The state flag of Virginia flies in Richmond. (Ned Oliver/Virginia Mercury)
Oh, East is East, and West is West and neither will meet,
Until the earth and heaven are currently standing before God’s great judgment throne.
—Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’
When this century began a generation ago, could you have imagined that there would come a time when a political party would call its opposition party “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 rapidly splitting into hostile tribes, ideologically, culturally, and—perhaps most disturbingly—geographically. It plays out for us in our politics, our policies and the way we interact with each other. Or, better yet, not be in a relationship.
Neither side in our growing cultural schism is willing to consider the other’s point of view. We have been hardened by the echo chamber of social media and ideologically driven cable channels and podcasts, to the point where losers resort to violence to maintain or gain power. If these trend lines are taken to their extremes, they threaten to derail the governance structure of a freely elected republic that is now almost 250 years old.
Free, democratic societies are not immune to political disagreements. Instead, they feed on it. Unlike autocracies, we argue openly and implement policies through debate and compromise.
Democracies are also not static. Things change; sometimes, as is the case in Virginia, at a glacial pace.
Sixty years ago, rural Virginia — at a time when agriculture, factories and coal mines still dominated the state’s economy — ruled politics. Governors and speakers of the House of Representatives routinely came from places like the Southwest, the South Side or the Valley. The state as a whole was still loyal to a Democratic Party that favored racially segregated schools under its legally and morally bankrupt “Mass Resistance” doctrine. But democratic control waned when the party transformed into the current Social Liberal Party.
Then came the upheavals of 1968 and Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which cynically used white unrest in the former Confederate states against the rights Black Americans gained with the dismantling of Jim Crow, sending the South into a cycle of four years irrevocably changed from Democratic to Republican. Virginia Republicans broke the stranglehold that Democrats had had on the state government since Reconstruction the following year by electing Linwood Holton as governor. Since then, the two sides have exchanged power intermittently.
Virginia would vote Republican in presidential elections for forty years, until Barack Obama won the state’s thirteen electoral votes in 2008. The country has remained solidly Democratic in every presidential election since, including the one a few weeks ago.
We lost something along the way. A lot actually. And we are poorer for it.
The news media has become so diminished that professional, vetted reporting is no longer the most appropriate voters get their information. It’s a complicated dynamic in which the financial and attendant editorial atrophy of old-fashioned print and television journalism is being swamped by the unchecked proliferation of social media platforms, podcasts and cable stations where lies typically go unchallenged even when verifiable facts are difficult to hear.
Not that major newspapers and the once undisputed networks were sacrosanct. Far from it; they were very human. We have made mistakes. (I certainly did.) We got things wrong, but the process was so transparent that errors were immediately and publicly corrected and the reporters and editors responsible were held accountable.
Now conspiracy fabulists are on the rampage, spreading misinformation and disinformation with impunity. They’re blowing up a firehose of disinformation that in a more rational past would rightly be dismissed as really bad science fiction, but which nevertheless finds an audience among the willfully gullible. For example, enough people believe that there are machines that control the weather Legislation is pending in Florida prohibit such a device.
The past half century has seen a rise of political professionals who have turned campaigns into data-driven science, pitting groups of Americans against each other for political gain, legislative walls intended to stop plutocrats from secretly buying public offices and now raking in rock star fees for practicing their dark arts.
There is no ethical basis for today’s victory über everything election activities and the just ended elections make this clear. But it delivers results, so don’t expect it to go away or even lighten.
Politics as it is now being practiced is failing us by exploiting and exacerbating cultural differences that a great country or commonwealth like ours should not only tolerate, but celebrate. And its practitioners are content to keep us suspicious and resentful of each other – the better to manipulate us every November.
We are losing – if we have not already lost it – the ability to reason with each other because we cannot agree on the established facts where such dialogue should begin. Much of society seems unbound by the standards of decency and human empathy that once made ours a civil society. Threats Charges have been drawn up against those involved in the man’s arrest alleged murderer from UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson at McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania – that shows how low we have sunk.
In Virginia, the geography of the schism is easy to follow. It appears on crimson and blue cards after every election.
A crescent of suburban wealth – running loosely from Loudoun County and the bedroom communities of Washington, DC south along Interstate 95, through commuter country to the affluent clusters around Richmond and then southeast along the peninsula to Hampton Roads – is largely center-left and leans toward Democrats. They are largely college-educated, dual-income households whose children attend well-funded schools and tend to be more socially liberal.
To the west and south there are huge, often sparse populations in rural areas whose fortunes have taken a big hit since the 1990s. Global trade agreements moved jobs in the furniture and textile sectors abroad. Lawsuits against cigarette companies paralyzed tobacco growing and processing. Clean air mandates, driven by climate science, undermined the coal industry that once provided decent wages in the corner of Virginia furthest 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 that it doesn’t take much for those hard feelings to grow and freeze.
These are differences that the long passage of time may or may not eliminate. But the lack of communication we have here is intolerable. It will ultimately affect our ability to govern ourselves.
Forget about agreeing on everything. The first step is realizing that no one always has his or her way, no matter how convinced you are that yours is the only way. At least we have to to belong each other again, understand what the other guys are saying and occasionally even admit that they might have a point. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Kipling’s paradigm of a perpetually separated East and West is not an option, especially in Virginia.
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