11-18-2019, 05:44 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-18-2019, 05:45 PM by Anthony '58.)
That's my take from Saturday's gubernatorial election in Louisiana. The text comes courtesy of the award-winning (j/k) blog, Category 6 (the strength of "hurricane" sure to happen unless we cut out this divisiveness, post haste) on facebook.
In a rare non-Tuesday election, Democrat John Bel Edwards was re-elected governor of Louisiana - an outcome that is instructive on many levels.
First, it is living proof that national liberalism - the philosophy that Rose Montefusco identified her husband Tony in the short-lived 1975 NBC-TV series The Montefuscos as having - liberal on most things but conservative with the (Catholic) Church - is alive and well in America (Senators Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, and Doug Jones, Congressmen Daniel Lipinski and Henry Cuellar, and Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, just to scratch the surface, are clearly national liberals).
The term "national liberal," by the way, was coined by Michael Lind, who used it in his two bestsellers in the '90s, The Next American Nation (1995) and Up From Conservatism: Why The Right Is Wrong For America (1996; in the latter book he quoted Marvin Harris, who correctly identified the 1958-68 baby bust in his 1987 work Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology Of Daily Life) to denote those who are progressive economically but conservative socially.
Second, it proved that holding an election on a weekend as opposed to the traditional Tuesday can greatly help the Democrat, since it will increase, or more accurately, not reduce, the turnout of Democrat-leaning constituencies - and that could have been the decisive factor in the Louisiana governor's race, which Edwards won by just 51-49 per cent. If the election were held on a Tuesday instead, Edwards very likely would have lost.
A Catholic, a Baby Buster (born in 1966) and a Desert Storm veteran who is staunchly pro-life, Edwards signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of a pregnancy in May of 2018, and just 12 months later doubled down on this by signing an even more stringent "heartbeat law." But with an eye on his party's progressive wing, Edwards expressed support for banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation with only the most narrowly-drawn religious exemptions, raising the minimum wage, and equal pay for men and women.
Michael Lind posited that Catholic voters could position themselves as a moderate foil to both the low-church Protestant fundamentalists on the right and the "secular humanists" on the left.
The re-election of John Bel Edwards - who added the "Bel" to his professional name to avoid confusion with John Edwards, the former North Carolina Senator and unsuccessful Vice Presidential candidate whose career was destroyed by an adultery scandal, and who closely resembles an actor who subsequently appeared on a SunSetter awning commercial - is living proof that the death of national liberalism as a viable political philosophy has been greatly exaggerated.
This John Edwards, or lookalike thereof, won't be hawking awnings on TV anytime soon.
In a rare non-Tuesday election, Democrat John Bel Edwards was re-elected governor of Louisiana - an outcome that is instructive on many levels.
First, it is living proof that national liberalism - the philosophy that Rose Montefusco identified her husband Tony in the short-lived 1975 NBC-TV series The Montefuscos as having - liberal on most things but conservative with the (Catholic) Church - is alive and well in America (Senators Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, and Doug Jones, Congressmen Daniel Lipinski and Henry Cuellar, and Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, just to scratch the surface, are clearly national liberals).
The term "national liberal," by the way, was coined by Michael Lind, who used it in his two bestsellers in the '90s, The Next American Nation (1995) and Up From Conservatism: Why The Right Is Wrong For America (1996; in the latter book he quoted Marvin Harris, who correctly identified the 1958-68 baby bust in his 1987 work Why Nothing Works: The Anthropology Of Daily Life) to denote those who are progressive economically but conservative socially.
Second, it proved that holding an election on a weekend as opposed to the traditional Tuesday can greatly help the Democrat, since it will increase, or more accurately, not reduce, the turnout of Democrat-leaning constituencies - and that could have been the decisive factor in the Louisiana governor's race, which Edwards won by just 51-49 per cent. If the election were held on a Tuesday instead, Edwards very likely would have lost.
A Catholic, a Baby Buster (born in 1966) and a Desert Storm veteran who is staunchly pro-life, Edwards signed a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks of a pregnancy in May of 2018, and just 12 months later doubled down on this by signing an even more stringent "heartbeat law." But with an eye on his party's progressive wing, Edwards expressed support for banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation with only the most narrowly-drawn religious exemptions, raising the minimum wage, and equal pay for men and women.
Michael Lind posited that Catholic voters could position themselves as a moderate foil to both the low-church Protestant fundamentalists on the right and the "secular humanists" on the left.
The re-election of John Bel Edwards - who added the "Bel" to his professional name to avoid confusion with John Edwards, the former North Carolina Senator and unsuccessful Vice Presidential candidate whose career was destroyed by an adultery scandal, and who closely resembles an actor who subsequently appeared on a SunSetter awning commercial - is living proof that the death of national liberalism as a viable political philosophy has been greatly exaggerated.
This John Edwards, or lookalike thereof, won't be hawking awnings on TV anytime soon.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892