Give Politico’s chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza some credit. “Story of an era in two convention speeches,” he tweeted after Michelle Obama’s speech capping the first night of the Democrats’ virtual convention.
“Barack 04: ‘There’s not a black America and white America … there’s the United States of America.’ Michelle 20: ‘my message won’t be heard by some people’ because ‘we live in a nation that is deeply divided,'” he wrote.
But who’s to blame? Democrats like to load all the blame on President Trump. Despite their continued failure to cite evidence for his “racism,” there’s no denying his coarse insults have contributed to an increasing sense of national division.
Balance that out, however, at least a bit, by recognizing that bipartisan electoral politics inevitably divides a citizenry, as it has ours since James Monroe was reelected without opposition in 1820. That “era of good feeling” ended four years later, when a four-candidate deadlock sent the election into the House of Representatives. It’s been division ever since.
Obama’s 2004 speech made an Illinois state legislator into a plausible presidential candidate, an African American whose election promised to smooth over racial divisions as the election of John Kennedy in 1960 had once smoothed over Catholic-Protestant divisions. Such hopes buoyed Obama’s rapturous crowds, from Denver’s Mile High Stadium to Berlin’s Tiergarten to Chicago’s Grant Park in 2008.
The letdown came well before Trump descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. Gallup showed that the percentage of people in the United States rating black-white relations between as very or somewhat good plunging in Obama’s second term, from 70% in 2013 to 47% in 2015. The 2014 exit poll showed 38% of voters believing “race relations in this country” have gotten worse “in the last few years” versus 20% saying they’ve gotten better.
Plainly, there was a sense of disappointment, of optimistic and perhaps unrealistic expectations being unmet. Comments by the president and his appointees about incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere probably contributed to this. But it surely also reflected continuing poor conditions and relatively high crime rates in many (not all) predominantly black neighborhoods.
Distinctions between Catholics and Protestants became less visible after 1960. Distinctions between blacks and whites did not after 2008.
And politically, the Obama presidency left us in an America very sharply divided into two countries. Responses to COVID-19 have widened the already sharp partisan differences between big cities and the countryside. Democrats have vastly overestimated the virus’s death rate and its danger to people under 75 and have embraced stringent lockdowns and mandatory masking and social distancing. Republicans’ estimates have been closer to reality, and Republican states such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona have taken milder measures.
Partisan media (and Democratic convention scriptwriters) have hailed New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo — despite his persistence in sending infected patients to senior citizen homes and the resulting high death rates. They’ve denigrated Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, though his state’s 450 coronavirus deaths per million is a fraction of New York’s 1,690.
There’s a vivid contrast also between the “mostly peaceful” (translated into English: often violent) demonstrations in hip Portland, Oregon, and Seattle and the criminal mobs in Minneapolis and Chicago and the relatively calm and intact exurbs and small towns.
You could argue that Democrats’ extreme risk aversion and the resulting lockdowns have imposed hideous damage on Democratic turf. “New York City is dead forever,” writes Manhattan comedy club owner James Altucher. With restaurants, bars, museums, and clubs closed down, storefronts up and down the avenues boarded up and giant office buildings near-empty, a de-policed Manhattan has been transformed from a garden into a combat zone. Zoom technology threatens to make unnecessary the face-to-face interactions which have always drawn professionals there.
Teachers union members’ refusals to return to school, despite overwhelming evidence that children do not contract or transmit the virus, may end up promoting school choice. Colleges and universities going virtual may demonstrate they are dispensable.
The partisanship that has made Democrats shun (and Republicans embrace) hydroxychloroquine has made Democrats, even those thronging to Black Lives Matter demonstrations, much more determined to vote by mail — and prone to implausible Post Office conspiracy theories. The actual problem, misstated by Trump, is that in many states, many ballots may be improperly filled out or undelivered on time. You can request a postal ballot in Michigan the Friday before the election. Good luck getting it delivered by Tuesday.
Democratic convention speakers are blaming Trump for not stamping out the virus, for the lockdowns’ economic devastation and for intensified partisan rancor. He’s made mistakes and missteps, but the charges are over the top. Maybe they’re an attempt to cover up the differences between red and blue America, which don’t work to Democrats’ advantage.
