Bishop: Divided We All
Friday, September 14, 2018
We don’t need to wait for the general election to recognize the trend of division that makes RI a microcosm of the country. The marquee event wasn’t the mediocre challenge that Matt Brown posed to Gina Raimondo, or the proto-typical young turks vs. rump party battle between Pat Morgan and Alan Fung. It was the primary between Aaron Regunberg and Dan McKee which was the partisan epitome of the Country’s divide -- with but a few percentage points separating the energetic progressives and the traditional Democrats.
Mckee ironically benefitted from the previous progressive ‘advance’ of direct election of senators. As a former mayor who became a conduit for municipal concerns at the statehouse, this effect gained him the strong support of many municipal officials who have seen their jurisdictions kicked to the curb repeatedly in terms of state policy priorities. This would have been unthinkable in a world where Senators were appointed by the town they represented.
Regunberg, for his part, quickly closed ranks and endorsed Mckee after several weeks of negative campaigning on both sides. Never such grace in the Republican camp where Patricia Morgan seems to be taking more than investigatory advice from Ken Block as she drags her feet, just as he did, on endorsing Fung following his primary loss. And Trumpublican Trillo, whether motivated by a fit of pique over perceived slights by his own party or promises of political riches from the other, threatens to make the 2018 election a rerun of 2014.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTParty bases reflect candidates attitudes – much like kids and parents
And these attitudes are reflected in the party bases. I spent election eve with the virtual crusade that elected progressive Sam Bell to the Senate over longtime incumbent and my onetime Classical classmate Paul Jabbour. It would be safe to say that I anchored the right-hand end of the crowd. But Bell has long impressed me as honest, informed and effective at defending his progessive politics, and open to working with conservatives in areas of common interest like stopping subsidies for ballparks and ritzy high rises downtown. And, I had another friend at Classical who was his father. Those human connections make you sit up and take notice where you might be tempted to dismiss someone who seems to hold views so antithetical to your own.
And then, there is the pragmatic. Bell didn’t waffle to win his district, but walked. This was a theoretically impossible race at the macro level, with the incumbent not caught up in scandal or tarnished with controversy. And the race was actually three-way, with a third-way candidate, Nick Autiello, capturing positive marks from some of the same progressive coalitions that touted Bell, yet bringing a Chamber of Commerce endorsement no doubt nurtured during his tenure working at the Commerce Corporation. But Providence has proven particularly fertile ground for micro-level shoe leather campaigns. Both Bell himself and a loyal cadre of supporters were treadbare but ecstatic after last night’s win. This was the kind of party where Matt Brown’s defeat was a disappointment. But, unlike Republican confabs that sought new statewide leadership from Patricia Morgan but balked at closing ranks in the wake of the primary, there was already a grudging sense that Providence’s progressive shock troops would swallow the primary and canvas for Gina Raimondo.
Warwick is not Providence
If Providence is the progressive crossroads, Warwick demonstrated that some recent high water marks for that movement, like the earlier election of Jeanine Calkin over longtime incumbent William Walaska in last cycle’s primary, was the result of underestimating the existence of any significant progressive ilk outside the urban core, rather than an indication of a seachange in the suburbs. Mark McKenney brought Senate District 30 back into the conservative Democratic fold with a 12 point reversal from the previous primary. And, that was in the Democratic primary, that saw perhaps a third of the votes likely to be cast in the district in the general election, so the electorate simply is not even closely divided there.
But what about where divisions are close, nationally or locally? Much of the focus on the Russian cyberpunks who are grinding their nationalist axes by throwing the tiniest bits of gasoline on this fire of division mistakenly imagines that division is a problem, and a product of some external conspiracy rather than a true disagreement between Americans. Does anyone really think that if Russia had not sent 700 bucks to someone to construct a Hillary for Prison float we would all be singing Kumbayah?
The idea of minimizing or ignoring our divisions is a pipe dream. Indeed, in present circumstances, we can expect our divisions to be exacerbated. There is no clear mandate, there is no notion of a loyal opposition that permits the majority to the governor as you might see were the election results 60/40 instead of 50/50. Where indeed has the filibuster gone. It was a strong tradition so long as the country was divided near its working limit, but with closer division, the filibuster frustrated the ability to move in any direction to the point of gridlock. That was fine with those of us who prefer less government but there would be only so many Gangs of 14. Little wonder that the more closely divided nation has begun discarding this longstanding tool of consensus.
