During the first Republican presidential primary debate, on August 23, former Vice President Mike Pence spoke of founders of the nation conquering the American “wilderness.” It was one of many mentions of American history: Candidates also name-checked the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. Toward the end of the evening, Pence stressed the wilderness theme: “If we renew our faith in one another and renew our faith in Him, who has ever guided this nation since we arrived on these wilderness shores, I know the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”

Historical references are so ubiquitous in presidential debates and stump speeches that they can seem superficial. This year’s Republican candidates seem especially committed to the idea that the past matters, perhaps because of battles over history and ethnic studies curricula spreading in some states.  If, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis opined, “We cannot be graduating students that don’t have any foundation in what it means to be American,” then perhaps we also need to pay closer attention to what kind of American identity candidates are finding in history.

When Pence referenced conquering the wilderness, he used a keyword lifted from the Puritans. Those early American immigrants make cameos in plenty of political speeches, but often in ways that are misquoted or misunderstood, because their writings reflect a world of the 1600s, whose concerns are not identical to those of our time.

In England, the Puritans constituted a religious minority who opposed the state-sanctioned Church of England, which they believed had betrayed true faith. By leaving for North America, many believed they were testing whether their distinct vision of Protestant Christianity could survive in a new continent.

The concept of conquering a wilderness came into American vocabulary from these immigrants. Between 1630 and 1650, Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford penned a history of the Puritans’ settlement of Plymouth, known today as “Of Plymouth Plantation.” In the text, the governor offered a vivid depiction of how the Puritans who sailed to the coast in the autumn of 1620 met a land “with a weather-beaten face” and how “the whole country, full of woods and thickets,” had “a wild and savage hue.”

In reality, Bradford and those who sailed with him on the Mayflower did not encounter a wilderness as we typically use the word now. As even other Europeans like Samuel de Champlain and Captain John Smith acknowledged at the time, these English arrived in long-settled Wampanoag territory. Cornfields, not thick woods, surrounded Patuxet, the town the English renamed New Plymouth. Residents of the town had suffered through a devastating epidemic, possibly caused by rats that had stowed away on ships from Europe, that tore through coastal New England in the late 1610s.

Despite the loss of life, the Indigenous community survived. Yet because Christians did not inhabit these places, Bradford and the other Puritans saw them as part of the “wilderness” that needed to be conquered. Later in the same book, Bradford celebrates the destruction of a Pequot village, which left 400 to 700 dead in a single night. The Puritans rounded up survivors and sold them into slavery.

In his references to wilderness, Pence left unspoken the irony of representing a party bent on restricting access to newcomers while praising the idea that the nation emerged only because newcomers ran roughshod over those who already lived in North America.  In his version of early American history, Europeans were the only important actors, so his view of the nation’s history concentrates on them alone.

The second Republican debate will take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley today. Like Pence, Reagan invoked the Puritans to boast of American exceptionalism. In his farewell address to the nation on January 11, 1989, he cited a lay sermon delivered in 1629 by soon-to-be governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop, and referred to the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” Reagan famously interpreted Winthrop as stating that America was “a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.” He also called Winthrop “an early freedom man.”

In an interview with Time magazine published last week, Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott repeated this invocation of Winthrop. He stated that he hoped to lead “a team anchored in conservatism that wants to make sure that America remains the city on the hill.”

But Winthrop wasn’t bragging about the colony being a yearned-for destination, like a freedom-minded Emerald City. He didn’t even use the word “shining” at all—that was Reagan’s addition. The original text was Matthew 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill, cannot be hid,” the verse reads in the 1599 Geneva Bible the Puritans favored. Winthrop understood what the apostle meant: Creating a biblically centered community was a challenge, and if the Puritans succeeded, they would be the envy of the world. But if they failed, everyone would see their shortcomings. They would make an embarrassment of the Protestant agenda to reform the world in the way they believed God intended.

Reagan took the line out of context. His proud, sunny version missed the Puritan theologians’ point, which was made at a time when religious wars were driving Catholics and Protestants against each other across much of Europe. For Winthrop and his contemporaries, the fate of the world was at stake. They knew that the English migrants could lose their battle. That possibility did not fit into Reagan’s belief in the inevitability of American greatness.  (For what it’s worth, when John F. Kennedy invoked Winthrop’s speech shortly before he became president in 1961, he understood that it referred to a challenge rather than an assertion of inevitability.)

But if Pence and Reagan twisted the meaning of the twinned ideas of conquering wilderness and building a city on a hill, they are right that these concepts are foundational to American history. The English migrants to New England believed that what happened to them had world-historic significance, but that success was not pre-ordained. Bradford and Winthrop each recognized that danger lurked. They believed that survival depended on adherence to their faith—and that even so, the risk of failure was high. Those views shaped early New England and, by extension, much of what became the nation’s culture in the years after the American Revolution.

A different kind of existential threat seems to animate at least some of the candidates for the Republican nomination. In some ways, it appears, these candidates feel the kinds of pressure that the Puritans faced four centuries ago. They too look to stake out a moral position, based on the notion that the future of our culture depends on who comes to occupy the Oval Office.

Though they are battling to govern in the future, the Republican candidates seem obsessed by how we understand the past. Those who cite the legacies of President Reagan and the conquest of wilderness want to emulate what they see as the heroic steps the Puritans took to establish a nation. Yet they seem blind to the complexity of the actual past, in which Europeans pursuing one vision of the future displaced and attacked Indigenous peoples who had their own plans for what was to come. If the Puritans are to serve as inspiration, it seems time to reckon with their actual ideas and actions.

The post What the GOP Gets Wrong About the Puritans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why are so many Georgians still supporting Herschel Walker’s bid to replace Democrat Raphael Warnock in the U.S. Senate?

The easy answer seems to be the vast reservoir of good will that derives from Walker’s legendary exploits on the gridiron at the University of Georgia (UGA) in the early 1980s.

But the lingering afterglow from what he accomplished 40 years ago is not what’s keeping Walker competitive in the face of multiple disclosures of the sort that have torpedoed many a political campaign. Instead, conditions on the ground in Georgia and survey data suggest the key to understanding Herschel Walker’s staying power lies in the shifting demographic and political landscape that has left Georgia Republicans fiercely determined to defend the increasingly shaky ground they occupy.

Walker hasn’t made it easy for his supporters. His off-the-wall takes on air pollution in the U.S. (China foisting its bad air on us) and on evolution (the mere survival of the ape proves that Charles Darwin had it wrong) should amount to major alarm bells in and of themselves. Then come the outright fabrications he has offered concerning his achievements in education and business, his civic and charitable contributions, and, most notably, his personal life. Beyond that, it now appears that despite his stern public stance against abortions, in 2009 he persuaded a woman he impregnated to have an abortion and footed the bill for it. Walker’s son Christian blasted his father’s efforts to dismiss this allegation, accusing him of serial adultery and numerous threats to harm him and his mother, who had already described Walker holding a gun to her temple. For his part, Walker links his violent impulses to a multiple “identity disorder” that he has since overcome.

The standard campaign tale about overcoming adversity plays out in a candidate’s early years. Walker has one of these stories too, and it’s a doozy: a variation on the theme in which, rather than eventually discovering that he’s a swan, the bullied and shunned “Ugly Duckling” forces himself to become one.

