Oh, that First Amendment: Dies Easy in Hampton, NH

 

It is the very first sentence of the Bill of Rights.

There was much consternation about the Constitution when it was being debated, and voted into existence, in the 18th century. Much of the resistance came simply from the objection that while it outlined the nuts and bolts of the structure of the government, it failed to get beyond the "what" to the "why" our government should even exist.

So its backers, Madison, Hamilton, promised to add the Bill of Rights, which addressed many of the resentments which had prompted the Revolution in the first place and which enumerated the specific stuff the Crown had done which Jefferson had described generally in the Declaration. Jefferson spoke of "abuses and usurpations" and "Despotism" but when he got around to listing what the King had done, he complained mostly about how laws passed locally were dismissed and how the king's judiciary owed no care but to please the king, not enforce the law. Then he gets on to the plundering of our seas, ravaging our coasts and destroying lives. 

But mostly, Jefferson accused the King of violating the "inalienable rights" of Americans.

And what were those rights? 

You had to wait for the Bill of Rights to learn that.

And the first rights, the First Amendment, starts off with an explosive leap onto the stage:

First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Of course, freedom of speech is the most basic of all, because without that none of the others can be had. It is the sine qua non of all rights. Oddly, it does not make its appearance until after two phrases regarding religion.

There may be many reasons for this ordering, but whatever else can be said, the importance of the relationship between government and religion is clearly an ascendant one. Maybe this is because religion is about authority, and if there is a state religion, then all that matters is not what men reason out for themselves but what someone speaking for God says is right. To free people to speak freely, you must first free them to think freely and that is why the First Amendment addresses both.

The two clauses, now called the "establishment clause" and the "free exercise clause" exist in tension with one another.  This is because one man's free exercise of his religion may mean that he wants to force his religion on another man, and he may demand money from others to support his priests and church. And sometimes one man's religion violates the rights of other men: If a man's religion tells him as a white man he is superior to Black men, and has the right to enslave them, or has the right to educate his children in government schools which he denies to Black children, or if his religion tells him gay folks are committing grave sins and he should not have to allow them to stay in his hotel, then that means the folks his God inveighs against will be denied their own rights.

And then there is the question of what sorts of actions constitute the establishment of religion by the state. 

In basic terms if a state or town or if the federal government declared: The religion of the town of Hampton is the Roman Catholic religion, ruled by the Holy See in the Vatican, few would have trouble seeing this as the establishment of religion.

England has an established religion as its law says The Church of England is the state religion, and the King is its head, which goes back to Henry VIII, he of many wives and the temerity to disown the pope.

Germany establishes "religion" without specifying any one religion: So in Germany 3% of your income tax goes to the church you register with. If you register with none, you don't pay that tax.  That is establishment of religion in a different way, but presumably would be forbidden by the First Amendment in the United States, although with the current Supreme Court, this is not at all clear any more, at least until and unless the Democrats manage to pack the Court.

Thus far, in a series of cases about the separation of church and state, the Supreme Court has ruled for funding religion by the state consistently, claiming that to deny churches state funds would be to impair the free exercise of religion.

Most of these cases, if not all of them, have come down to cases where the government set up some sort of benefit for the children in a community or state which Justice Roberts describes as a "neutral benefit" which should be available to all, but which was then denied to children whose parents wanted them educated in a church school--so in the case of Everson, a town wanted to be sure all the kids in the town got a school bus to transport them to school, but not to religious schools; in a Maine case, public funds to attend private schools were made available when children lived in remote areas where there simply were no public schools, but not for attendance at a Christian academy; in Espinoza v Montana, it was a scholarship program available to all students, except those who wanted to use it to attend a Christian school. 

In all these cases, the local governments sought to avoid giving taxpayer money to educate students in one particular religion and the Supreme Court struck that down.  To deny these students the education they want because it is a religious education is to deny them the "free exercise" of religion, even if it means requiring other taxpayers to pay for that religious education.

