It’s not any kind of original observation to note that Appalachia has moved more dramatically against the Democrats than any other area of the country. And, yes, it began even before the Kenyan usurper took the Oath without supplying even so much as a kiss or an original copy of his long-form birth certificate. Our first hint was when George W. Bush won West Virginia in 2000. Prior to that, the Mountaineers had broken their strong post-Depression preference for Democrats only to vote for the reelections of Ike, Nixon and Reagan. Even though Sen. Robert Byrd endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 (and the Republicans never tire of reminding us that Byrd was once some kind of exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan), the rest of his state and region was not interested in having a secret Muslim in the White House.
Kentucky was never a Democrat-leaning state. It was more of a battleground. But it did vote for Bill Clinton twice before going on some kind of Jim Bunning bender. Like it’s coal-producing neighbor, Kentucky has spent its time since 1996 in pursuit of a crimson red reputation.
It’s gotten to the point now in this region that the Republicans are beginning to wipe out Democrats on the state level. For example, Kentuckians went full-Palin last year and elected Matt Bevin as their governor despite million-watt flashing neon warning lights that the guy is only a few almonds short of a nut bag.
Gov. Bevin is in the news this morning because he was caught on tape making a very novel argument for the rule of law.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin urged a group of preachers to embrace political speech at the pulpit by telling them not to fear a federal law that prohibits candidate endorsements by tax-exempt churches.
Bevin called the federal law a “paper tiger” during an address to preachers at the governor’s mansion last month. A group called Kentuckians Against Matt Bevin posted video captured by someone at the gathering. Bevin says no church has ever been punished under the law.
The governor calls the law “an absolute paper tiger and there is no reason to fear it, there is no reason to be silent.”
As the Associated Press reports, this law that is supposedly never enforced (and therefore not a law?) has been on the books since 1954, and it states that no tax-exempt organization may participate or intervene in any “political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”
I only need to go back as far as September 1st to discover that Donald Trump was fined $2,500 this year by the Internal Revenue Service for violating the tax code when he made a political contribution via his tax-exempt Donald J. Trump Foundation. That’s a pretty mild slap on the wrist, it’s true, but Matt Bevin wasn’t offering to pay these pastors’ tax attorneys and federal fines.
The thing is, Gov. Bevin is the opposite of hinged, which he made clear in August when he asked his supporters a non-rhetorical question about a future with Hillary Clinton in the White House:
“Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children,” he said. “It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something that we, through our apathy and our indifference, have given away. Don’t let it happen.”
Do you remember back in 1992 when Jerry Brown told his frothing hordes that their children would need to die if Poppy won a second term?
Yeah, that never happened. Matt Bevin isn’t normal. Both sides don’t do this.
I wasn’t born until the end of the 1960s, so until now I only read about governors proudly advising their citizens to defy federal laws because the folks in DC didn’t have the guts to enforce them. I suppose the end of Jim Crow did seem apocalyptic to some folks but Alabama’s football team is still winning national championships so I think it worked out alright in the end.
It’s weird that we’re getting back to a similarly nasty level of cultural war. The Kentucky pastors will fan out and redeem the nation with Matt Bevin as their Savonarola.
And when Hillary wins, these folks will revert back to law-abiding citizens, right?
Right?
Maybe the Democratic Party should offer more to Appalachia and the rest of the country than upper-middle class entrepreneuralism, market-driven healthcare, passivity towards the reproletarianization of the non-top-30%, American exceptionalist interventionalism, etc.
And for those Democrats whose first instinct to that above paragraph is to go ‘hrrmph, well, our preferred politics are DENMARK!! It’s just that those gorram Republicans won’t let us implement our REAL AGENDA’, maybe you guys need to:
A.) Tie all of your preferred plan into some sort of memeplex. Like, say, “Take back the country from the 1%” or “It’s New Deal 2.0 Time”. The memeplex for the Clinton-Obama Coalition is “Multicultural American Exceptionalism and Moderately-Regulated Capitalism is the way of the future”. Even if you can come up with a punchier way to
B.) Start credibly fighting for it. This means discrediting the Clinton/DWS/Obama/Reid/Pelosi wing and replacing then with Sanders or at least Warren types.
You missed your chance to mention the futility that is Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions football.
Hey, at least the Lions have a quarterback, sort of.
Ah, yes, the Lions. Finding ways to lose since 1957. After all this time, some of them are even new!
I defy you to find a team that as lost games this year in as pathetic a manner as the Chargers.
.
You mean things like affordable healthcare for the working class? Affordable child care? An increase in the minimum wage? Treatment options for the opioid epidemic? Encouraging promising new industries like wind power in the Appalachians? Enforcement of EPA rules to protect water supplies?