Walker, who grew up in tiny Wrightsville, Georgia, has described himself as an awkward, overweight child, taunted for his stuttering. He exchanged fat for muscle through a physically extreme daily regimen of thousands of situps and pushups and exhausting sprints down a dusty path near his house. Equally relentless verbal drilling took care of the stuttering.

The payoff for his superhuman exertions was superhuman speed and strength and a physique so stunning that, by the time Walker was 17, a sportswriter reckoned it was as if “God just reached down and chiseled this guy differently.” At 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds, Walker was a monumental mismatch for hapless high-schoolers and later collegians, whose numerous contusions bore witness to the rigors of bringing him down. In only three seasons at Georgia, Walker broke 11 NCAA and 16 Southeastern Conference rushing records, led his team to a national championship in 1980, and put it in position to claim another in 1982. As a junior, he won the Heisman Trophy that many thought should have been his as a freshman. So deep was the gratitude of the University of Georgia faithful that he was even forgiven for forgoing his senior season to sign a precedent-breaking, multi-million-dollar contract with the New Jersey Generals of the newly minted United States Football League. There he would make the acquaintance of one Donald J. Trump. Meanwhile, his marriage to a white UGA coed caused barely a ripple in a state where interracial unions had been illegal only a decade before.

The special place Walker occupied in the hearts of so many white Georgians of that era was not based entirely on his athletic achievements but also on a carefully crafted public persona marked by a disarming humility and a deafening silence on all matters pertaining to race. As an already-famous high school senior in 1979, he frustrated fellow Black students at Johnson County High School by refusing to join their outcry against the alleged racial insensitivity of the school’s white principal. At the same time, he steered clear of any involvement, either as participant or peacemaker, in Black-white community confrontations. He said he did not feel the need to “represent my people”; he had been raised to believe he “represented humanity,” rather than any particular segment of it.

His views may have endeared him to whites, but did not play well with Black people in Wrightsville, where even today, reportedly, the only Black residence displaying a Walker campaign sign is his mother’s. Statewide, Black support for him hovers around 5%.

Meanwhile, demographics alone suggest Walker’s storied athletic career is not the primary reason why so many white Georgians refuse to abandon him. Nearly half of the state’s current residents were born elsewhere, and regardless of where they hail from originally, scarcely a third of them are old enough to remember his glory days. Trump’s endorsement doesn’t explain Walker’s staying power either. His anointed candidates for the Republican nominations for governor and secretary of state of Georgia failed miserably in the primary election. Only one in five of those who support Walker tell pollsters they are doing it out of loyalty to the former president.

These and other findings in recent polls by CBS and Monmouth University suggest that many likely voters are not buying into efforts to put Walker’s warm and fuzzy side forward. Nor are they willfully blinding themselves to his shortcomings. In the CBS and Monmouth surveys Walker is viewed unfavorably by roughly 48% of respondents compared to 44% for his opponent. Meanwhile, 58% say that they like the way Warnock handles himself personally, while the same share say precisely the opposite about Walker. A similar disparity shows up on questions of moral character. In fact, six in ten Warnock backers profess to be voting for him primarily because they like him, while only one in five who support Walker make this claim.

To understand why this race is still so close, we need to flash back to 2020. Although Democrat Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 1.4%, Georgia Republicans seemed utterly dumbfounded when Joe Biden carried the state in November 2020 and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff unseated the state’s two GOP senators in a January 2021 runoff. Less than three months later, an angered and energized Republican majority in the state legislature pushed through SB 202, arguably the most sweeping suffrage-restriction measure enacted anywhere since the 2020 election.

SB 202 signaled that those Democratic victories left Georgia Republicans not only smarting, but scared. Census figures indicate that persons of color account for more than 90% of the 1.6 million-person increase in the state’s voting-age population between 2010 and 2020. The Republicans’ majority in the lower house of the state legislature shrank from 66% to 57% between 2014 and 2020, while their margin in the upper house dropped from 20 to 12. Painfully aware of how quickly Georgia turned purple, they aren’t sitting idle as it trends blue.

In the CBS survey, 86% of Walker’s supporters—more than four times the percentage of Walker supporters who say they actually like him—say they are voting for him primarily to help Republicans regain control of the Senate. A similar share say they see voting for him as voting against President Biden. A squad of nationally prominent GOP politicians will be arriving shortly to shore up these sentiments.

Should Herschel Walker still manage to eke out a win in November, he will owe it to voters who acted out of blind loyalty, not so much to the greatest Georgia Bulldog ever, but to the party that made him their standard bearer despite his manifest unsuitability for the position he would be assuming.

The post Herschel Walker Is a Football Legend. But That’s Not Why Republicans Are Sticking With Him appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The idea of “staying woke” became an important refrain among Black Lives Matter activists after a spate of police killings of Black men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. These debates over “wokeness” are the latest in a long history of Republican efforts to win over white Democratic swing voters with racially conservative attitudes that political scientists call “racial resentment.” Democrats have often tried to maintain support from these whites by staying silent on racial issues.

But my research shows that racial resentment among white Democrats is at all-time low and by failing to take stronger positions on racial justice—out of concern they could alienate moderate whites – the party is missing a historic political opportunity.

Since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats have taken gradually more progressive positions on racial justice issues, social welfare programs, and immigration policies than Republicans. As a result, majorities of racial and ethnic minorities have increasingly supported the Democratic Party and self-identified non-Hispanic white voters have steadily allied with the Republican Party. According to data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), in 1968, 52 percent of white Americans identified as Democrats and 37 percent as Republicans; by 2020 those values had reversed: 53 percent of white voters were Republicans, while only 37 percent of white voters aligned with the Democratic Party.

By comparison, 80 percent of Black Americans and nearly 60 percent of Hispanic Americans currently identify as Democrats.

But even as the party’s non-white voter base grows, Democrats have continued to express concerns about losing white voters because of racial positions. In 2017, a former Bill Clinton pollster blamed identity politics for weakening the party’s electoral chances. Earlier this year, racial justice activists like Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, chided President Biden for omitting racial justice issues in his State of the Union Address, even as he addressed his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

My research suggests, however, that when Democrats stay silent on race to appease white moderates, they are making a tactical error. It’s a lose-lose situation for Democrats who are soft on racial justice because Republicans will still attack them for being too liberal. In Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, and elsewhere, Republican candidates aligned with former President Donald Trump continue to take aim at Democratic positions on identity politics, regardless of Democrats’ reluctance to raise the issue. Additionally, when Democrats avoid racial issues, they fail to address the needs of their large, and growing, constituency base of people of color and risk alienating their own base of support.

Social scientists such as Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders introduced the concept of white “racial resentment” to describe the more subtle forms of racial prejudice that emerged after the civil rights movement. Instead of extreme beliefs about biological inferiority and preferences for segregation, racial resentment addresses a more covert type of racism that is expressed in the language of personal responsibility and denial of racial discrimination.

Researchers measure this form of prejudice primarily through survey research. Respondents are asked questions about perceptions of work ethic and personal responsibility. For example, respondents are asked how strongly they agree with statements like, “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should do the same without special favors.” And: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Black people to work their way out of the lower class.” Individuals who deny the consequences of racial discrimination and blame Black people’s poor work ethic for racial disparities receive a higher “resentment score.”

Using data from the ANES, which has routinely measured whites’ levels of racial resentment since the 1980s, Duke University graduate student Trent Ollerenshaw and I analyzed how white Americans’ levels of racial prejudice have changed over time. Our findings showed that racial resentment among white Democrats is at an all-time low.