Justice Alito, in his concurring opinion in Espinoza showed his hand baldly by railing on for some pages about all the indignities levied against his own Catholic church by the Jeffersonian infidels who demonized Catholic school education, an insult from which he has clearly never recovered.

He went so far as to incorporate a visual aide in his opinion, (which in all the Supreme Court opinions I've read I can never recall seeing before. ) It is a cartoon from an 1879 Harpers Weekly, depicting alligators with pope's hats for jaws, menacing children and public schools. Oh! The horror! He recounts that James Blaine in 1875 attempted to bar aid to any Catholic and other sectarian schools, and it was motivated by "virulent prejudice" against Catholics and supported by the Ku Klux Klan. He notes that though Mr. Blaine's perfidy did not manage to become an amendment to the United States Constitution, thirty eight states still have such amendments to their own Constitutions even to this day.

And you just know how Justice Alito will vote if cases challenging these state constitutions are brought! He virtually invites these challenges from the halls of the Court in Washington, D.C. 

From here Alito links anti Catholicism to anti immigration feeling, as many immigrants were from Catholic Ireland and were viewed by "groups" as "soldiers of the Church of Rome." And newspapers claimed that Popery is the natural enemy of general education...if it is establishing schools, it is to make them prisons of the youthful intellect of the country."

Alito goes on for pages about how he is not simply defending the Catholic faith against the insufferable attacks of the past and present, but he is defending the indignities visited upon all immigrants. Justice Alito, you must understand, is not simply defending Catholicism, but all those downtrodden immigrants.

He notes that to be admitted to the Union, Montana had to pledge to institute public education "free from sectarian control."  "Montana thereafter adopted its constitutional rule against public funding for any school, "controlled by a "sect." All this Alito places in the anti Catholic immigrant mindset. 

Of course, New Hampshire's 6th Amendment has pretty much the same phrase, and it was adopted in 1784, long before immigration was on anyone's radar. 

But no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination. And every person, denomination or sect shall be equally under the protection of the law; and no subordination of any one sect, denomination or persuasion to another shall ever be established.

It should be noted that this is contained in the "Morality and Piety" article, (Number 6) which is mostly about how religions should be neither favored nor inhibited.

So, Alito's argument that any attempt to draw a line between church and state is simply a smokescreen for virulent anti Catholicism seems a bit contrived, at least, and paranoid, at worst.

During the 2022 Hampton Deliberative session the warrant article which sets up a town taxpayer funded bank account for the Catholic Sacred Heart School (SHS), to be used to cover operating expenses of the school, so the Bishop of Manchester will not have to dip into his own accounts to cover the costs of computers, testing materials, glitter glue, sundry books (e.g. "The Giver") objections were made and amendments proposed.

One amendment, offered by a Hampton Lawyer, Erica DeVries, said simply that the same amount made available to the SHS should be made available to any private school in town which requests it. This was a very canny amendment because it cleaves so closely to the argument by Chief Justice Roberts that there are "neutral' ways to provide taxpayer government funds, i.e. if the funds are available to all. 

But a citizen arose to object. "What if a church of Satan asked for such funds? I wouldn't want to have my taxes supporting THAT!" The amendment was promptly voted down. 

Thus it was demonstrated at the Deliberative session that the citizens of Hampton were willing to support a church they liked, but not to spend taxpayer funds on a church they did not like.

"Let them get their own warrant article and see if they can vote it through!" One indignant citizen shouted.

So far, for the past 50 years, Hampton has given taxpayer money to only one religious or private school in town: Sacred Heart School.

"I don't understand this whole fuss," one citizen said. "I've lived in this town 50 years and nobody has ever objected before. This is the way we've always done it. People here like it. They've voted for it."

This was the same thing, one citizen noted, he had heard when he was growing up in the South--we've always had, always voted for, segregated schools. Who are these agitators who are objecting?"

