Why Virginia Hurt
The Hysteria Over Critical Race Theory
For most people who exist in the world of news cycles and election anxiety, the current realm of American politics has been grim. And Virginia made it grimmer.
The country just had a president who was adept at manipulating media figures through his reality television days. He was also keen on displaying a reptilian cunning for what type of distracting shiny options could weaken public unity and press scrutiny. The dark outcome ended up being that our political soil became fertile for power politics and Machiavellian designs that seriously threaten a functioning democracy in the lifetimes of future Americans. On the surface, our discourse has taken its final step towards eradicating the line between fiction and non-fiction especially when it comes to digesting truth and lies in our body politic.
You look at the way that news outlets dealt with an insidious political campaign for governor of Virginia. A campaign that featured people who knew better demagoguing the inordinate level in which race has been discussed by all communities in America as Trump blatantly played on White resentment (sometimes in an openly unserious way no matter the radicalizing effect.)
The news media covered this meta attempt to rewrite the central conflict of the Trump years like “Who shot J.R.?” instead of doing the journalistic work of connecting how not long before this election the former guy was performing demagogic rallies calling for multiple congresswomen of color to love or leave America. One of those women survived a refugee camp on land with heritages the former guy would refer to as “shithole countries.”
These things aren’t just strange anomalies.
The larger point is that a political party can’t get away with trivializing discussions of African American history and literary contributions because the rise of a homegrown demagogue revealed their own lack of leadership or candor on the topic of racial inclusion over the last 50 years. It is how popular television hosts keep trafficking in White nationalists conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Theory and the January 6th attack being a false flag by the FBI. This is right after a timeslot traditionally considered to be the “family hour”, by the way. But in 2021, this programming is on the most popular cable news network, which is more unserious than Comedy Central.
Just a quick reminder, a predominantly African American church was shot up, a synagogue was shot up, and a grocery store in predominately Hispanic El Paso, Texas was shot up in the last decade.
Fire is being played with and there is little care from Republican Party leadership and elites to speak honestly on these issues.
But that’s the thing.
Undergirding the dark reality outlined is a fundamental dark comedy that became the soul-drenching defense for those often cast in the villain role today (the structures on the American right-wing). Trump’s off-color comments and angry tweets became the appeal and signal for a new movement. Fox News primetime hosts' ability to reduce every earnest political initiative they dislike into a nihilistic practice ultimately meaning nothing while we all (according to them) suffer under an elite bureaucracy is not only masterful but criminally effective in its ability to sow political dysfunction that is salivating to overseas adversaries.
It’s not unique or ground-breaking to suggest that America’s media diet has affected our political clarity. We outfit the world either on an irrational and ahistorical cowboy individualism or overarching communitarianism, both popular archetypes describing America’s two most dynamic decades that America’s senior power classes are trying to desperately relive, the 1960s and 1980s. We argue over the New Deal (the Great Society) or Reaganomics without suggesting a new path forward that finds both America’s private and public sectors grappling with its limits in a shrunken world.
All of this of course requires sober thought and good-faith debate where one can trust the opposing voice is not pushing a nationalistic, tribalistic, or megalomaniacal hidden agenda.
The faith and trust needed to have difficult conversations that bring people to their existential cores can’t be restored in our political body if the organizational and spiritual heirs of Donald Trump blame historical research on their failings instead of their flawed incentive structures and candidate recruitment.
This is why the election of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia was hurtful. The Virginia governor will be a Republican and that has happened before. But the way he won. It reaffirmed to many who are part of an American heritage just as old as those who migrated during the religious wars and upheaval in Europe that their stories and histories can be turned off and demagogued away by cynical actors shedding a little bit of social Darwinism in their crusade to make us forget the lessons of the past.
Is this what our country has come to after Trump? Are we worthy of a democracy? Are we worthy of dynamic and enlightening political debate?
Right now everyone’s instinct is to blame Progressives because Thanksgiving is coming and an uncle eating in the corner swearing on reverse racism and “wokeness” for the third year in a row is too much for some families.
But I do hope as a country living at the pinnacle of human wealth and security (in the span of human existence), we can be honest with ourselves. Be honest that a president used the bully pulpit to stoke racially-motivated violence. Be honest that a new lost cause around the 2020 election has been created based on Reconstruction-era stereotypes of politicians-of-color having corrupt election precincts. Be honest that after the nation witnessed the murder of George Floyd, we are still susceptible to the same dirty tricks played by the ghosts of Confederate demagogues, even if the host body is in a lacrosse dad costume.
