In a recent essay on my own blog, I promised to lay out my Geezers’ strategy for supporting a “blue wave” in November. On reflection, I think it mostly boils down to one candidate and one state: Stacey Abrams of Georgia (although there are other support-worthy candidates and causes, too). I’m posting here an abbreviated version of my analysis.
Americans’ longest-standing challenge remains today what it has always been: the divide between South and North. Our Congress is twisted to favor the South. Today the so-called “Tea Party” makes a rabble out of the House of Representatives, with the help of the so-called “Hastert Rule.” But who or what is the “Tea Party”? As of 2013, when the so-called “movement” began, about two thirds of its members came from the Deep South and Border States:
2013 House Tea-Party Roster by Region
Region |
Number |
Percentage |
States |
Old South |
17 |
53% |
AL, FL, GA, LA, NC, SC, TX |
Border States |
4 |
12.5% |
KY, MO, TN |
Midwest |
6 |
18.8% |
IA, IN, KS, MI, MN, OH |
North |
1 |
3% |
NJ |
Northwest |
1 |
3% |
ID |
Southwest |
2 |
6% |
AZ |
West |
1 |
3% |
CA |
Almost twenty percent of its members (one out of five) came from a single Southern state: Texas.
As for the Senate, our Founders designed it for minority rule from the very beginning. Today, Wyoming has two senators to represent its 573,720 people, while California also has two senators to represent its 39,776,830. Thus each citizen of Wyoming enjoys more than 69 times the voting power in the Senate of every Californian. And procedural rules in both the House and the Senate entrench minority rule even further.
In just twenty years, half the country’s population will reside in a mere eight states, with sixteen senators. The other states will have eighty-four senators and will govern the majority with an iron fist. Meanwhile, our Electoral College has given us five minority-elected presidents, two in our new century alone.
A future in which Southern bossism continues to govern the vast majority of Americans, including the huge progressive states of California, Illinois, New York and Washington, is untenable. The South today comprises but one-third of Americans. Even with the powerhouse of Texas, it generates only one-third of our national GDP. It ought to be perpetually in the minority, able to make or block law only if and when it can attract a larger political coalition. But don’t tell that to Mitch McConnell or the Tea Party; you might frighten them.
Something has to give. Testosterone-fueled pride makes Southern pols revel in political anachronisms like the Electoral College, which stole presidential elections from Al Gore (with the Supreme Court’s help) and Hillary Clinton. They gloat about stealing Supreme-Court seats with sheer political obstinacy. But the longer this travesty of democracy continues, the more all Americans peer into the abyss.
We got a good glimpse of the abyss a year ago in Charlottesville. Our president reveled in the catastrophe because his angry minority is all he’s got, and he knows it. But the rest of us awkwardly gazed away toward a better future. That’s why this year’s proposed “re-enactment” of Charlottesville, in our nation’s capital, came out so differently. Counter-protestors vastly outnumbered the white supremacists, and a strong central government kept order.
As much as the violence prone might welcome one, a second Civil War is not the answer, let alone in the Nuclear Age. Nor is secession, although the reasons for it are mounting daily. The solution cannot be based on testosterone, on masculine guile, obstinacy and risk-taking.
Instead, our two cultures must meld. We Americans must adopt common values. Whether through migration, education or simple exhausted compromise, we must become a single nation, with a single culture, in which North or South makes no difference. If we stay divided, the best we can hope for is a national decline so precipitous as to duplicate ancient Rome’s four-century slide in as many decades. With the most divisive, erratic and incompetent president in our history—and with Russia’s persistent and skilled egging on—we have already started down that road.
Since Trump became president, political analysts have focused on our upper Midwest and Pennsylvania. There a mere 80,000 votes in a few key states made liars out of pundits and chaos out of order. But the action isn’t really there. It never has been. The action is in the South, and in the cultural chasm between the South and the rest, where it always has been.
California, now the world’s fifth largest economy, is already a majority-minority state. But key Southern states are close behind. If you add African-Americans and Hispanics together, they amount to about 40% of the total population in each of Georgia and Florida, and 30% in North Carolina. If just one-fifth of whites vote progressive (one third in North Carolina), and if minorities understand who’s on their side, common values can command an absolute majority of the population in all three states. When that happens, the Dems will have a permanent lock on the Electoral College, with a reliable 273 votes in every presidential election. Then the Midwest’s (and Pennsylvania’s!) indecision will become irrelevant.