No doubt a Democratic candidate pushing for these sorts of great programs for rural Appalachia would get enthusiastic support from the left wing. /snark
Democratic Party apologists do this trick a lot, so I’ll explain this to people not familiar with this one.
When excusing the failures of the Democratic Party with ‘well, look at what we’ve done!’ they dance between two non-sequitur arguments.
A.) We did this policy in order to address this issue. I mean, we’re not going to talk about how far our actions went towards solving this issue. We acknowledged it, we had a non-negative impact, the end.
B.) This other policy would’ve been really good in theory. But, alas, we were blocked by those damn Republicans. Therefore our hands are clean. But it would’ve been really good!
The beauty of this argumentative structure is that by peppering in a few net positives, they hope to filibuster long enough so that they can sneak in a few fairy tale victories. The idea is to have the reader get intimidated by said long-list. Even if they discard a few of the fairy-tale arguments, the more ‘inadequate centrist victory’ arguments require the reader to spend time analyzing them. If the list is long enough and has enough of these roadblocks, most people just give up and the partisan declares fvictory.
Most people would just call this a Gish Gallop, but it comes in such a specific pattern that it pays to know it anyway. So let’s unpackage curtadem’s list here.
Affordable Healthcare for the Working Class?
That’s definitely an A, mixed in with a healthy dose of B. Do we need to go over ACA’s still too-high premium increases or how many private insurers are pulling out of the market?
Affordable child care?
Category B. Modern child care is almost expensive on a start-to-end basis as college.
An increase in the minimum wage?
Category A. If the minimum wage goes up but income inequality is barely dented, then guess what? You didn’t raise it high enough.
Treatment options for the opioid epidemic?
This one is either an A if you accept the reasoning for the ACA or a straight-up B.
Encouraging promising new industries like wind power in the Appalachians?
Total B. Get back to me with employment statistics and projections.
Enforcement of EPA rules to protect water supplies?
I could be snarky and just go ‘fracking and Flint’ and stamp a big fat ‘B’ on this argument, but I’ll just go with an A.
http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/03/top-10-polluted-rivers-waterways
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3194998/How-polluted-city-Interactive-smog-map-reveal
s-Earth-s-toxic-locations-dirtiest-power-plants.html
But anyway, that’s besides the point. The more interesting thing to note is that curtadems completely ignored the thesis of my argument. My argument being: “the Democratic Party lacks a good memeplex and branding that would allow it to make headway into voters on the edge of the margin of the GOP”.
The current memeplex of the Democratic Party… is weak. If you ask them what their party stands for, you’ll either get Republican-style glittering generalities or you’ll get a Mulligan style of policies that don’t come together in ways that are incomprehensible (to a non-political junkie) or are unflattering (to a political junkie). Seriously, what exactly is the branding for a party that simultaneously believes in a strong CIA/NSA, market solutions to health care and education (lol debt-free college), patchwork gun control policy, climate change centrism, and overseas interventionalism? I can give you a branding, but I can guarantee you that if you ask any moderately aware voter they’re either going to give you a patchwork list or glittering generalities.
Look, let’s leave policy aside for a moment. The biggest hobgoblin of the Democratic Party appeal-wise is its boneheaded, purity-trolling insistence that voters must do a complicated min-max of policies that involves assigning some arbitrary but internally consistent utility to a list of unrelated policies.
Voting does not work like that. Life does not work like that. Human beings do not min-max their careers, their friends, their mates, their housing, their families, their religion, their hobbies, or even basic-ass shit like what they’re going to eat for dinner tonight. Human beings — and pay attention, Democratic Party strategists, this is important — decide by BRANDING. That word is bolded, underlined, and italicized because unless you grasp that statement any analysis of mass human decision-making will never make any sense.
So. Let’s get back to basics: what is the Democratic Party’s brand? If you were going to explain what the Democratic Party stood for to an alien or robot and you knew that the Republican Party was going to present its case immediately after yours, what would you say to this person?
Meritocracy. They think that excuses everything, it’s so damn neutral.
That’s not what you said. You said Hillary is not pushing policies to help people in Appalachia when she is – lots of policies.
If you want to complain about her messaging, fine, but you need to admit the first sentence of your post was flat wrong. The Democratic party is offering a LOT more than that.
I shredded everything in your list as either being a “this would be so nice” fairy-tale or claiming that it was in the grand scheme of things inadequate. So. Please provide a counter-rebuttal before going back to your ‘lots of polices’ talking point.
The messaging and the actions tie together. The Democratic Party does not have a messaging problem separate from its policy problem. It has a messaging problem because it pursues a hodgepodge of policies that are inadequate or can’t be politically implemented. It pursues a hodgepodge of weak policies that are inadequate or can’t be politically implemented because it has no clear guiding philosophy*.
