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....

86.6K

8:41 AM - May 30, 2020

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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

On Race And Growing Up Southern

The controversy over Confederate statues is something I have thought a lot about. Perhaps unlike many, my experience has allowed my position to change over the years.

I grew up in small town Georgia. I attended an elementary school that was predominantly black. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were growing up in the shadow of the Jim Crow South. I was in elementary school in the 1970s, less than a decade after the full integration of Georgia public schools.  Lester Maddox (D-Ga.), the avowed segregationist governor, was not even a distant memory.

What’s more, my classmates and I were scarcely a decade and 20 miles away from the murder of Col. Lemuel Penn, a decorated hero of WWII who happened to be black. Penn was murdered by a trio of Ku Klux Klansmen for the crime of driving through Athens, Georgia in 1964. The murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury prompting the FBI to charge the men with civil rights violations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I can only remember two brushes with the Klan. As a high school student, a classmate showed me a Ku Klux Klan ring one day. It was like a class ring, but instead of the school name, it was engraved with the words “Ku Klux Klan.”

In the other instance, I was a college student working part-time at a local pharmacy when Klan members appeared on the town square one day. The Klansmen, dressed in white robes with no hoods, tried to hand out leaflets to anyone who would take them. Even at that point, they were such an anachronism that everyone in the store took turns driving by to gawk at them. No one seemed to be taking leaflets.

The world had changed a lot in a short time. My classmates and I scarcely thought about race. We got along fine as kids generally do. In my youth, we were aware of race, but pushed it to the background. I remember my parents telling me that I should treat everyone with respect, but that the races should not mix sexually.

I would be willing to bet that they have evolved past the intermarriage taboo now. I know I have. I care more about the content of the character of my children’s future spouses than skin color. I would prefer they have an honorable and decent mate who is black, Hispanic or Asian than what is referred to as “white trash” in the South.

My experience taught me that children have to learn hatred. They don’t come to it naturally. A proud moment for me as a father was when my own children failed to even comprehend race as a descriptive characteristic. “Why does anybody care about skin color?” they asked.

For years, I subscribed to the notion that race relations were nothing to be concerned about. No living blacks were slaves and no living whites were slave owners. If that was the case, what was there to argue about?

As I learned about civil rights history and talked to my black friends, my opinion slowly changed.

My family has been in Georgia since the early 1800s. In an undated photo, my ancestors are standing outside their cabin with a black man who is almost certainly their slave.

Several of my ancestors were Confederate soldiers. My great-grandfather was captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania and spent the rest of the war in a (damn)Yankee prison camp in Elmira, N.Y. Today, Elmira is forgotten by history, but it was a brutal place in 1864.

The mortality rate among the prisoners was 25 percent, rivalling the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Ga. But Georgia was subject to a federal naval blockade that meant that even Confederate soldiers didn’t have enough to eat. Supplies were plentiful in New York, but overcrowding, disease, inadequate protection from the New York winter and lack of food still killed thousands of prisoners. Many of those who survived were emaciated and unrecognizable when they returned home.  

If I feel bitter about the treatment of my grandfather and his brothers-in-arms, none of which I never met, how much more bitter do blacks feel about slavery and Jim Crow? I can scarcely imagine.

While there are no living slaves today, Jim Crow is a recent memory. Older blacks experienced it personally. Younger blacks have heard first-hand accounts of whites-only water fountains and lunch counters, of the Freedom Riders, of lynchings, of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in which Klansmen killed four little girls, of the murders of Medgar Evers, Lemuel Penn, Martin Luther King and more.

While slavery and Jim Crow are distant history in my experience, they aren’t so far in the past for my black friends. Even black conservatives like Tim Scott (R-S.C.) have stories of prejudice and “driving while black” to tell. Racism is in retreat, Charlottesville notwithstanding, but it isn’t dead and never will be. Vestiges of racism will probably be around forever.

The world is full of longstanding ethnic problems. There is the black-white divide in America. We also have tension between Native Americans and European newcomers. In Texas, there are still hard feelings on both sides over the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto and the border clashes that occurred after Texas independence. In other countries, there are ethnic conflicts that have lasted for centuries between Jews and Arabs, Armenians and Turks, ethnic Russians and their subjugated countries, the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans…. The list goes on and on.

In most cases, people have dealt with these conflicts by dredging up old hurts and killing people because of it. Then the children of these victims take vengeance on the next generation of the other group in an endless cycle.

One way to avoid this vicious cycle is to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Would most whites hold a grudge if their parents and grandparents had been treated as second-class citizens and had to fear for their lives if they acted as normal human beings, as Emmett Till did? You bet they would.

Would blacks and non-Southerners feel protective about Confederate memorials if their ancestors had fought and died under the Confederate banner?  Many Confederates who did not own slaves simply fought to protect their homes from the federal invaders. Sherman burned everything in his path on his march to the sea and Union soldiers committed numerous atrocities on Southerners. In 1864, for example, Union forces forcibly deported 400 civilian women from Roswell, Ga. to the North. Most of these women never returned home.

The point is that both sides have legitimate grievances. If we persist in fighting over the status of biggest victim and inflicting revenge on the other side, then the dispute will continue to fester and grow.

The ultimate answer is forgiveness. The Bible that most of us, black and white, purport to believe teaches that forgiveness heals the victim as well as the perpetrator. The Bible also teaches that race is unimportant, that we are all equal – and equally sinful – at the foot of the cross.