Sound unlikely? Not so much. In 2008, Barack Obama won both Florida and North Carolina, but not Georgia. In 2012, he still won Florida but lost North Carolina and Georgia.
The elusive prize is Georgia. Why? Well, there’s still a lot of regional resentment there. That’s where General Sherman marched to the sea, in the only sustained military occupation by Americans of their own. Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, is where the KKK held many of its most fearsome rallies and set out on its rounds of white terrorism. Ghosts of the strong feelings that made our Civil War the single bloodiest in our entire history still inhabit Georgia’s stones.
But the time is ripe for change there, and Stacey Abrams is the one to bring it. She’s smart, experienced and capable. As a woman, she lacks the testosterone that still fills the halls of Congress with rancor and once made Southern ground slippery with blood.
Abrams is nice looking. But she lacks the kind of strong attraction that can inspire lust in men and envy in women. She has no accent, whether “black” or regional; she speaks American English. Most of all, she lacks the slightest trace of the bitterness and resentment that have poisoned the South for a century and a half. She’s a healing mother figure who loves all her “kids” equally; she hardly ever refers to her constituents except as “all Georgians.” She threatens no one.
Abrams is the kind of candidate who could be elected governor of Georgia without most voters caring that she is “black.” But when she wins, you can be sure that gerrymandering, vote suppression and the other political shenanigans that have characterized the South since slavery will come to a screeching halt. The state and its national influence will belong to all its people for the first time since our original Constitution counted slaves as three-fifths human.
If ever our nation needed such a healing figure, it is now. If ever there were a state that deserved one, it is Georgia. Atlanta’s thriving business and entrepreneurial culture has made it known as the “Silicon Valley” of the South. It’s as capitalist as a stock market; but Abrams can make it fair and just for those—black, brown and white—whom the stock markets have left behind. Isn’t that what President Trump has promised so often but has yet to begin accomplishing?
Like African-Americans of both genders, Stacey Abrams has had her soul tempered by four centuries of oppression and hate. Yet she bears no scars. Whether minorities or not, all Georgians will reap the harvest of her wisdom born of hardship.
So dig deep, my fellow Geezers. Support her with your money and your time.
If we can propel Abrams to victory, a whole lot of things will change for the better. We will have forged a durable new coalition of white progressives and minorities that could last as long as FDR’s New Deal. We will have taken a decisive step toward a society in which female caring for the whole human family replaces male-ego-driven abstract ideology that never quite gets it right. We will have leaders who care about the people they represent, rather than proving a point. We will finally have laid our American Civil War to rest, without further violence.
Endnote: If you’re skeptical that “vote suppression and the other political shenanigans that have characterized the South since slavery” are still going on in Georgia, read a recent catalogue of Georgia’s vote-suppression efforts as reported by the New York Times. The attempts include: (1) a purge of registrations of voters who don’t vote for three consecutive years, (2) a delayed purge of registrations with information that doesn’t match, down to the letter, data in state drivers’-license databases and Social Security databases, (3) a “sweeping investigation” of so-called “voter fraud” in Brooks County, which produced a dozen indictments and no convictions, (4) a 2.5 year investigation of voter-registration drives by Asian-American groups, which found no violations, and (5) a recent investigation of the New Georgia Project, a voter-registration drive founded by Abrams herself, which discovered 53 fraudulent applications but provoked a lawsuit claiming that state and local officials had failed to process 40,000 registrations.
Who’s responsible for most, if not all, of these efforts to cut the vote? Georgia’s current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, a Republican and fervent Trump supporter. The same guy is now Abrams’ opponent in the general election for governor of Georgia.
One thing that has changed over the years is that minority-vote suppressors have become much more cagey and sophisticated in hiding their partisan and racist motives. Kemp, for example, was recorded only once, in 2014, complaining of efforts to register “all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines.”
But you don’t need careless confessions to know what is going on. Watch what they do, not what they say! In a nation whose average turnout in non-presidential elections rarely beats one-third, officials who really care about democracy and giving everyone a say ought to be doing everything in their power to register more voters and get them to the polls. When they do precisely the opposite—seeking to cut the vote, especially in minority districts—you don’t have to be a genius in tracing cause and effect, or an historian, to know what’s going on. That’s especially so in the Deep South, where it’s been going on for one and a half centuries and counting.
If Abrams were to do nothing more than put a stop to this nonsense, she would deserve support from everyone who values democracy. The facts that she wants to do so much more, plus be the only major-party small-d democrat running for the job, qualify her to win. Just ignore skin color and think which of the candidates every true small-d democrat since ancient Greece would support.