What is striking about Justice Alito's argument is how emotional it is. Any attempt to separate state from church is ipso facto welling up from a despicable dark anti religious animus.

Jefferson, of course, looked across the Atlantic at Europe, riven by religious wars, and with Madison sought to avoid the same thing for America.

The ACLU, an organization founded mostly to defend the First Amendment right to free speech now quotes Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent  in Carson: The Court, she says, "has led us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation." She notes the establishment clause, that clause which seeks to insulate government from religion is now viewed as hostile to religion.

In her dissent Sotomayor notes:

 As a result, in just a few years, the Court has upended constitutional doctrine, shifting from a rule that permits States to decline to fund religious organizations to one that requires States in many circumstances to subsidize religious indoctrination with taxpayer dollars. 

But if your religion tells you you are owed state taxpayer money, if your religion tells you you should not allow Black people to sleep on the same hotel beds as White people, where does that leave us?

As for the balance between government neutrality and the individual's right to practice, Sotomayor notes:

The Court’s increasingly expansive view., dissenting of the Free Exercise Clause risks swallowing the space between the Religion Clauses that once “permit[ted] religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and without interference. Walz, 397 U. S., at 669. 

Do we not need to be protected against religious belief as much as religious belief needs to be protected against government intrusion?

And, the fact is, what religion is complaining about is not intrusion but the failure to intrude, the failure to fund religion.

Again, Sotomayor:

 I do not understand today’s decision to mandate that SAUs contract directly with schools that teach religion, which would go beyond Zelman’s private-choice doctrine and blatantly violate the Establishment Clause. Nonetheless, it is irrational for this Court to hold that the Free Exercise Clause bars Maine from giving money to parents to fund the only type of education the State may provide consistent with the Establishment Clause: a religiously neutral one. Nothing in the Constitution requires today’s result. 

What this is all about, in some way, is, in fact what Justice Alito says it is. 

If you believe you can have a society which is just and fair and impartial and which operates with or without religion,  then you are stating something which is antithetical to most religious belief. Virtually all religions insist that religion is indispensable, that religion must be made central to civic life, and if you deny this you are anti religion. Those who insist on government remaining independent of religion are arguing that we can do without it, they are agnostics, or worse, atheists. 

Hitchens

This is the central argument Christopher Hitchens often made: Do we need religion to know right from wrong?  Hitchens argued, and I fully agree, we do not. 

We know that slavery is wrong simply looking at those miserable human beings standing on the auction block. We do not need religion to tell us this and in fact, it was religion which found Biblical reasons to endorse slavery. The most ardent slavers were religious men and women.

Speaking of the zealots who flew their airplanes into the World Trade Center, of the jihadists who chop off the head of reporters, or school teachers in front of their students, Hitchens noted, only religious people would do that. The most horrific things in history have been done by people, thought they were doing these hideous things because they were commanded by God to do them, people who, without religion, would have known from simple decency, they should not have done.

The classic story is, of course that of Abraham who takes his son up on the mountain determined to slit his son's throat because, of course God had commanded it. No unreligious person would ever consider slitting the throat of his own son. Only to a religious person does this make sense. 

So, yes. To oppose religion as the basis of American life is, in a very real sense, anti religious. 

But to insist on the separation of church and state does not require you to be anti-religious, and in fact this neutral posture has worked for over 200 years; it has been simply a practical solution to different beliefs, to allow all religions to co-exist without joining a religious fight. 

Onward Christian Soldiers

As for the Constitution and the Law, what the Supreme Court has demonstrated is the system is rigged. You can pass whatever law you wish, you can enshrine in your state Constitution a separation of church and state and the Catholic justices on the Court will find a twist to make a new law which completely reverses the law you have passed. In fact, the law, the Constitution is now only what the Court says it is. No matter what the text says, the Court will find a way to see its own prejudices enshrined right there.  