This suggests that Democrats have an historic opportunity to advance more racially progressive policies. By leveraging burgeoning white progressivism on race, Democrats may also serve the interests of—and thereby, attract—another crucial constituency: people of color, whose support for the Democratic Party appears to have eroded somewhat in recent years.

We find that during the 1980s and 1990s, white Democrats had only slightly lower levels of racial resentment than white Republicans, and both were more politically conservative than now. The two groups began drifting apart in the early 2000s, a trend that accelerated at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2008 and became a gulf by 2016. By 2020, the two parties were further apart than ever. While white Democrats’ resentment scores declined dramatically, white Republicans’ racial resentment scores in 2020 had not changed much since 1986, the same year Howard Beach race riots in Queens, New York, killed a Black man and the state of Arizona rescinded the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

There are two likely explanations for this trend: More racially prejudiced white Democrats have left the party in recent years, or they have substantially changed their views. Multiple surveys of the same individuals between 2011 and 2020 provide evidence for the latter explanation: they show that whites who remained Democrats have expressed less racial resentment over time.

The next critical question for political researchers and Democratic strategists is: Does declining racial resentment among white Democrats suggest there is greater support for specific policy solutions?

Our analysis shows that many white survey respondents in 1980s and 1990s opposed policies that are perceived to benefit Black people, disproportionately, such as affirmative action and welfare spending increases.

During the Obama era, however, white Democrats’ support for these policies increased substantially. A 2020 poll by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute revealed that more than 73 percent of white Democrats supported affirmative action policies in college admissions and more than 66 percent supported them in hiring practices. More white Democrats support affirmative action now than ever before.

Our analysis suggests that the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take stronger positions on racial justice due to concerns about racially resentful whites is a lost opportunity. There is empirical evidence that Democrats could see gains if they embrace the progressivism of their core constituencies: racially liberal white voters and people of color.

The post Why Are Democrats Reluctant to Be Woke? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Answer:  One.

Maybe.

That singular spot is the State Controller’s Office. If you don’t know anything about the position or can’t name who holds it, you are not alone. For decades, the controller has been just another down-ballot elected position, occupied by forgettable establishment politicians.

But here’s a secret that California’s ruling elites don’t want you to know: the controller’s office has vast and often untapped powers to oversee, audit, and prod California’s dysfunctional government. Which is why public employee unions and other interest groups have long worked to ensure that a reliable ally wins the job.

The controller, however, could become a major force for turning California’s aspirations into effective programs. It requires someone smart, responsible, dogged—and resolutely independent of the Democratic power structure.

In our two-party system, such a person is likely to be—deep breath—a Republican. And in this otherwise boring election year, with the governor sailing to reelection, a potential contender has emerged. The 2022 state controller campaign might actually be a race worth watching.

Let me be clear. While your columnist is a non-partisan, and not a Democrat, he understands and respects Californians’ profound aversion to electing Republicans, who have not won a statewide office since 2006. In the Trump era, the Republican party has treated Californians like traitors and enemies, preferring to attack our elections, our environmental laws and our undocumented neighbors, instead of meeting our needs or seeking our votes. And since Republicans dominated our politics for more than a century, another 100 years of Democratic dominance would do nothing more than balance the books.

All that said, even the most partisan of Democrats should acknowledge that making our government a political monoculture isn’t healthy. There’s also hard math: 5.3 million Californians are registered Republicans who deserve democratic representation, even if their party seems hostile to democracy right now.

But most of all, the status quo is broken. The state’s Democratic rulers have struggled with management and oversight, too often failing to turn progressive policies into actual progress. The billions we’ve devoted to homelessness haven’t ended that crisis. Huge and worthy spending increases on health access and education haven’t made the state much healthier or smarter. And scandals and corruption have plagued many departments, most notably employment development. Worst of all, the public has become convinced that such problems may never be fixed.

Electing an effective state controller who isn’t on Team Democrat may be the easiest way to shake up this dynamic.

The controller is often described as California’s chief fiscal officer, controlling and disbursing all state funds. But the position is more than that. The controller serves on 70-some state boards and commissions, including the Franchise Tax Board and the Board of Equalization, and our two giant state pension funds. The controller also has broad authority to oversee and make public the fiscal data and actions of local governments, where federal and state money are used.

All these overlapping roles provides an opportunity for a controller to be California’s true public watchdog and a force for transparency and reform. A strong controller could find fraud while also helping identify solutions to persistent management and fiscal failures.

Is there a Republican smart and skilled enough to seize the opportunity? This year, for the first time in a long time, it’s possible the answer is yes.

Lanhee Chen, a Stanford scholar of domestic policy and democracy, with four degrees from Harvard, including a law degree and a PhD in political science, is undoubtedly brainy enough to do it. He’s got governing experience—he was a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services during George W. Bush’s presidency and became a member of the independent Social Security Advisory Board during the Obama administration. His political experience includes a stint as policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, and in the private sector, he’s been a partner at an investment firm, and chaired the board of a Northern California health system.

He’s not the perfect candidate—I dream of a controller who investigated Mafia finances before turning around poorly managed companies and government agencies. But Chen has the connections to build a new team and the political savvy to speak the Democrats’ language, a skill that would be crucial to getting other politicians to follow his recommendations. At the California Economic Summit in Monterey last fall, he couched a Republican argument for supporting small businesses in the terms of diversity and equity that obsess Democrats.

After watching that performance, I asked him to lunch.

We met at a Middle Eastern place in Mountain View. Chen and I are both former San Gabriel Valley kids in our 40s with fancy educations. Our mutual friends routinely sing his personal praises (while sometimes shaking their heads at his Republicanism). After reminiscing about the Puente Hills Mall and lamenting the sorry state of the Lakers, we fell into a detailed technocratic conversation about the state.

Chen avoided bombast, was humble about the complexity of what might face him as controller, and recognized the odds against him winning the office, given his party affiliation and lack of independent wealth. When I asked why he wasn’t running for governor, he said he thought that, realistically, a Republican in California had the best chance to make a constructive impact in the controller’s role.

I agree, but victory remains a long shot. Los Angeles city controller Ron Galperin is a candidate on the Democratic side. And the Democratic establishment is backing former San Francisco supervisor Malia Cohen, who would be a historic selection (the first Black woman to be controller). A smart consensus builder, she’d be perfect for many elected jobs—except this one.

The most effective controller won’t be a team player. A better bet on the left could be State Senator Steve Glazer, who has a long history of clashing with his own party’s labor interests and challenging progressive fantasies. His extensive experience in state and local government—including as senior advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown—includes service on various auditing committees.

But would he be as independent as an actual Republican?

That question, of course, is hypothetical. At least until the elections arrive, and we learn if Californians, already tired of holding their noses at state government’s problems, can hold their noses long enough to elect a Republican who might be able to help.

The post The California Post That Might Need a Republican appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Did Leonardo da Vinci spray graffiti all over the Mona Lisa? Did Alfred Hitchcock destroy the original print of Vertigo?

Of course not. So why are Republicans waging war against California, their party’s greatest masterpiece?

For all the raging rhetoric against our state as a failing Democratic bastion, the larger, historical truth is exactly the opposite: Modern California is, in almost all respects, the creation of Republicans. Even in the 21st century, when Democrats hold almost every significant elected office, the structures of this place remain fundamentally Republican.

