A RECIPE FOR A WINTER DAY

Esther Terry, the wonderful woman who chaired the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts for many years and recruited me in 1992 to join the department – God bless her – grew up poor in a small town in North Carolina on the Virginia border, and though she eventually earned a bachelor’s degree at Bennett College, a Master's degree at UNC Chapel Hill, and a doctorate in English at UMass, she retained the colorful language of her youth. When I ran into a problem and things did not go as I wanted them to she would say to me, “Bob, you have to learn to make chicken salad from chicken shit.”

 

Well, socially, politically, medically, globally, it has pretty much been all chicken shit for a while now, so in this post I am going to try to create a little chicken salad out of it. What follows is not a prediction.   As Yogi Berra famously said, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  What follows is my effort to find some ray of light, some reason to hope, in regard to the forthcoming midterm elections. No need to tell me that I am being foolish. God knows, I am all too aware of that.

 

Let me begin with an observation. I consume cable news obsessively – I watch MSNBC and CNN for hours each day. I have been quite struck by the slow but steady and irreversible tendency of the hosts and their guests to treat what is happening as a genuine existential threat to American democracy itself. It has really taken less than a year for the common wisdom, the consensus gentium, to come to an agreement that what we are witnessing now is one of the two major political parties being transformed from a conservative party into an autocratic cult that seeks nothing less than the end of democratic elections in the United States. Little by little, the qualifications and hesitations have dropped away and the statements of prominent Republicans are now routinely described as lies. Now I am well aware that only a small fraction of the American electorate watches these cable news channels, but the change is striking nonetheless. “Both sidesism,” the curse of the mainstream media, has all but disappeared.

 

Let us agree that voting rights action at the federal level is dead for the time being. We can also agree that the usual suspects in the Republican Party – Collins, Romney, etc. – will stand by and do nothing while the party seeks to kill democracy.

 

However (here comes the chicken salad) there is reason for hope. Turnout in midterm elections is always very low. In 2018, the turnout soared more than 10 percentage points above its usual level and got all the way to 50%, which means that even then half of the eligible voters did not bother to vote. In short, the outcome in midterm elections is determined, more than anything else, by turnout.

 

This spring, probably in June, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in the Mississippi abortion case and the probability is very high that by a vote of 5 to 4 or 6 to 3 the court will strike down Roe V Wade. At that point, in a large number of red states, antiabortion laws already on the books will go into effect immediately. There is, I believe, good reason to hope that in the four or five months between that disastrous decision and the election, two things will happen. First, there will be an outpouring of rage and anxiety from women across the country, including in those red states. If we are lucky, this will produce a surge in Democratic votes. The second thing that may happen is that the evangelicals, who for 50 years have been voting Republican in the hope of seeing abortion outlawed, will embrace the decision and in significant numbers not bother to go out and vote, their dream having been realized.

 

There it is. A nice big platter of chicken salad made entirely out of chicken shit.

 

Dig in.