The classic example was Justice Scalia looking at the Second Amendment which says "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," and he ignores the first part about the militia and goes on for pages about the possible meanings of the word "people" only to conclude, in the end, this text means every citizen is guaranteed the right to own a howitzer (Heller vs DC). It's all right there in the text, the original meaning of the text! 

You don't need 3 years of law school to see that grift. 

Some have argued that given the current Court's attitude about separation of church and state being unconstitutional, that does, in fact make separation of church and state unconstitutional. What is constitutional is, in fact, whatever the Court says it is.

But this is wrong, and it is wrong on the current Court's own terms. This Court has rejected the whole idea of stare decisis, the idea that current cases be judged with reference to precedents, i.e. prior decisions. In Dobbs, the Court said that Hugo Black simply got Roe wrong. So, we can now say this Court has got Everson and Espinosa and the other cases about separation of church and state wrong. They got these cases wrong because they were blinded by their own Catholic upbringing and because they knew they had the power as a 6 to three Court to do whatever they wanted to do.

A new Court, with say 4 additional justices, could very easily see this Court's misdeeds and reverse these contemptible rulings. Now that  stare decisis is dead, we can say that prior Courts simply got it wrong and move on.

As Justice Sotomayor says:

What a difference five years makes. In 2017, I feared that the Court was “lead[ing] us . . . to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.” Trinity Lutheran, 582 U. S., at ___ (dissenting opinion) (slip op., at 27). Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation. If a State cannot offer subsidies to its citizens without being required to fund religious exercise, any State that values its historic antiestablishment interests more than this Court does will have to curtail the support it offers to its citizens. With growing concern for where this Court will lead us next, I respectfully dissent.

Now, we are rushing into a history we are doomed to repeat. 

God help us.

Frumious Banderdash

 

Twas froznatch in the Hampton shire

When Banderdash did sally forth

And all the citiwhenish mob did come inspired

In from the whirling snoggloombroth.

The Churchmugeonfolk were there in force

But some hobbitfolk as well

The mediator fully cloaked did burble to the stageysource

And then the vocalwags did in chorus swell.

Oh, do not wrest our rightful tithe!

From our Drumhum school

We have stole it fair and squaresythe

Through, uffish, whiffling and deep murky pool.

And Banderdash did finally rise

And spoke of Jefferson in mome beamish wisdom

But, oh the Churchmugeonfolk did despise

The Banderdash's vorpal sword, dripping in lawyerishsom.

Mightily did Banderdash  swing and smite and sizzle

Through all that uffish tugley snipe in which resentment did drizzle.

Do not tell us, rathoutgrabe, how to rapeplundersizzle

Our own towntreasureglade which Godabove did us mizzle 

To our fairishshuff church, forsooth, and schoolbizzle.

And thus did Banderdash in defeat slugchurlishly on home

While  galumphing out went the Churchmugeonfolk aglome

And Calooh! Callay! Oh frabjous day! 

The townmuggles did wardubble

We have won again! 

And Jefferson and Banderdash are laid back in their woozy puddle!

The New Yorker in New Hampshire

 

In the mid 20th century, moving to New Hampshire from New York City or from Washington, DC or any other sophisticated urban environment might have been a leap into a backwater, something like the scene of Dr. Zhivago stepping off the train from Moscow, with his family, at the Varykino train station in the Urals: you were launched into another world, not alone, but surely disconnected from the people, values and ideas you had lived with before. 

Of course, with the internet, with podcasts, even with the old fashioned snail mail delivery to your rural mail box, you can read what they are saying, hear what they are thinking in Manhattan just as much as if you really lived there. After all, when I lived in Manhattan, did I ever have lunch with David Remnick or Jane Mayer? No. I heard what they were thinking the same way I do now: I read the New Yorker. I might as well have been in New Hampshire, for all the actual connection I had with the minds at the New Yorker.

But listening to the New Yorker's podcast about the January 6th committee and its recommendation to the Justice Department that Donald Trump be prosecuted for his crimes of January 6, I can only marvel at how marvelously disconnected these urban sophisticates are from the rest of the country, as opposed to the other way round.

Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer describes the actions of John Eastman, one of Trump's "lawyers" and she has to pause to gather her breath when she describes how he recommended Trump simply refuse to accept the results of the election, while admitting the case he would make to the Supreme Court would almost surely fail, and she says, almost choking at the enormity of the risk Eastman was taking: "He could be DISBARRED!"

Oh, the Horror!

Susan Glasser

Ms. Glasser added that Mr. Eastman had admitted he thought the Supreme Court would have rejected his argument as if that is the same thing as saying he did not believe in his argument or that he thought they would be correct in doing so.  And he had such stellar "credentials" having clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas! As if clerking for Thomas proves you have been molded in the most clarifying fires, and have a mind like tempered steel! He must have know what he was saying and advocating was wrong!

No, actually, Ms. Glasser, I don't think serving as a clerk for just any Supreme Court Justice makes you a legal scholar, or even a smart lawyer.

John Eastman on Jan 6

I tried to imagine Ms. Mayer, Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser having their conversation in a diner in the 14th Congressional district of Georgia, the one that sent Marjorie Taylor Greene back to Congress with a 65% mandate, after she informed her constituents that the wildfires in California were started by  space lasers devised by the Jewish bankers, the Rothschilds, and after she advocated for the execution of Nancy Pelosi.

Evan Osnos

"Sophisticate" means, at its essence, "knowing." It suggests a type of knowledge from worldly experience, which, when gained, allows one to operate in a setting where the stated rules of church and state are well known, but broken, and other rules which allow people to pursue their pleasures or their own ideas, really prevail.

So, in that sense, these New Yorkers are essentially unsophisticated because they know only their own world, their own rules.

What would Ms. Mayer have said to the woman who took my passport ID photos at the local Walgreen's, who told me the charge was $16.99, "Which ought to satisfy the government, which makes you do this but doesn't do anything for you."

"How's that?" I asked.

"Well, when has the government ever done anything for you? The government isn't good for anything."

"Oh, I think the government is good for a lot of things, like Social Security and Medicare," I replied. 

"Yeah, and they won't even pay for COVID tests any more," she retorted.

I hardly knew where to begin with that one, as it implied she thought it was the role of government to offer free COVID tests, and, in fact, I had just that day read the government was once again sending out free tests, so I said, "Well, the government got the COVID vaccines done in a year, which was amazing.

"Yeah, and I got three vaccines and still got COVID twice and my husband didn't get any vaccine and never got it. And COVID only had a 0.5% mortality rate."

"Closer to 1% with the first go round of the virus. And that would have meant 3 million dead," I rejoined.

"Yeah, well, have a nice day," she said.

So, what would Evan have had to say to her?

What these three lovely and intelligent people focused on was the 1000 witnesses, the slow, methodical accretion of evidence the committee had created and the obvious malfeasance of Trump.

What they seem oblivious to is what the Walgreen's clerk knows instinctively: The truth is, as Roy Cohn once told Trump, "Don't tell me about the law; tell me about the judge."

The law is just one long argument and as Mr. Trump knows well, the longer you extend the argument, the less likely you'll ever have to pay a price.

What counts, in the end, is how you are judged and that depends on who is doing the judging--the 14th Georgia or the New Yorker.

Meritocracy, Again

 Reading a book called "The Meritocracy Trap" by Yale Law School Professor, Daniel Markovits, and having watched Michael Sandel's series of lectures at Harvard, in which he finally crystalizes his major objection to the idea of "meritocracy" as the psychological and social damage done by the idea--that meritocracy means the losers are made to feel they deserve to be losers and are unworthy--I was struck by how very prosaic and fundamentally banal the product of thought from these two ultra-elite professors really is.

Professor Markovits had a stellar career at Yale in math, graduating summa cum laude and then off to Oxford and the London school of economics where he got degrees in "econometrics" and other stuff before returning to Yale, where he got his J.D. 