The state of California and the Republican Party were born at the same time and grew up together. Both the party and state were forged by the same man, John C. Frémont, who in 1846 as a U.S. Army captain declared a republic in California, then part of Mexico. Frémont became one of California’s first U.S. senators in 1850, and then, in 1856, he was the first Republican presidential nominee, losing in the general election to James Buchanan. Frémont was a risk-taking explorer popularly known as the Pathfinder, and his volatile personality—including a talent for controversy and insubordination—still define both his state and his party.

But Frémont’s impact pales in comparison to that of Leland Stanford, our first Republican governor, elected in 1861. Employing money and power in scandalous fashion at unsurpassed scale, Stanford linked California to the country with his railroads, and gave us our greatest private university. In the process, as journalist and historian Roland De Wolk writes in the new biography American Disruptor, Stanford established the template for the innovative, paranoid, confoundingly corrupt, (if public-spirited) California oligarch that is embodied by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk today.

To be fair, Republicans in California did not merely pioneer corruption: they also found new ways to counter it. In the early 20th century, Republicans—most notably the popular governor (and later U.S. Senator) Hiram Johnson—backed women’s suffrage and established the initiative and referendum process that still dominates California governance. Johnson, who briefly left the party to run as Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president on the 1912 Bull Moose ticket, also oversaw the first steps in making California a leader in environmental conservation.

Under Progressive Republicans, the state adopted a professional and corporatized system of government, including a series of independent commissions, such as the Public Utilities Commission, that still hold sway over California life. These commissions were designed not just to assure free enterprise but to prevent immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities from winning the sort of political power they had achieved in patronage-fueled Democratic bastions back East.

Between 1899 and 1958, California had just one Democratic governor—the ineffective, one-term atheist Culbert Olson. So even as the Depression and Second World War built up an American welfare state, California largely skipped the New Deal and remained an ungenerous, if wide-open, place. When Republicans spent money, they preferred to devote the dollars to institutions. Governor Earl Warren, easily the most distinguished California Republican of all time, made plans and saved money for expansion of our universities, roads and water systems—with a subsequent assist from a rare Democrat, Pat Brown, who supervised much of the actual building and spending.

Warren, as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, went on to impose a California Republicanism on the country: a commitment to civil rights—in law if not in practice—and protection for powerful government agencies and corporations, especially those engaged in national defense. The Warren Court left alone the Golden State defense contractors who established the manufacturing base that turned L.A. into a global city, and also nurtured the companies that birthed Silicon Valley.

California Governor Earl Warren with a small boy dressed as a prospector, likely taken during the Gold Rush centennial celebration. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The cheerleaders for this growth were the two most important Republican politicians of the second half of the 20th century.

California-born Richard Nixon advanced the race-baiting, conspiracy-minded politics that now define our civic lives. But, in the wake of a giant 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, he proved a historic champion for environmental protection, establishing the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

As governor, Ronald Reagan set up California’s smog-fighting Air Resources Board while legalizing abortion (which many progressive Democrats opposed at the time). He also embraced the forces that still shape our economy and culture: free trade and immigration. As president, his 1986 amnesty bill established an orderly path for integrating undocumented citizens—the sort of legalization to which California’s business and political leaders still aspire today.

Most profoundly, Reagan inspired the tax revolt, best represented by the Republican-backed 1978 ballot initiative Proposition 13. Even as Democratic politicians have come to win more elections, Prop 13 and its tax limits remain the foundation of California governance. Today’s Democrats have been unwilling to uproot Prop 13—instead, they build new structures upon it. It is California’s Prop 13-based operation system that keeps California school funding at levels closer to those of conservative Republican bastions like Alabama and Mississippi than to those of liberal states like Massachusetts and Minnesota.

More recent Republicans governors have also left their marks. Pete Wilson created much of today’s structure for health and children’s programs in the state (though he is better remembered for fanning the anti-immigrant politics that helped end a century of GOP political dominance). And Arnold Schwarzenegger established the climate change regime—based on the Republican idea of a cap-and-trade system—that stands at the heart of California policymaking today.

Yes, Democrats have now ruled Sacramento for nearly a decade. But, remarkably, they have been willing to accept—and in some cases celebrate—the historic, and very Republican, California consensus. Jerry Brown, on fiscal matters, was more hostile to spending than his conservative predecessors. State leaders have let California tech firms grow as powerful as they like, while resisting bold actions to tackle California’s poverty and inequality, which persist at levels antithetical to Democratic talking points. And while Gavin Newsom has vowed to transform the state, he’s so far governed as a fiscal steward and portrayed himself primarily as a father in a family tableau so white-bread it would make country club members blush.

But now, in the face of all this Republican history and Republican reality, Trump’s Republicans look in the California mirror and somehow see the enemy. And so they make war against all of our Republican-ness—our direct democracy, our commitment to environment and health, our technological supremacy, our love of immigration and free trade, our tradition of independent governance and regulation. Nixon and Reagan, those great California anti-communists, spin in their graves as the president asks for election help from the Chinese Communist Party, and writes love notes to the dictator in Pyongyang.

This is an ugly war that today’s national Republicans now wage against us. Let’s pray the party considers history and retreats from this dark turn. Because you can’t win a war that you fight against yourself.

The post California Is Still America’s Most Republican State appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But few people look back far enough: to the pivotal election 60 years ago that unintentionally spawned his father’s governorship and the Brown family dynasty.

In 1958, two of California’s most powerful and popular Republicans tried to swap jobs—the governor ran for a U.S. Senate seat while the Senator tried to be elected governor. The epic failure of the “Big Switch” opened the door for an ambitious San Francisco Democrat named Edmund G. Brown, who seized the unusual moment to change the political narrative in California—and in the United States. The ramifications of Brown’s victory have resonated ever since, not only through his own political career but that of his son, Jerry, the longest-tenured governor in California history.

Although California today is considered reliably Democratic, in the 1950s, it was a Republican stronghold. On paper, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in rapidly growing postwar California, but state government had been solidly Republican for decades. Between 1896 and 1958, Culbert Olson was the one Democrat elected governor, and he left office in 1943, a one-term chief executive of little note.

One of the mechanisms that helped Republicans stay in power was the open primary. Candidates could run in both party primaries, and party affiliation was not even noted on the ballot until 1954. As a result, incumbent Republicans could win both lines and run unopposed in the general election.

Edmund G. Brown, known to all but his mother as Pat, had been elected attorney general in 1950, the only Democrat to hold statewide office. He rejected entreaties to run for governor in 1954 against the well-liked Goodwin “Goodie” Knight, who had moved up from lieutenant governor when Earl Warren was appointed chief justice of the United States. Attorney General Brown played it safe, coasting to re-election with the second-highest vote total in state history.

The top vote getter in California was also a Bay Area politician: Republican U.S. Senator William Knowland. He was scion of a prominent Oakland family that owned the Tribune, the majority leader in the U.S. Senate, prominent conservative, and presidential hopeful.

In January 1957, Knowland upended the political calculus in California by announcing he would give up his Senate seat the following year to challenge fellow Republican Knight for the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Knowland’s strategy was to defeat the moderate Knight, move the party to the right, establish himself as the state’s favorite son, and thwart the presidential aspirations of another California Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon.

Knowland’s daughters later confirmed in oral history interviews the widespread speculation that accompanied his surprise decision: Knowland believed he could not be elected president from the Senate. So his ambition drove him to run for governor, even against a well-liked incumbent of his own party.