Bernie Sanders and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Warren have one that I think will reap a lot of rewards. And that guiding philosophy is: “increase the power of the American worker”. It’s simple, direct, and predictive of what the Democratic Party will support. Once that becomes so, the policy and messaging will flow naturally.
*I mean, it does, but like I said it’s not very flattering. Modern Democratic policy-making dovetails quite nicely with the generations-long political policymaking of ‘incrementalist nationalist meritocracy’, but I totes understand if the smarter people in the party don’t want to go with that. Even if it’s more truthful.
Oh, yes, by all means, let’s talk about how to rehab this beautiful, neglected old house that is on fire.
Republicans said the same thing about racial minorities back in the 80s-90s. They pointed to the IQ gap, the crime wave, the teen pregnancy rates, etc. and said that they deserve no pity and that the elites should not worry too much about the irredeemables.
Are you liberals enjoying becoming everything you claim to hate?
Will President Hillary Clinton have the fortitude and national political support to enforce the law.
Grant failed to in 1875 and 1876.
In viewing this trend, remember that the Pentecostal, fundamentalist, and Southern Baptist churches were the linchpin of opposition to desegregation after the Civil Rights Act and court judgements–starting segregationist “Christian” academies that were later supported strategically by Bob Jones University, which has had a large number of students from the Ohio Valley (Kentucky and West Virginia), Appalachia, and even parts of New Jersey since it founding in the 1940s.
Bevin is actuating Trump’s get-out-the-vote plan.
The response to the police killings that prompted the #blacklivesmatter movement are not encouraging on enforcing the law.
Given the contempt for the law among Republicans, no doubt one consideration in the reluctance to enforce the law is mutiny within police forces and national guard units, even after federalization. How well can Republican state adjutant generals be trusted?
I’m betting that rump Republicans are planning a severe Constitutional crisis after Trump’s defeat. And unless the state level has a wave Democratic elections in legislatures, states will adopt a radical states rights policy on religious taxation in an attempt to nullify the law.
A pre-emptive strike might be to have one of Clinton’s first proposals be to repeal that 1954 law (anyone see the significance of that date). That would free the religious left and other non-profits to start advocacy in their pulpits.
The fact is that the religious right is not the majority they think they are. Their going over the edge just might wake up the actual majority in this country.
Especially with Trump on the ballot.
This to me illustrates the dire need for Clinton to win and for the Senate to flip. We desperately need that fifth liberal Supreme Court vote.
To me, it shows the dire need for the House to flip–dramatically across geographic regions. So there is a national consensus (not a regional division) about repudiating Trumpism and the sort of politicized religion that Bevin is peddling.
People should have been paying attention to this 6 months ago? Has anyone seen Patrick Murphy’s poll numbers lately against that empty suit Rubio? Or Strickland’s, just today against Rob Portman(the same poll that has HRC ahead in Ohio for once!)? Lots of ticket-splitters in both races. 🙁
I’m not surprised Strickland’s running ahead of a neo-liberal like Clinton…
You know, I have a notion that she actually would. LOL
Some well-placed folks fail to see the potential dangers of repeating what the voices in their heads are saying.
The voices in their heads are not reliable sources.
The story isn’t that Matt Bevin was elected. The story is Matt Bevin was elected by 52.5% of a 30.7% voter turnout.
A sidebar story is why the Kentucky Democratic Party is moribund.
Q to the FT.
I’m baffled as to why there is so little coverage/analysis in liberal blogs regarding the question of why the “[name of state] Democratic Party is moribund.” Or the relationship between the moribund state of said Democratic Parties and their inability to get Democrats elected to the House and Senate.
Could there possibly be a connection there?
I get that the intent of BooMan as well as other liberal analysts is to write to a national audience so that leads to a strong national bias; I get that most writers have expertise in only one or a couple of states at the most so what I’m asking for is difficult. Yet leftists who point this kind of thing out in the face of liberals’ denial get called “cynical”.
That comparison is not fair to Savonarola. Sure, he heard voices, was homophobic, thought that fire only burns the wicked and hated modern art.
But he also denounced clerical corruption, despotic rule and the exploitation of the poor. He pushed for instituting an Appeals process and seems to have genuinely believed his preachings, so he didn’t enrich himself. He also was pro republic and anti aristocracy.
Clearly if Savonarola ran against Bevin, he would be the lesser evil. Even though he was by modern standards mad as a better.
So we have an elected official advocating for breaking a federal law.
How is this different than Judge Roy Moore’s case?
Why aren’t their crowds outside the Capitol chanting “Lock him up!”?