My attention was caught last week by an op-ed piece in the Washington Post written by Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III. Mr. Sullenberger, of course, is the pilot who skillfully maneuvered his disabled airliner to safety on the Hudson River, saving all 155 of its passengers and crew. His essay was not about that famous 2009 incident, however, but about the 2018 midterm elections.
Far be it from me to impugn an American hero who is universally admired and a recipient of the highest honor our society can bestow: an eponymous movie about himself starring Tom Hanks. But I think it’s possible that, perhaps, Captain Sully has been on the motivational-speaking circuit a little too long. You had to hack your way through some formidable prose thickets—“The fabric of our nation is under attack . . . Our ideals, shared facts and common humanity are what bind us together as a nation and a people”—and read between a fair number of cryptic lines to get to the gist of his argument: He doesn’t like Donald Trump and planned to register his disapproval on Election Day.
Fair enough. The president is scarcely to everyone’s taste, and Sullenberger’s bill of particulars—“Many [people in power] do not respect the offices they hold; they lack . . . a basic knowledge of history, science and leadership; and they act impulsively, worsening a toxic political environment”—was carefully worded in ways that could be applied to innumerable “people in power” but was obviously directed at Trump.
What intrigued me about the exercise, however, was the lone paragraph where the author got specific, more or less.
Sullenberger may have genuinely believed that his account of awakening, conversion, and repentance was a novelty—that is certainly the way it was reported in the press and disseminated on social media—but in the pages of the Post, especially, this is one of the oldest and most shopworn reflections on Republicans and their party: namely, the wise, widely respected, and faithful old GOP voter who, more in sorrow than anger, has concluded that the Republican party of 2018—or 2008, or 1992, or 1980, or 1964, or 1952—is no longer the party of his earlier life or of innumerable ancestors.
Indeed, if you live long enough, you begin to notice certain trends in such stories and their evolving succession of names. In the early 1980s, for example, political correspondents were especially adept at finding New England farmers or Midwest businessmen whose first presidential ballots were cast for Calvin Coolidge, say, or Wendell Willkie. But those overbearing ideologues in Ronald Reagan’s White House, running up the national debt and pushing the world toward the brink of nuclear war, had persuaded them—sadly, reluctantly—to vote Democratic for the first time in their lives!
By the turn of the 21st century, lifelong Republicans in these perennial tales were more likely to have cast their first votes for Dwight D. Eisenhower or Barry Goldwater—both of whom seem to have retrospectively lost any partisan identity and were, in any case, described in respectful, even nostalgic, terms that would scarcely apply to those divisive, bigoted figures (Bob Dole, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain) currently calling themselves “Republican.”
The obvious problem with such selective accounts as these is that in a body politic with a large and malleable “independent” constituency, strict party-line voters tend to be less common than is widely believed. Moreover, since Republicans have persisted in winning elections on the local, state, and national levels, it’s reasonable to guess that for every laconic Vermonter or son of the prairie who used to vote Republican but has now switched sides there is a Georgia shopkeeper or daughter of the Plains who descends from New Deal Democrats but now wants to Make America Great Again.
There have been enormous demographic, geographical, and ideological shifts in American politics—always have been and always will be—but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the press coverage. The suburban Northeast and the Solid South have switched political loyalties; but the youth vote is always on the verge of transforming America, the NRA is no longer omnipotent, and Hispanic voters—or global-warming activists, soccer moms, #BlackLivesMatter—are sleeping giants keeping the GOP awake at night.
Decorated veterans running for office as Republicans are a statistic; decorated veterans running as Democrats are a feature story. You can read about the disappearance of liberal Republicans on a regular basis but the absence of conservative Democrats escapes notice. Which, after all, is scarcely a surprise when the principal historic reflection in the press on Republican values is its status as “the party of Lincoln.”
To be sure, the fact that Abraham Lincoln was born during the reign of King George III, and that his views on gay marriage, the League of Nations, net neutrality, women’s suffrage, Medicaid expansion, and affirmative action are impossible to know, seems no bar to expectations about the party of Lincoln. Yet there is no corresponding media standard by which today’s Democrats are judged as the party of Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson.
Perhaps that’s what Captain Sullenberger meant when he wrote that “the fabric of our nation is under attack, while shame—a timeless beacon of right and wrong—seems dead.”