Democrat Pat Brown agonized for months. Should he run for reelection yet again as attorney general, a safe bet and a job he loved? Or jump into the governor’s race and hope to exploit the Knight-Knowland fight? Or run for the U.S. Senate seat now open because of Knowland’s run for governor?

Many of Brown’s backers, especially his financial supporters, were Republicans. Like Brown, they were friends with moderate Republicans, including Knight; they urged Brown to run for Senate. So did his son, Jerry, cloistered in the Sacred Heart Seminary at Los Gatos, but still managing to follow politics. He warned his father that Knowland would be a formidable opponent with great fundraising ability and an enormous stake in winning. “You should weigh your chances very carefully,” Jerry wrote his father. He also thought the Senate had advantages. “As Senator you would have six uninterrupted years, untroubled by election entanglements, to devote to your work.”

But Pat Brown had earlier made a secret pact with Congressman Clair Engle, a Democrat from California’s far north: If Engle ran for Senate, Brown would run for governor. Engle had announced his candidacy for Senate. After months of indecision, Brown declared in October 1957 that he would run for governor.

Then came what Democrats gleefully dubbed “the Big Switch.”

Although Knowland was a potential rival, Nixon intervened in an effort to unify the fractured party. He began backdoor overtures to force Knight to pull out of the gubernatorial race. Knight’s wife, Virginia, bitterly and vividly recalled years later the rainy night that Clint Mosher, political editor for the San Francisco Examiner, came to visit the Governor’s Mansion. Mosher was friends with both Knight and Nixon. He came to deliver a message to Knight: If he stayed in the governor’s race, Nixon would campaign against him in every county.

As Knight later described his predicament: “I had no choice. I was like a man in the middle of the ocean, standing on the deck of a burning ship.” In November, he announced he would run for Knowland’s Senate seat.

Democrats had a field day with the Big Switch: Knowland was a gubernatorial candidate who knew more about Taiwan than Sacramento, and Knight was a Senate candidate forced into a race he never wanted to make.

Though Democrats were initially dismayed when Knight pulled out and Republicans avoided a bitter primary fight, the Big Switch turned into a fiasco for Republicans. Knight was treated so shabbily that Republicans abandoned Knowland in disgust, and the beneficiary was Pat Brown.

The primary results revealed the depth of the defections: Brown won 22 percent of the Republican vote, while Knowland only won 14 percent of the Democratic vote. Since Democrats outnumbered Republicans to begin with, that meant Knowland faced an uphill climb in the general election.

The bad blood between Knowland and Knight worsened, driven in part by Knowland’s support for an anti-union “right to work” ballot proposition, which would deny unions the right to require membership as a condition of employment. In the end, Knight refused to endorse Knowland.

“My husband knew that if the Republican party went against labor, the working people, it would lose,” Virginia Knight recalled in her oral history for the state archives. She remembered her husband warning, “in speech after speech: ‘Don’t do this, Republicans! It’s a blueprint for disaster!’” Not only did California labor unions throw their support behind the Democratic candidate; Brown benefitted from a $1 million campaign waged by national labor organizations that viewed California as a bellwether.

In one of the campaigns’ oddest twists, Knowland’s wife, Helen, sent 200 California Republican leaders a vitriolic, seven-page letter in which she called Knight a tool of labor with a “macaroni spine.” Knowland’s victory was essential, his wife wrote, because “California may be the last hope of saving our country from the labor-socialist monster which has latched on to the Democratic Party and to some Republicans as well, ‘poor Goodie’ being a perfect example.”

She also distributed 500 copies of a pamphlet, “Meet the Man Who Plans to Rule America,” which smeared Walter Reuther, vice president of the AFL-CIO and head of the United Auto Workers, as a Marxist, pro-Communist, “pseudo-intellectual nitwit.”

The internecine warfare among Republicans made Pat Brown’s nice guy image even more appealing. As they fought with each other, Brown barnstormed the state; he believed there was no one he could not win over if they met face to face.

On election day, more than 79 percent of the registered voters showed up at the polls, a California record for a non-presidential election. Brown won the governorship by a million-vote margin, led a Democratic sweep, and ushered in a new political era in the Golden State. For the first time since 1889, Democrats won six out of seven statewide offices and the U.S. Senate seat, which went to Engle, control of both houses of the state legislature, and majority of the congressional delegation. The victory also gave Democrats control over reapportionment in 1961, when the state would add seven congressional seats.

In retrospect, the election would be viewed as the inflection point when California became a two-party state and Pat Brown became a national figure, who would leave an enormous imprint on his state.

On the night of Nov. 4, 1958, as the results became clear, the authorities at Sacred Heart Seminary made a rare exception to the rules that barred newspapers, magazines, television, or any news of the outside world. They allowed 20-year-old junior seminarian Edmund G. Brown Jr. to watch the lone television, to see his father’s victory speech.

The post The 1958 Governor’s Race That Launched a Dynasty appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The things Donald Trump is saying about immigrants sound very familiar to those of us Californians who have been involved with immigration issues for the better part of our adult lives. Substitute former California Governor “Pete Wilson” for “Donald Trump” as the author of some of these quotes, and you could convince me that we are living in 1994 California, not 2017 America. We just got there sooner.

In 1994, California was still mired in recession, lagging behind the rest of the country in what would become the remarkable economic recovery of the 1990s. Instead of focusing on housing, job creation, higher education, or retraining workers for the burgeoning information economy, some prominent Republicans decided it was easier to blame “illegal” immigrants, despite persistent statistics that immigrants use fewer public services than native-born residents. And so, Proposition 187 was placed on the ballot.

Arriving at a time when Latinos were beginning to reach critical mass in California, Prop 187 was almost perfectly (if unintentionally) designed to galvanize a generation of activists—which is exactly what it did.

For those too young to remember, Prop 187 would have barred all undocumented immigrants from using public health care facilities, public education, and many other publicly funded services. Yes, you read that right: It would have barred hospitals, schools, and other vital services from people who needed them. Worse, it required various public officials in public agencies to report people whom they “suspected” were not documented to authorities. Essentially, not only would it have kicked millions of Latinos out of hospitals, schools, and other public places, but it would also have created a witch-hunt atmosphere, allowing for people to be turned in for simply “seeming” illegal.

I was 27 years old in 1994, working at a nonprofit helping immigrants navigate the difficulties of life in Los Angeles, alongside some friends including Gilbert Cedillo and Kevin de Léon. We immediately saw this for what it was: an attempt to lay the blame for persistent economic uncertainty at the feet of a growing minority—the “Other.” So, we did what we were good at: We organized people; we rallied; and we tried to show that the Latino population couldn’t be taken for granted.

What surprised Pete Wilson and his Republican colleagues was that their plan to push people to the margins of society achieved the exact opposite. People were so outraged, so motivated, and so galvanized by this blatant attack on their American Dream that they moved out of the shadows and pledged to show the world that they were real people with real hopes and real aspirations.

To prove that, we organized two marches. The first, on February 28, 1994 in Los Angeles, was 20,000 strong; many of the attendees were people who, just a few short months earlier, were nervous about attending parents’ night at their child’s school for fear of running into authorities who would deport them. But at the march, they were fighting for their rights in front of television cameras.

