The New Order
I’m confused. Maybe its my age, but I suspect it is more about our confusing times. There is so much I do not understand that is going on in politics and I want to understand it better, The stories this morning that draw my attention and are the source of much of my confusion are the stories about Eric Adams winning the NYC democratic mayoral nomination (and therefore, almost certainly the election for mayor in November) and J.D. Vance embracing Trumpism for the sake of boosting his chances to win the crowded Republican nomination process for the Rob Portman senate seat in Ohio.
To begin with, allow me to declare that I have been with Eric Adams in his Brooklyn Borough President office a few years ago and had a chance to see one of his most often mentioned affectations, the handgun on his belt. I was there to discuss a proposal to engage Brooklyn in the efforts to expand the water ferry services on New York Harbor as I plied the waters of the Harbor on behalf of the New York Wheel project. I found Adams to be very attentive and balanced. He was neither offhand nor obtuse (which is often the way I have experienced politicians who want to make you think they are interested in your mission when, indeed, they are really only interested in maintaining and building their own power base). I love that we will have another black man at the helm of a city that needs to show representative leadership to drive forward with our changing national agenda. On the one hand I love hearing Eric Adams talk about the expanding victims of gun violence and the need to expand our perspective about gun violence from just assault weapons used in mass shootings to one that equally includes the importance of controlling the use of handguns in one-on-one shootings that especially target innocent people of color. He brings an interesting perspective that says that more people of color are under attack by handguns than the people who grab headlines by being victims of mass shootings, which are often not people of color. No one should think this means he doesn’t care about mass shootings, but he does care about the numbers and the numbers say that handgun use is a bigger problem than assault weapons use. Adam’s focus is on a fundamental truth, and that is that we have to focus on letting “good guys” overtake “bad guys”. That’s a great concept, but I am troubled by the execution of that concept (excuse the bad pun), and the fact that it takes packing heat to achieve gun control.
People are saying that Eric Adams may be the future of what the Democratic Party needs to do in order to take and keep control of the national agenda. He is far less a liberal ideologue (think Bill de Blasio) than a pragmatic person who represents the reality of the lives of our growingly diverse population. There is a lot to like there and there is great logic to suggesting that regular people want delivered to them a leadership slate of people who understand their needs and desires. It may well be the best path to majority success. Make no mistake, I am a liberal ideologue and while I don’t care much for Bill de Blasio, there are many concepts, including the banning of guns and certainly open-carry, that I support wholeheartedly. But I am coming to recognize that I am in a distinct minority on many of my ideological stands and that the best available path forward for our nation and our people may lie in a far more centrist, pragmatic path. In some ways, this is the path that Joe Biden seems to be following and there is a lot to commend it from what I am seeing. His refusal to focus on Trump-bashing and rather on getting things done that will help people is very commendable. I find myself liking it like I find myself liking Eric Adams and what he represents.
By contrast, let me talk about J.D. Vance and his political aspirations. I think its great to see a man raised in an almost Hillbilly environment that bootstraps himself into a Yale Law degree, writing a hugely successful book (Hillbilly Elegy) and then eschewing a career as a venture capitalist, to go the route of leadership through public service, in this case a run for the U.S. Senate. But everything I like about Eric Adams and his pragmatic path through law enforcement to politics to represent a world that needs to balance the books for people of color, I despise about J.D. Vance’s decision to embrace Donald Trump simply to improve his chance of electability in Ohio. Both Adams and Vance are being pragmatists, but one advocates for good over evil while the other embraces evil (that would be Trump and all he represents) in order to gain a position of influence and power. The ends do not justify the means, plain and simple. Packing heat and embracing evil are very different means. One strikes me as rational and justifiable, even though I oppose it, while the other seems groveling and weak, playing to the lesser instincts of the electorate in order to supposedly “suck it up” and lie in order to take his people (the supposedly downtrodden poor white people of his native hills) to a better place.
If these distinctions are confusing to you, you begin to understand my confusion. It is a complex time and there are complicated tactics being deployed on both the right and left to address this complexity. I keep trying to balance my perspectives and do what the likes of Biden and Adam’s are doing, but every time I take myself there, something like this new J.D. Vance announcement puts me right on my ass in amazement. This is a man who unabashedly spoke out about all the bad things that Trump represented for the country. But then when he realized that the Trump base needed to hear him support Donald Trump in order to give him serious consideration for his senate run, he was willing to recant everything. In days gone by such duplicitous behavior would put a knife through someone’s electoral prospects, but the calculus of today’s Republican Party is such that anything that improves the chances of winning is considered acceptable and integrity is simply not considered a necessary characteristic for a good candidate.
I really enjoyed reading Hillbilly Elegy and watching the movie of the same name. I respect someone who makes something of themselves despite bad influences in their upbringing. Getting a law degree from a top-notch school like Yale is no mean feat and then finding the time and inspiration to write a great book while trying to climb the corporate ladder is quite impressive. I started the day today holding J.D. Vance in high regard. Now I think he is nothing more than a cliche of what has become of the Republican Party with no social, economic or political platform and nothing more than a desire for power to create further advantages for themselves. This may have been the undercurrent of the Republicans for a long while, but now they are unabashed about their desperation for winning at all costs.
This is the new order and it is confusing to understand how to combat it. It reminds me of an old observation that crazy always wins because one just want to do what is needed to keep it out of our lives. The new order is to find a way to confront crazy a d not run from it.