The Difference Between a Conservative and a Demagogue
“On the ruins of public liberty”
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” From George Washington’s Farewell Address
Looking back a few years, I can recall when Virginia was as conservative a state as–perhaps not Alabama — but you couldn’t refer to it as crazy liberal either. Still can’t. When I was growing up, my home state of South Carolina wasn’t any better than Alabama and George Wallace when it came to race relations.
I was born in Tuomey Hospital in Sumter, just the other side of Wateree Swamp from Columbia, the state capital where the Confederate battle flag still flew for most of my life. My 1967 high school class was the first to be integrated in Sumter. To spite those four brave souls, the school band kept playing Dixie at the football rallies. Sumter County was part of the consolidated lawsuit known as Brown vs. Board of Education back when we had a more moral Supreme Court.
To this day Clemson University’s administration building remains named for Pitchfork Ben Tillman.
When I moved to Virginia for a job, the state was Harry Byrd conservative — still hung over from losing god knows how many teenage rebels and witnessing the ruination from one end of the state to the other. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President was a Mississippi slaveholder who was just fine with letting all those Virginia farms become battlefields and its boys be slaughtered. Slavery ruined Virginia. Didn’t help Mississippi either.
It ruined most of the country, one way or the other. The Southies in Boston of good Irish stock, rioted in 1974 to 1976 when integration came their way years following when the South was forced to integrate. We who claim America as our country still carry that stain of slavery.
By the time I pulled up in the Ryder rental truck to Reston with my three-year-old belted in his car seat, Virginia was still more conservative than not— with large pockets of Confederates still evident. Virginia’s senior senator in the 1980s was John Warner — probably better remembered as Elizabeth Taylor’s fifth spouse than his support of a strong foreign policy. Warner was every bit a conservative, who had served as Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford.
Warner opposed Ollie North’s 1994 run for the second senate seat in Virginia. Warner, long a Republican, said North didn’t have the character to be in the Senate, bringing down the wrath of the Republican Party on his head. Ollie North, it may be recalled, was convicted of selling guns to Iran in exchange for cutting a deal with Nicaragua rebels, under none other than “What-me-worry” Ronnie Reagan.
John Warner said straight out the personal integrity of a Senator was more important than party, for reasons his fellow Republicans couldn’t grasp.
I voted for John Warner for his refusal to place party before nation. Lots of independents, even Democrats voted him back into office.
I voted for John McCain when he ran against George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican nomination. You should listen to John McCain’s concession speech if you’ve forgotten it, and compare it to Trump’s — oh wait, Trump never did concede.
In his Farewell Address, George Washington had cautioned that political parties bent on their own aggrandizement would be the ruin of democracy. Southern Democrats from John C. Calhoun, to Jefferson Davis, to Pitchfork Ben Tillman to Republicans like Ollie North to the present day Trump supporters prove his point. That it hasn’t ruined the nation does not guarantee that it won’t in this go round.
The moral fiber of those we vote into office matters if we are to keep a shadow of democracy.
A man who believes women are only useful for sex and arm candy, who lies with every speech he makes, who said there were “some very fine people on both sides” when Jew-hating racists marched in Charlottesville, and who sat watching TV as rioters stormed the Capital, who was convicted by a citizen jury for hiding his payoffs to Stormy Daniels, and who doesn’t admire the military of his own country, nor its allies, this demagogue does not meet a minimum definition of a responsible human being, let alone a candidate for the Presidency.
We the People have voted for carny folk and thieves in the past — too many to cite — but God help us if we vote this Joker in again.