On October 16, just a couple of weeks before the election, we staged another march, from Boyle Heights to City Hall. And this time, it wasn’t just Latinos. It was religious and civic and elected and community leaders, marching in solidarity with us. And this time, we were 100,000 people—standing up for the American Dream, and standing up to say that American opportunity isn’t just for the few able to get through an arcane, Byzantine, broken immigration system. It’s for everyone.

I’ll never forget one telling moment: When that march was over, people didn’t just go home. They took a few minutes to pick up the trash around them. Just as we were demanding not to be taken for granted, we were not taking our community and our country for granted. We were demanding respect and dignity, and were committed to showing respect and dignity. We wanted to leave our community cleaner than we found it.

We lost the battle: Prop 187 passed, though it was later deemed unconstitutional and was never implemented. In retrospect, not all of our tactics were as politically astute as they should have been, but we were passionate, and we were angry.

With the benefit of two decades of hindsight it’s obvious that Prop 187 planted the seed out of which Latino activism and political power began to grow. I was eventually elected to the Assembly and became the longest serving Speaker since Willie Brown. Gil Cedillo was elected to the Assembly, Senate, and now serves on the Los Angeles City Council, championing immigrant rights during his entire career. My good friend Kevin de Léon is the current President Pro Tem of the State Senate. Many other Latino political pioneers—from the legislator Richard Polanco, to former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to the late labor chief Miguel Contreras—came of age during the fight over 187.

And, more broadly, because of Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s high-profile support for 187, Latinos were cemented firmly to the Democratic Party during a time when the Latino vote was still up for grabs. In 1994, Latinos were 28 percent of the population, but only eight percent of the electorate. By 2016, Latinos were 38 percent of the population and 31 percent of the electorate. For anybody wondering why Republicans can no longer win statewide offices in California, look no further than the legacy of this blatant attempt to disenfranchise Latinos.

As I’ve listened to Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants in general and Latinos in particular, I hear what many California politicians were saying 23 years ago. Like them, Trump is appealing to people with very real economic concerns by scapegoating an entire class of people who are not the cause of it. Just as 187’s backers avoided the very real and very difficult challenges of adapting to a new kind of economy, Trump is evoking a past that never really existed as somehow “great again.” He is also ignoring data as he pursues demagoguery. He is exploiting fears over safety, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of terrorist acts now—and more localized crimes then—are perpetrated by native-born residents.

This approach is cheap; it is disingenuous; it is simplistic; and, worst of all, it doesn’t actually solve anything. We could build a wall on the Mexican border tomorrow AND ban all Muslims from entering the country, and none of the issues that Donald Trump is claiming to solve, or protect us from, would change or be resolved. Just like turning California into some sort of heartless police state in the ‘90s wouldn’t have helped an unemployed oil worker in the Central Valley get a job.

Trump’s rhetoric, and the 187 rhetoric before it, share one very nasty characteristic: both are deeply pessimistic. California’s progress since 1994 shows that the best way to adjust to economic change is by confronting challenges head-on. Our state has shown that a tough-minded, optimistic and inclusive spirit can create more prosperity.

So, what does the Trump era mean for immigrant L.A.? First, we have to remember that days that seem dark now can turn much brighter tomorrow. If we stay focused. If we stay organized. If we stand in solidarity. And if we stay out of the shadows.

The post How Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Drove My Generation into Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For them, just going to the hospital could result in bills that would take a decade to pay off. The old then squeaked by on getting special rates from doctors and hospitals who knew they had limited resources. Many relied upon their families to help them pay. There was no safety net whatsoever: One 1963 survey found that nine out of 10 couples, and eight out of 10 elderly individuals, paid for their own care without help from government or private sources.

Since 1946 through 1952, when Harry Truman was president, liberals had argued that the United States lagged behind other countries by failing to guarantee health care to all of its citizens. But in the ensuing decades, health care reform had been a losing issue for Democrats. Taking on the health care issue was a top liberal issue, but it wasn’t easy. The U.S. had a well-developed system of private health care, which meant that when liberals pushed for their policy, those with a vested interest in the existing system—including doctors—would have reason to say no. The process of crafting Medicare and Medicaid, building a federal program on top of a well established private system, left scars on the legislation itself so that these unresolved arguments from half a century ago still haunt American health care today.

In 1949, the American Medical Association and congressional conservatives had defeated President Truman’s plan to provide national health insurance for all Americans by branding the proposal as “socialized medicine” and warning that patients would lose their relationship to their doctors. During the mid-1950s, liberals narrowed their focus by proposing a federal health care program for the elderly, paying for the cost of hospital insurance through Social Security taxes. President Kennedy picked up on the idea and pushed for “Medicare” in 1962 and 1963.

But congressional conservatives and the AMA blocked the proposal. California Governor Ronald Reagan produced a record that the wives of doctors in the AMA played during coffee klatches in which he warned: “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.” The AMA distributed posters that doctors hung in their offices, warning patients that should Congress pass Medicare, bureaucrats would make their next medical decisions. “The doctors in Florida agreed that the first three minutes of every consultation with every patient,” said Florida Senator Claude Pepper, “would be devoted to attacking socialized medicine. …”

But the politics changed in the spring of 1965. Lyndon Johnson won a landslide reelection against Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a right-wing Republican who spent much of his campaign blasting Medicare proposals. With Goldwater’s defeat, many Republicans believed that they would have to move to the center and work with the administration to survive. The election produced huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, with many of the new members having entered into Congress determined to pass the languishing health care proposal.

Johnson, sensing that he might be victorious, told one of his top advisors, Wilbur Cohen, to find a bill that would please Wilbur Mills, the conservative chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “You get him something, though … if labor will buy, that he can call a Mills bill, that’s what it amounts to …” Johnson understood that his time was limited, and urged everyone to move as fast as possible. “For God sakes, don’t let dead cats stand on your porch,” he said about the Medicare bill—explaining that if a bill sat around to long, like a carcass, it would begin to “stink.”

Republicans, eager to distinguish themselves from Goldwater, proposed their own alternatives to Medicare. One proposal provided insurance to cover the cost of physicians, paid for through general tax revenue and a contribution from participants. Another program would provide health care to the poor, those who were “medically indigent” and couldn’t afford care on their own.

When the House Ways and Means Committee met to discuss the three plans in early March, administration officials were worried that their plan would not be able to garner enough support to pass the committee. But Chairman Mills, who decided that it was no longer possible to hold back the tide on the legislation, given that so many of the new members elected in 1964 had promised to deliver on Medicare, shocked everyone in a closed committee hearing. He turned to Wilbur Cohen and said, “Maybe it would be a good idea if we put all three of these bills together. You go back and work this out overnight and see what there is to this.”

In that moment Mills transformed himself from the top opponent to the main architect of the new program. The rest was history. The bill moved through the Ways and Means Committee, the House, and finally the Senate. Johnson was happy to give Mills all the credit in exchange for a bill, though the president was taken aback at just how expansive the revised program would be.

Johnson traveled to Independence, Missouri to sign the Social Security Amendments of 1965 into law on July 30, 1965 with Harry Truman standing by his side. The final legislation, officially called the Social Security Amendments of 1965, contained three parts. The first, Part A, provided hospital insurance to elderly Americans covered by Social Security paid for through the payroll tax. Part B was a voluntary program that covered doctor’s bills, paid for through a combination of general tax revenue and premium contributions from recipients. Finally, Part C, which we now call Medicaid, provided health care coverage for poor Americans who were “medically indigent.” The final part was much more like a welfare program, administered by the states and paid for through a combination of federal and state money.