But when you read his book, you find yourself saying: This is what all those highfalutin degrees gets the writer and the reader? Somewhere in the muddle of his argument the professor finds that meritocracy is responsible for deaths of desperation, a decline in life expectancy among non college educated white men, and stagnation in central Michigan near Lake St. Clair. 

Not getting into Yale did all that to those dying Midwesterners in those stagnant communities in the Rust Belt. 

He employs  a case study--a bartender who found he could live better in a small, stagnant middle class town in Michigan than he could in Seattle, where he felt like a loser compared to the high tech rich guys working at Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing. Yes, professor, as so many of us knew already, you can live better on less money outside the glamour cities, where rents and mortgages are set by the upper 1%. 

So far as I've got into his book, Dr. Markovits seems to blame the Ivy League and elite institutions for the ills of meritocracy, rather than the clueless titans of industry who make a B.A. degree a requirement for jobs which should not require a college education at all. 

As so many of us know, there are folks among our own friends and families who had the experience of being better at their jobs than those who were hired to manage them simply because those incompetent hires had  a college degree. 

General Electric wanted to make my friend a manager because, after 15 years on the line doing ultra high tech welding on airplane engines, he knew more than any of his managers, and all the managers kept going to him to find out how to organize the production line. When they called him in to promote him to management, they discovered he never did finish at the University of New Mexico and so, for want of that diploma, they couldn't promote him. He shrugged and said, "Fine, I like being a union worker."  He retired at age 54, after 35 years with the company, with a good pension, well before any of his siblings, all of whom had advanced degrees and professional careers.  He sits in front of his computer in his den watching the graphs and curves of his investment instruments, including several Vanguard accounts, and he travels with his wife all over the world.

His story reminds me of that classic Thomas Hardy poem, "The Ruined Maid" about the woman who laughed off the socially prescribed mores defining success and saw the truth by rejecting what society said was merit:

The Ruined Maid

BY THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —

"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

And I think of my son's high school girlfriend, who was a star student, and the daughter of a mother who was a Yale graduate and who wanted her to go to Yale.  

She chose to transfer from an Ivy League school to join my son at a lesser institution, Vanderbilt, where he had spent a desultory first year, struggling to keep up his grade point average. When she arrived, she told him to stop studying more than he had to in any given subject. He would get fascinated by some topic and read beyond the assignment, leaving less time for other demands. "No," she told him, "You've done what you need to do for your 'A' in zoology,  now move on and do enough in the next subject for an 'A' there. this isn't about learning or fun or getting deep into things. This is about grades."

 From the time of her arrival, my son got nearly straight "A's" and he graduated magna cum laude and got into Columbia P&S, a very elite medical school. He did that by hardening into cynicism and he was a star there, as he reverted back to his tendency to get absorbed in subjects which fascinated him and he won the prize for best student in surgery and went on to become a vascular surgeon, a specialty which put to use some of his great strengths. We had despaired of his ever graduating college. 

The former girlfriend went on to get a PhD at Yale. But her ultimate career is instructive. After all those glittering academic prizes--she had as stellar a summa cum laude career as one could have--and then on to Yale, what did that mean for her ultimate financial and career fate? 

She went to work for the federal government, as had her mother before her.  The former girlfriend worked briefly at Ft. Dietrick, in a virus lab, but the went on to a more administrative job with the Department of Health and Human Services.

So how much does that elite education really determine the economic fate of American generations?  Markovits and Sandel think the meritocracy is pervasive and fate determining--like the university admissions process in Japan, where you either leap up into the stratosphere because you have got into the University of Tokyo, or you wind up stuck in the middle with the hoi polloi, working every day, living with your wife and her parents in an apartment at the outskirts of the city.

Of course, those graduates of the U. of Tokyo are also living with their wives and children with her parents in crowded apartments, but they are living in better neighborhoods.