Toqueville saw this two centuries ago
All of this is a corollary to the Toqueville Effect which holds that, as conditions improve in the sense of alleviating historic inequalities, the demand for egalitarian activism actually increases. If the possibility of equality is admitted by progress, then seeking its perfection will become an aggressive preoccupation. Similarly, I recognize an ‘Immoderation Effect’. If the nation is closely divided on political philosophy, rather than incentivizing accommodation this encourages a hardening of position in both extremity and refusal to compromise – much as in bearing down during a close tug of war.
Our present differences are not to be solved through moderation, but through long-term iteration of various policy ideas by those who do win, thus allowing the electorate to see the outcomes. And rather than a political kumbayah, we can and should separate our politics from social engagement. This doesn’t mean hiding or never discussing political ideas in social settings, it means accepting that we live in a society with people who have different values and beliefs than we do and that does not prevent us from friendship and discourse.
Another Aaron
Another Aaron comes to mind here, Aaron Jaehnig, a Providence small businessman who has been a leader in various progressive causes and ran a solid campaign for the Ward 5 Council seat in Elmhurst that fell short. When I enter Jaehnigs Parlour, a bar and musical emporium that sits on North Main Street where the Penalty Box used to be, he is quite used to piping up: “It’s my favorite conservative”. In what we have shared, presenting music and fighting tax breaks for connected developers, neither of us has asked the other to compromise, or to abandon their philosophy. We have forged a friendship across ‘party’ lines. I don’t share his views on gun control, abortion, minimum wage, rent control or various progressive touchstones, but I share a community with the man and a respect that his own commitment to his views are as much a part of his identity as are my ideas to me.
I cherish his willingness to engage in a friendship in which we seek to reconcile differences over the long run by showing each other how our policy ideas enable free Americans to grow their economy and their communities aided by the endless American growth market also recognized by de Touqueville for creation of formal and informal groups to address many needs of society outside of governmental channels.
Direct Action
In this respect, Aaron’s was perhaps the high water mark of primary campaigns when he took the Saturday before the primary off from knocking doors and invited his supporters and neighbors to join him in cleaning up a mess he have found while campaigning -- an attractive nuisance of dumping around the Hillcrest Apartments off Manton Avenue. Sitting Councilors reacted quickly to his determination to take direct action on the problem by calling out the city DPW. But this was a project that called less for administrative or institutional solution and simply for some bodies, not only to pick up the refuse left by other neighbors, but to demonstrate that there was anyone who cared about doing that in the first place. And they did it without laying blame or pulling rank with city services.
This reveals where I part ways with organizations that claim the mantle of direct action, nominally, for instance, the Providence centered DARE: Direct Action for Rights and Equality. They don’t really mean direct action though. They mean they want to take action to force politicians to do things, perhaps pass ordinances and laws to make the rest of us do things. That is anything but direct action. Direct action is seeing a mess and cleaning it up. That is how environmental groups began. Long forgotten as the incumbents of the day like the Sierra Club lent imprimateur to Jaehnig’s contemporary undertaking is Project ZAP, which brought people out almost 50 years ago to pull junk out of the Blackstone River, not to demand that the government do it. Pulling junk out the river is hardly a liberal plot. I was all in with environmental groups, until I wasn’t.
It isn’t that I maintain that there’s no place for regulatory limits when rivers are catching on fire, but we have lost our way when every conceivable sleight to the environment is portrayed as the end of the earth -- remediable only through government action. Indeed, we have lost the prerogative of direct action. I hardly see my friend Aaron as someone who isn’t given to some of that hyperbole with attendant demands for government action in his opposition to the LNG liquification project in Providence and the power plant in Burrillville (where he apparently has Bob Flanders as a strange bedfellow of late and I’m with Gina, go figure). But Aaron is a great human being who has not forgotten the difference between direct action and government action.
We will never completely reconcile our differences, but the fact that two such philosophically divergent hardheads can be friends -- and occasionally find the common cause -- is the way I believe Rhode Island and America should deal with differences. This won’t happen by pretending they don’t exist or that they can be easily erased, but by disagreeing respectfully and maintaining a discourse that demonstrates our differences are not of a sort that prevents treating our ideological opponents as the neighbors and friends they are. Our philosophy, our view of the human condition is part and parcel of our identity. But there is simply no reason to imagine that the melting pot metaphor should not apply just as readily to mixing across political as across racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic lines in the preservation of this remarkable American experiment. The melting pot does not homogenize, it mixes. The distinct strains remain but they are more broadly experienced in contexts which give us shared experienced if not, at the end of the day, identical outlooks.
Brian Bishop is on the board of OSTPA and has spent 20 years of activism protecting property rights, over-regulation and perverse incentives in tax policy.
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