Yet even at a moment when liberalism was strong, Medicare proponents still had to make a number of consequential compromises because of America’s resistance toward strong government. The most important was that Medicare and Medicaid provided this insurance within the existing health care system. As the sociologist Paul Starr has argued, the system layered the federal insurance on top of the existing system, thereby leaving many of the dysfunctional elements of American health care fully in place.

Medicare and Medicaid also stuck to the American political tradition of distinguishing between “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients of government help. This was a central feature of political discourse about government assistance since the start of the Republic, as the historian Michael Katz has written. In this case, the government provided benefits based on status rather than as a right.

With Medicare and Medicaid, you had to be old or you had to be poor to receive this help. You couldn’t just be an American.

The result was that even in a moment of victory, liberals legitimated a narrower vision of public policy than existed in other comparable systems in Europe. The fact that Medicare depended on a Social Security tax, which was sold as a way of showing this was an “earned benefit” likewise confirmed a limited vision of the obligations of government.

And then there was the problem of cost control. During the final weeks of negotiation over the bill, Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills pushed back against efforts to include stronger regulatory mechanisms to control health care costs in the legislation. The final law allowed hospitals to determine what a “reasonable fee” would be, with a guarantee that the government would pay it. The result was skyrocketing costs over the next few decades. Although Congress did impose tighter cost controls during the 1980s, the overall strength of the federal government remained limited and health care providers came to rely on high charges.

All of these compromises, which made Medicare and Medicaid possible in 1965, would have long-lasting effects. By providing health insurance to the elderly the program made a huge difference. In 1963, one of every five Americans who lived below the poverty line never had been examined by a doctor, and poor people used medical facilities less than others. By 1970 that proportion had fallen to about 8 percent. Most elderly Americans had access to hospitals and doctors. Medicaid vastly expanded over the next few decades to include pregnant women, kids, and other categories of Americans who have limited access to care. By 2011, close to one-third of all Americans, not just the elderly, were covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Hospital administrators, doctors and other people in the health care system now depended on these federal dollars. State governments counted on Medicaid dollars in their health care budgets. The programs became so ingrained in the national political consciousness that when conservatives rallied to oppose President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2009—which achieved some cost savings through cuts in Medicare—they held up signs saying “Get Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” The signs were ironic and funny, but also the best evidence of success, namely that even the right wing accepted these plans as part of the status quo.

The post How Medicare Both Salved and Scarred American Health Care appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the time, the world was reeling from geopolitical instability and economic recession. Terrorists calling themselves anarchists were using bombs against their antagonists in the United States. Foreigners—Jews, Catholics, Christian Orthodox from eastern and southern Europe, and East and South Asians from Japan, China, and India—were thought to be polluting America with their religions, cultures, and radical ideologies. That these immigrants formed a large portion of the population—similar to now—heightened fear of their presence and its effects.

The Republican Party, back in power in 1921 after an eight year absence, resolved to—and did—close America’s gates to immigrants from the world beyond the western hemisphere. The GOP had the support of the southern wing of the Democratic Party, in which nativist sentiments also were running strong. The Ku Klux Klan was revitalized in both South and North, drawing millions of members and placing Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans in its crosshairs. When Irish-American Catholic Al Smith ran for president as a Democrat in 1928, he was mercilessly attacked for his alleged subservience to the Pope.

The charges leveled at eastern and southern European Jewish and Catholic immigrants were every bit as harsh as those directed by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at Mexicans and Muslims today. The European immigrants of yesteryear were accused of being prone to violence, of having no regard for the traditions of liberty and democracy that Americans held dear, of being made of inferior racial stock, and of being incapable of becoming good Americans.

In 1924, Republican Congressman Fred S. Purnell of Indiana stated on the floor of the House of Representatives that “there is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and the stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World.”

Purnell and his supporters won big, yet, the attacks on the racial and moral character of the newcomers roused millions from political quiescence. New immigrants and their children began to declare that America was their home, too, and that they would build a country free of intolerance. They naturalized and registered to vote in large numbers. They chose congressmen, senators, and governors from the Democratic Party’s northern wing, in immigrant-rich states such as New York and Illinois, as their tribunes. While their vote totals were not large enough in 1928 to save Al Smith from defeat, they became a critical part of the coalition that swept New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt into the White House in 1932 and three times thereafter, making the Democratic party and liberalism the dominant forces in American life for 40 years.

Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 challenged the liberal dominance that New Dealers and the new immigrants had forged, but only Ronald Reagan’s triumph in 1980 upended it. By then, the Republican Party had spent two generations in the political wilderness. The descendants of the new immigrants counted themselves, and were counted by others—including Reagan—as the best of Americans. In the process of making a home for themselves in the United States, these groups transformed America from an Anglo-Saxon outpost to a cosmopolitan Judeo-Christian civilization. That change may appear limited by today’s standards; but those fighting for it then faced opposition as fierce as a campaign to turn America into an Abrahamic-Christian civilization would confront today.

Once again, America is divided between those who think that the virtue of an older and narrow America should be restored and those who believe that newcomers can enrich America with their work and creativity. Trump leads the restorationist camp. He has denounced Mexican immigrants as rapists. He has pledged to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He has declared that a well-qualified judge of Mexican descent, whose family has been here since the 1920s, is incapable of rendering an impartial ruling in a case involving the alleged misdeeds of Trump University. Trump also wants to outlaw Muslim immigration, much as his predecessors in the 1920s banned eastern European Jews and Italians for being mortal threats, both ideological and physical, to the American way of life.

Irish-American Catholic and Democrat Al Smith (left) lost his 1928 presidential bid, but a surge of immigrant support helped sweep Franklin Delano Roosevelt (right) into the White House in 1932.

One day, Trump may be remembered for giving today’s immigrants the motivation to bust into the political process, to be counted as Americans, and to define an America that they can call their own. His poll numbers among Latinos are barely in double digits at a time when it has become virtually impossible to win a presidential election on the basis of the non-Hispanic white vote. We don’t know how large the Latino mobilization will be on election day, although nearly three quarters of Latinos report being “highly interested” in the outcome, a rise of nearly 50 percent over the equivalent figure in 2012.

The GOP establishment is deeply concerned about the party’s unpopularity with Latinos, and what it means for its long-term prospects as a governing party. That’s why it commissioned a post-mortem of the 2012 presidential election that called for Republicans to embrace a different tone, and a different set of policies, to woo America’s fastest-growing demographic. But Trump has a very different agenda, and his politics of racial resentment may yet deliver a razor-thin, backward-looking victory in 2016. And yet, the example of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrates the long-term risk entailed in arousing the long-term ire of tens of millions of actual or potential voters.

That Trump has provoked such ire became startlingly clear in the Democratic National Convention speech given recently by Muslim-American immigrant Khizr Khan. After extolling America for the blessings it had bestowed on him, his wife, and his three sons, Khan rebuked Trump for not knowing the Constitution and for sacrificing “nothing and no one” to defend American ideals. Khan spoke of his son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who had given his life fighting for America in Iraq. “If it was up to Donald Trump,” Khizr observed, Humayun “never would have been” allowed to immigrate to the United States or to serve in its military. Khizr implored “every patriot American, all Muslim immigrants, and all [other] immigrants … to honor the sacrifice of my son, and on election day take the time to get out and vote.”