Which makes me wonder what happens to all those wunderkind folks whose wedding announcements (advertisements) you read in the New York Times.  That woman who graduated from Princeton, went on to study at the Sorbonne for a degree in semiotics, and then Cambridge in philosophy and corporate anthropology and then a degree from Yale in public health and finally an MBA from Harvard. And she marries a guy who went to Princeton and then Yale Law and got a job with a fancy Washington, DC law firm, which is the actual source of their income, and none of those degrees earned by the wife mattered much to their status or income, because she now works for a non profit devoted to preserving architectural landmarks. 

So, yes, the academic pedigree might buy a job at Goldman Saks or some fancy law firm, but how long does that last? As so many of these high achievers discover the wash out rate at these places is high,  and they wind up working at less glamourous places, for less inspiring salaries.

Meanwhile, my HVAC guy visited my house this week, and the electrician is due any minute. And the plumber was in last week and all those guys live in New Hampshire in houses which are as roomy and comfortable as my own, but unlike me, they don't have diplomas from three different Ivy League institutions framed on their walls. I always ask them when they plan to retire and they tell me they could retire any time but they are having fun and they don't know what they'd do with their time that would be more satisfying.

I tell them about the Midwestern businessmen I meet on Viking tours and and they tell me they've been on Viking cruises and had fun, but they wouldn't want to live on a cruise boat.

And I have to agree with them. 

Harvard is just down the road and the folks wandering those lovely green yards are convinced they are masters of the universe and in the drivers' seats. But I'm not so sure.

Red vs Blue America

 

Every two years, Mad Dog does his penitence, wandering through the streets of Hampton, New Hampshire, like those penitents of the Middle Ages who walked among the plague stricken towns of Europe, self flagellating, in an attempt to atone for their sins. In the case of Mad Dog, this consists of knocking on the doors of his offended neighbors, and watching them scamper from the fronts of their houses to the inaccessible back rooms, where the Patriot's game is playing on their TV screens.

What makes the exercise magnetic for Mad Dog is his partner, who we will call "Olivia" and who is the epitome of a local citizen who sacrifices for her country. 

There is no better, and likely will never be, a better door knocker/canvasser in New Hampshire. About ten percent of those doors are actually opened by the citizens who are willing to engage.  Olivia quickly introduces herself and Mad Dog as neighbors who live in Hampton.

The faces of these wary home owners transform almost instantaneously from the picture of annoyance to something approaching delight.  There are two reasons for this: Firstly, there is the face of Olivia.  Picture what most people look like when presented with a yellow Labrador puppy, or an adorable child. Oliva's blue eyes are so captivating that when Joe Biden was campaigning through New Hampshire some ten years ago, before his cognitive abilities slipped, he stopped his movement down the handshaking line, did a double take and told Olivia, "Those are some gorgeous eyes!" 

In all the years Mad Dog has accompanied Olivia to thresholds, he has never seen a homeowner whose countenance did not simply melt under the radiance of her smile.

Then there is her prodigious use of memory and connectivity: Olivia knows everyone in town, or if she does not know them personally, she knows that your cousin's brother went to Winnacunnet High School with her daughter's best friend's cousin. 

Talk about six degrees of separation! For Olivia, in Hampton, it doesn't matter if the connection is twelve degrees: She'll make that connection.

Now, the homeowner is ready to invite us in for tea or a beer or nachos and all is warm and welcoming until Olivia feels compelled to get down to business, because, after all, we are working off a computer list provided by the state Democratic Party and she has to present the slate of Democrats running for US Senate and the House and for the state representatives and for sheriff. Mr. or Ms. Homeowner's face changes from delight to tentative tolerance but it's still smiling, until...Olivia has to progress on, as the Party demands, to the next function beyond shoring up good feelings for Democrats to a polling function when she has to ask, "So, can we count on your supporting Senator Hassan?"

Renny Cushing

At that point, a dark shade is pulled own across half the faces and sometimes a diatribe ensues to the effect that Senator Hassan has voted for a law which allows "abortion" at such a late stage that the baby may be met with a scalpel as it is coming down the birth canal. 

