Oh, East is East, and West is West and ne’er the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”
When this century began a generation ago, did you imagine that you’d see a time when one political party would refer to its opposition party as “the enemies of the people?”
Did you think you’d see someone accused of gunning down an executive on a Manhattan sidewalk by shooting him in the back celebrated as a hero on social media?
Well, here we are.
Virginia is an interesting microcosm of a nation fast cleaving itself into hostile tribes, ideologically, culturally and — perhaps most troubling — geographically. It’s playing out before us in our politics, our policy and how we relate to one another. Or, better yet, don’t relate.
Neither side in our widening cultural schism is willing to consider the other’s point of view. We are hardened by the echo chamber of social media and ideologically driven cable channels and podcasts to the point that losers resort to violence to keep or gain power. Those trend lines, taken to their conclusion, threaten to derail the governing structure of a freely elected republic now almost 250 years old.
Free, democratic societies are not immune from political disagreement. Rather, they feed on it. Unlike autocracies, we quarrel openly and enact policy through debate and compromise.
Nor are democracies static. Things change; sometimes, as is the case in Virginia, at a glacial pace.
Sixty years ago, rural Virginia — in a time when farming, factories and coal mines still dominated the state’s economy — ruled politics. Governors and House speakers were routinely from places like the Southwest, Southside or the Valley. The state as a whole was still loyal to a Democratic Party that had championed racially segregated schools under its legally and morally bankrupt “Massive Resistance” doctrine. But Democratic control was slipping as the party morphed into today’s socially liberal party.
Then came the upheavals of 1968 and Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which cynically leveraged white restiveness in the former Confederate states against rights Black Americans gained with the dismantling of Jim Crow, flipping the South irretrievably from Democratic to Republican in one four-year cycle. Virginia Republicans the next year broke the stranglehold Democrats had on state government since Reconstruction by electing Linwood Holton governor. Since then, both parties have intermittently swapped power.
Virginia would vote Republican in presidential elections for 40 years until Barack Obama won the state’s 13 electoral votes in 2008. It has remained solidly Democratic in every presidential election since, including the one a few weeks ago.
Along the way, we lost something. A lot, actually. And we’re poorer for it.
News media are diminished to the point where professional, vetted reporting is no longer how most voters get their information. It’s a complicated dynamic in which the financial and concomitant editorial atrophy of legacy print and broadcast journalism gets swamped by the unchecked proliferation of social media platforms, podcasts and cable stations where lies commonly go unrebutted even as verifiable fact struggles to be heard.
Not that major newspapers and the once-unchallenged networks were sacrosanct. Far from it; they were quite human. We made mistakes. (I certainly did.) We got things wrong, but the process was sufficiently transparent that errors were promptly and publicly corrected and the reporters and editors responsible were held accountable for it.
Now, conspiracy fabulists run wild, misinforming and disinforming with impunity. They blast a firehose of disinformation that would rightly be dismissed as really bad science fiction in a more rational past, yet it finds an audience among the willfully gullible. For instance, enough people believe there are machines that control the weather that legislation is pending in Florida to ban such a device.
The past half century has seen the rise of political professionals who have made campaigns into data-driven science, turned groups of Americans against one another for political gain, knocked down legislative walls intended to keep plutocrats from stealthily buying public offices and now rake in rock-star fees for practicing their dark arts.
There is no ethical bottom to today’s victory über alles electioneering and the just-finished election makes plain. But it delivers results, so don’t expect it to go away or even lighten up.
Politics as it is now done fails us by exploiting and exacerbating cultural differences that a big country or commonwealth such as ours should not just tolerate but celebrate. And its practitioners are content to keep us suspicious and grudgeful of one another — the better to manipulate us every November.
We’re losing — if we haven’t already lost — the ability to reason among ourselves because we can’t agree on established facts where such a dialogue would begin. Much of society seems untethered to standards of decency and human empathy that once made ours a civil society. Threats have been made against those involved in apprehending the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson at an Altoona, Pennsylvania, McDonald’s — that shows how low we’ve sunk.
In Virginia, the geography of the schism is easy to follow. It shows up in crimson and blue maps after every election.
A crescent of suburban wealth — that loops loosely from Loudoun County and the Washington, D.C., bedroom communities south along Interstate 95 through commuter country to the affluent clusters around Richmond and then southeast down the Peninsula to Hampton Roads — is largely center-left and leans toward Democrats. They’re largely college-educated, two-income households whose kids attend well-funded schools and tend to be more socially liberal.
West and south of there are vast, often sparse populations in rural areas whose fortunes took a beating since the 1990s. Global trade agreements moved furniture and textile jobs offshore. Litigation against cigarette makers crippled tobacco farming and processing. Clean-air mandates, driven by climate science, undermined the coal industry that once brought decent wages to the corner of Virginia the farthest from the suburban crescent.
When people with their conservative beliefs feel — and not without justification — that their communities and values are being ridiculed by comfortable elites in cozy subdivisions … well, you can see how it wouldn’t take much for those hard feelings to grow and ossify.
These are differences that the long passage of time may or may not assuage. But the lack of communication we have here is untenable. It will eventually corrode our very ability to govern ourselves.
Forget about agreeing on everything. The first step is realizing that nobody has his or her way all the time, no matter how convinced you might be that yours is the only way. We must at least hear one another again, understand what the other guys are saying and even acknowledge from time to time that they may have a point. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Kipling’s paradigm about a perpetually separate east and west is not an option, certainly not in Virginia.