Consciously or not, Khan was standing on the shoulders of the immigrant generation of the 1920s and 1930s. That generation and their descendants showed an unexpected capacity for political mobilization, and for using the political power they thereby acquired to punish the purveyors of anti-immigrant bias. Their example reminds us how immigrants battling for their rights is one of the best ways to deepen their attachment to America; and that American democracy can deliver on its promise: namely, to give voice to the “tired and poor yearning to breathe free,” and to allow them a hand in shaping the politics and culture of their land.

The post In Attacking Immigrants, Republicans Repeat a Century-Old Mistake appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today the valley is a 51-square-mile nature preserve stretching from the Akron suburbs in the south to the Cleveland suburbs in the north. Waterfalls, rolling hills, caves, narrow ravines, boulder-strewn cliffs, rolling floodplains, and lush farmland create a stark contrast with the densely populated metropolitan area around it.

As a bicyclist I try to visit the valley at least twice a week to find inspiration in its solitude and to enjoy some sessions of sweet silent thought. Along the towpath I regularly spot bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and great blue herons with Jurassic wingspans. Typically, I have to share the path with queen snakes, spotted turtles, and industrious beavers building their dams in a nearby marsh that was once a junkyard with a small stream flowing through it. On one of the many hiking trails through the steep woodlands, the sharp-eyed can spot the occasional black bear or bobcat, or a pack of coyotes hunting for rodents and rabbits and unfortunate toy poodles. Visitors are urged to keep their dogs on leashes at all times.

The park is an idyllic setting that seems a world away from the dark, satanic steel mills and the sulfur-spewing smokestacks that crowd the riverbanks in Cleveland’s industrial flats.

For 10 years, on and off, I worked in those mills as a union boilermaker, earning my way through college and graduate school. At 7 a.m., with an acetylene torch in hand, I would climb into the black asbestos pit of a dust collector and begin cutting through enormous pieces of warped and rusted metal, all the while thinking of my unsmiling professors and how they remained unimpressed by the latest draft of my master’s thesis, an unwieldy tome by a 27-year-old pseudointellectual who’d fallen under the sway of Joseph Campbell.

While my blowtorch melted the inch-thick sheets of steel, I tried to remember Campbell’s words: “Life is a wonderful, wonderful opera. Except that it hurts.”

Yes, the fiery embers hurt, the falling pieces of jagged scrap metal hurt, the deep cuts from power grinders hurt, but always above the roar of the blast furnace I heard the opera. Below me toiled the enslaved Nibelungs harassed by invisible foremen while I sang the part of Siegfried, hammering a sturdy sword of scholarly pretension.

I couldn’t decide which was more absurd—the neuroses of academic life or the physical dangers of blue collar work. Both seemed hellish and bizarre, equal parts vaudeville and Wagner, completely untethered from anything most people would recognize as reality. On those rare days of bright sunshine and yellow smog, I stood on a platform at the top of the refinery where I could see, to the north, the skyscrapers of downtown Cleveland and, to the south, the thin white line where the towpath followed the river and eventually disappeared, five miles away, into the lush treetops of the national park.

It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that Cleveland was a city of scarcely believable contrasts—heavy industry and bucolic nature; blue-collar trades and intellectual ambition; an international hub of cutting-edge medical research and an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis where entire neighborhoods were devastated by the government’s lax oversight of predatory lending. How many boilermakers and steelworkers and pipefitters, I wondered, who made their homes in some of these neighborhoods, would take their final breath at the Cleveland Clinic’s state-of-the art “Cancer Pavilion?”

After work, the men poured from the gates of the mills and then went straight to one of the dank dive bars at the corner where they cashed their checks and in stoic silence drank shots of whiskey and mugs of cheap draft beer. I rarely joined them. Instead, I had to fight rush-hour traffic and race to night classes at Cleveland State University. If time permitted, I would stand under an icy spray of water in the athletic center’s locker room, washing away the sparkling graphite dust and scrubbing the stubborn black soot that ringed my eyes and mouth. Later, sitting in the classroom and fighting the temptation to sleep, I would patiently take notes on Mailer and Roth and Updike, how each boasted of his sexual conquests, and sometimes, if the Indians were playing and Manny Ramirez had hit another home run, I would hear the celebratory explosion of fireworks from the ballpark 25 blocks away.

Driving home from school, I would pass through Playhouse Square, the largest performing arts district in the United States outside New York City. Near I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I would turn onto the West Shoreway overlooking the guano-splattered break wall and the tumultuous lake.

Measured by surface area, Lake Erie is the 13th largest lake in the world, but it’s the shallowest of the five Great Lakes with an average depth of just over seven meters. As a result, it’s the roughest of the lakes and can kill an exhausted or inexperienced swimmer quickly. Invasive species like the zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) are beginning to thrive here, but the lake is still healthy enough to sustain a fishing industry that supports 10,000 jobs. In recent years a toxic algae bloom, fed by nitrogen and phosphorus-rich runoff from Ohio farmlands, spread east from the lake’s western basin, depriving the walleye of oxygen and turning the rolling waves into the color of cold hard cash.

This latest environmental catastrophe makes me think again of Cleveland’s notorious burning river. Polluted from decades of sewage and industrial chemicals and fueled by a thick oily sludge, the Cuyahoga River caught fire on a Sunday morning in June 1969 near the Republic Steel mill, not far from where I would eventually work. A piece of molten steel fell into the water and set the surface ablaze, causing $100,000 worth of damage to two railroad bridges. (The arresting photograph that appeared in Time magazine, showing flames leaping up from the water and completely engulfing a ship, was actually from a much more serious fire in November 1952.)

While it was a public relations catastrophe for what was at one time the fifth-largest city in the United States, the fire did help spark the modern environmental movement and the passage of the Clean Water Act. In 1970, to celebrate the inaugural Earth Day, a number of Cleveland State University students marched from campus to the river. In the decades that followed, the Cuyahoga’s water quality has improved dramatically, and business investors have converted parts of the Flats’ abandoned industrial cityscape into an entertainment district featuring restaurants, nightclubs, and music venues.

What’s true for the Flats is true for much of downtown Cleveland. As a result of winning the bid for the 2016 Republican National Convention, the city has undergone a massive capital improvement project, with the fixing of roads and bridges and public buildings.

The arriving delegates will see some of this: 275 new trees will spring up in the city; 250 planters filled with flowers and greenery will decorate the streets; murals and art installations will pop up all over town; 1,000 banners will hang from street poles; 1.5 million individual twinkle lights will gleam around the perimeter of Public Square and the lakefront and the arena where the convention is being held; bars and restaurants will stay open until 4 a.m. And a grant from the United States Bureau of Justice Assistance will pay $50 million to keep 5,000 police officers on duty during what is sure to be a violent political carnival.

As a novelist and unapologetic introvert, I’ll avoid the mayhem—the trendy bistros and crowded microbreweries and open-air amphitheaters and designated protest zones. I prefer to ride through the national park 10 miles due south. Yes, the thousands who will soon descend on the city may find the vibrant boardwalk along the downtown riverfront a refreshing glimpse of nature. But it cannot compete with the sense of grandeur one experiences while hiking through the national park.

As I bike through the tranquility of the park, I’ll think again of that young man forging his sword of prose and poetry in the demonic foundries along the Cuyahoga. But, instead of the deafening bombast of Wagner I’ll hear the plaintive melody of a miniature masterpiece by Randy Newman who sadly sings, “Burn on, big river, burn on.”

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

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