Sometimes, the citizen will agree she will support the Democratic Senator, and then Olivia is obligated by Party fiat to ask the citizen to sign a blue post card saying the citizen agrees to show up and vote on election day, although this request often provokes a look which clearly says, "And here I thought we we friends. What are you trying to sell here?"

For those who have expostulated about the late term abortion bill Senator Hassan voted for, Mad Dog will sometimes interject: "Excuse me. I must have missed that. What bill, exactly was that and when did she vote for it?" But that only results in overt hostility and slammed doors. Mad Dog tried to reach the offices of Senator Hassan and Congressman Pappas without success as a succession of interns answered with flustered dodges that they are not authorized to speak for the Senator or the Congressman even though they answer the phones in their offices. 

Dudley Dudley

Thus we find the Party has undermined the magic Olivia is capable of working, or we find that we don't have all the answers when it comes to what our candidates actually stand for. 

But, the effort of canvassing did allow Mad Dog to experience actual field research from which he has formed these hypotheses:

1/ Most citizens are not as cleanly divided over abortion as he thought. In fact, they draw a line between abortion and infanticide; they are fine with abortion up to a certain stage in pregnancy, but late abortions look like infanticide to them. For some, of course, life begins at conception and a two cell zygote, but for most, they are much more nuanced and the Party has completely missed this with their "women must control their own bodies." For most folks we met, this is an aggravating simplification which neglects the obvious objection that at some point in pregnancy there are now two bodies involved and both may have rights.

2/ Abortion is not a vote determining  concern to voters who are for it; for those opposed it is the only determinant.

3/ Anger over Dobbs flared and then cooled, like the passions of the million woman march. Once the march was over, passions cooled.

4/ Most voters do not have "issues" which drive their votes. When we asked voters what their big issues were we got mostly blank looks. Issues? Can't think of any. When we suggested, well, abortion, democracy, inflation, the war in Ukraine we'd get, "Yeah, well, all of that. I just don't like those MAGAT's!"

So it goes back to the problem of trying to run on a platform of policies against an opposition which is all about charisma and emotion. David Brooks calls this "performative" politics, in which Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Bobert pose with guns, at shooting ranges and rant from the galleries of Congress trying to drown out President Biden at the State of the Union. 

During the last Presidential primaries, we asked Amy Klobuchar how she planned to run against a candidate of charisma (Donald Trump) with a campaign of policies and she was clearly flustered by the question, which at that point in her campaign she had never been asked. She finally said, "Well, I think I have charisma." 

The fact is, the United States of America has changed. 

Lincoln, speaking in 1865, at his magnificent Second Inaugural Address noted, "One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

Apart from the importance of this observation, which answers definitively the canard now promulgated by Southern apologists that the Civil War was not about slavery, the demographic importance Lincoln alluded to is relevant today.

While the former Confederate states are still deeply, although not completely "Red" in the sense of being MAGA Republican, the distribution of white supremacy is not confined to the southern part of the nation. The nation is truly "purple" in the "blue" states. 

So, we do not have the option of simply dividing and going our separate ways.

Blue vs Red Counties in the USA 

We have to live with one another, and, the fact remains, our great strength and our advantage over Europe is that we have remained one country. It is easy to move from Uvalde, Texas to Hampton, New Hampshire.  People live in Maine and winter in Florida. The National Football League and Major League Baseball makes household names out of players who are as well known in California and Green Bay, Wisconsin, as they are in Washington, DC and Boston.

Obama was correct to say there is no Blue America and Red America there is only the United States of America. Or at least there is no way to easily split us up now that the MAGA folks in Pennsylvania cannot be dissected away from the blue cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. 

A Civil War today would be more like the fight between the Reds and the Whites of the Russian Revolution: There is no way to Balkanize the United States of America. 

For better or for worse, we are stuck with each other and there is no avenue for divorce.