As to Confederate statues, I prefer to keep them, but I understand the point of view of those who oppose them. To me, the issue of statues is unimportant compared to other issues we face such as the national debt, Islamic terror, and the fundamental decay of American society. To me, the disposition of statues of should be a local issue decided by the people of the community, not outsiders with an axe to grind.

Who was more right and who was more wrong is less important than that we now live together as Americans. That’s why it distresses me when my conservative friends take the bait so easily and quickly find themselves in the moral equivalence game between leftists and neo-Nazis who claim to be working toward the president’s agenda.

Solutions to many of the world’s problems would be possible if more people would attempt to understand the point of view of the opposing side. Before making up your mind on an issue, walk a mile in their shoes. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

Obama's legacy of failure

As the Obama era draws to a long awaited close, it’s appropriate to look back on the past eight years and contemplate the legacy of Barack Obama. For those seeking to put a positive spin on President Obama’s seemingly endless administration, I’m reminded of Mr. Chow’s standard of excellence from the “Hangover” movies: “Did you die?” No, I didn’t die during Obama’s tenure, but by any other standard his administration will probably be judged a failure by history.

Mr. Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the law that bears his name in popular culture, is a failure and its days are numbered. The Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” has not lived up to its name. Health insurance premiums have increased sharply under Obamacare, even as deductibles and coinsurance have increased. This means that Americans are paying more for healthcare both at the insurance office and the doctor’s office. And, of course, Barack Obama’s promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” went down in history as the Lie of the Year.

Even by the standard of providing coverage to the uninsured, Obamacare is a failure. The uninsured rate is at a historic low, but remains above 10 percent. For its enormous cost and disruption, Obamacare hardly ushered in an era of universal healthcare.

Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan is largely forgotten now, but it is part of his legacy. The plan failed to stimulate the economy, but the Obama era has been a period of heady deficit spending. The borrowed $787 billion stimulus set the tone for the rest of Obama’s presidency. In the final analysis, President Obama nearly doubled the national debt. According to data from USgovernmentspending.com, the total federal debt has increased to more than 100 percent of GDP under Obama. The debt increased from $12 trillion under President Bush to about $23 trillion today. That is more than a trillion dollars per year of debt for every year of the Obama presidency!

Even after inflating the national debt, the US has still not fully recovered from the Great Recession. Even though unemployment has stabilized and decreased, the labor participation rate, the metric that shows how many Americans are in the work force, has decreased throughout Obama’s presidency. To find a historic level that is as low as the current level under Obama, you’d have to look all the way back to 1978 and the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

One part of the Obama legacy that will stand, for better or for worse, is the redefinition of marriage. While this was an action of the Supreme Court and not the president, Obama failed to adequately defend marriage laws in court and appointed justices that helped to upend thousands of years of tradition. As the first sitting president to embrace same-sex marriage, the landmark decision will be linked to his presidency.

Barack Obama also has a secure place in history as the first black president. His election did not heal the racial divide among Americans however. His tenure was marred by racial tension, especially over shootings by police, and race riots. A CNN/ORC poll in October found that more than half of Americans think that race relations have gotten worse under Obama.

President Obama’s record on foreign policy isn’t much better than his domestic record. One of the first things that comes to mind with President Obama’s efforts at diplomacy is the withdrawal from Iraq. President Obama campaigned in 2008 on withdrawing from Iraq and, in 2012, made good his promise after failing to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would permit US troops to remain in the country.

In 2012, Iraq was a stable and functioning democracy. A short time later, after US troops left the country, the Islamic State launched an offensive and gained control of large parts of both Iraq and Syria. Military leaders say that Obama ignored their advice to maintain a US force in Iraq to stabilize the region. The hundreds of thousands of dead, many brutally murdered by ISIS, are a part of Obama’s legacy as well.

The Middle East is not the only region where America’s enemies advanced during the Obama years. Russian President Vladimir Putin brazenly annexed Crimea in 2014. Russia has been fighting a proxy war against the Ukraine ever since. The Ukraine had relied on US and British protection under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in which Ukraine gave its nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for “security assurances.”

In Asia, China has not fired shots in anger, but the communist country has illegally been turning South China Sea atolls into artificial islands. Military bases are being built on the islands that could threaten many US allies in the region.

Obama’s seminal foreign policy achievements are abject failures. His nuclear deal with Iran was never ratified by Congress and is already being violated by the Iranians. The Trans Pacific Partnership, one of Mr. Obama’s few conservative achievements, was pronounced dead on arrival by President-elect Donald Trump, who is on par with Bernie Sanders when it comes to free trade agreements.

Ironically, one of the biggest legacies of Obama, the champion of the nanny state, is the loss of faith in government among Americans. Gallup shows that American trust in government peaked in 2003 when 60 percent of Americans believed that government would do the right thing most of the time. The current number is lower even than when President Bush left office amid the Iraq War and the Great Recession. In spite of – or perhaps because of – Obama’s conviction that government is the solution to every problem, only 19 percent of Americans now trust the government. Gallup also shows that 67 percent of Americans see government as the biggest threat facing the country. This is a 13-point increase over Obama’s term.

The falloff in trust in government may explain another Obama legacy. Under President Obama, the Democratic Party has been devastated at the state and local level. During Obama’s eight years, the party of Big Government lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures, governorships, Congress and the White House.

Even though President Obama leaves office with a respectable approval rating of 57 percent, his coattails have been short to nonexistent. Barack Obama’s personal popularity has not translated into popularity for his party or his ideas. With few rising stars surviving the Republican electoral victories of the past four years and Democratic ideas rejected by voters, the Democratic Party has a difficult road ahead. 

Originally published on The Resurgent