to stay isolated, or even to take precautions such as wearing masks, maintaining social distancing, or washing hands.

Many Americans fail to realize that our current situation, in terms of both the pandemic and the restrictions, is not unprecedented. Just because it isn’t something that we haven’t been through, doesn’t mean that the country as a whole hasn’t experienced something similar. As a result, people who are accusing the media and government of being fearmongers are fearmongering themselves with wild claims that the pandemic is being used to usher in a coup or steal constitutional liberties.

The risks of these conspiracy theories and irrational fears are that people will abandon the social distancing that has so far worked well and that civil disturbances may be incited. Both could extend the pandemic by spreading infections. Spreading disease and inciting riots risks both thousands of lives and the economic recovery.

Pandemics are not new. The United States has experienced them before and, even with modern medicine, will experience them again. The question for our generation is, when the history of the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 is written, will we be remembered as people who banded together and rose to the occasion or will we be people who cracked under pressure and couldn’t stay home for a few weeks, stoking the fire of a second wave of infections and deaths?

Originally published on The Resurgent