Politics It Was Eighty Years Ago Today: Hillman Taught the Band to Play The Harris VP selection process rhymes with an episode from FDR’s final election. Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock On August 7, Sen. Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, tweeted, “So I hear Kamala had chosen SHAPIRO last week – but the lefty Dems had a meltdown. So she caved and went with Gov. Angry Old Man instead. Great decision making skills there, Kamala.”  Does Hawley know something about the inner workings of the Harris campaign—how the Democratic presidential candidate came to choose Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, and not Governor Josh Shapiro? Or is he just stirring the pot?  Whatever the genesis of the Hawley volley, here’s a prediction: Within a week, the newspapers and magazines (oops, the author is showing his age here, as he is too, with the Sergeant Pepper–inspired title of this piece) will be full of tick-tock accounts (that’s timeline journalism, as opposed to videos in your timeline) of the Harris selection process. So to update and restate the prophecy: Right now, many websites, and even more X accounts, are buzzing with hot takes on the Harris deliberations.  Even by Internet standards, it all happened so fast. It was on July 21 that Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run again, and, as late as August 5, online prediction markets were favoring Shapiro.  Yet then came Walzmentum. On the morning of August 6, just hours before the veep announcement, POLITICO’s “Playbook” reported that 22 of the 24 Democratic insiders it was canvassing were predicting Walz. (Score one for instant conventional wisdom.)  Punchbowl News, an inside-inside the Beltway portal, included this clutch tidbit: “A number of key progressives are pushing for Walz, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Both lawmakers joined a ‘Progressives for Harris’ Zoom call Monday night that attracted more than 100,000 listeners.”  The next day, POLITICO published a behind-the-scenes account of Walz-pushing, giving credit to former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Did Sanders, Jayapal, and Pelosi wield enough power to kibosh Josh? To exalt Walz?  We are in the midst of the first draft of journalism, even as we await the second draft of history. Eventually, all will be revealed.  Yet in the meantime, we can think back to another era, when a left-winger could have changed the course of national politics—and American history. That rhyming moment came almost exactly 80 years ago, in July 1944, when the Democrats were holding their national convention in… Chicago.  The incumbent president that year was the mighty Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was not physically present in the Windy City, and yet his presence was overpowering, as it was in every aspect of American life after 11 eventful years in the White House. Moreover, FDR was gearing up to run for an unprecedented fourth term (his third term, too, had been unprecedented).  Yet with his declining physical health visible to all, the vice presidency became salient. Most Democratic Party bosses believed that the incumbent VP, Henry Wallace, had to go. Wallace was handsome and well-spoken—the First Lady adored him—and had been a New Deal hero as secretary of agriculture in the 30s, and yet as a regular correspondent with an exotic guru, Wallace was, as we say today, weird.  Worse, he was suspected of being a communist, or at least a com-symp—and to many, that made him scary. (In 1948, after leaving the vice presidency, Wallace did, in fact, run for president as the nominee of the pro-Soviet American Labor Party; he received a mere 2.37 percent of the national vote.)  So in 1944, it was ixnay on Wallace. But who instead? Roosevelt was preoccupied with winning the Second World War—and, he hoped, winning the peace with the new United Nations. In fact, even in more placid times, the 32nd president was notoriously hard to pin down; critics called him “a chameleon on plaid.”  According to historian David M. Jordan’s FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944, the president seemed to indicate that his choice for a running mate was James Byrnes, a former senator and Supreme Court justice who held various top posts during the war, such that he was often called “assistant president.” Byrnes believed that FDR had, in fact, offered the post to him. But saying it to Byrnes was not the same as saying it to party chieftains, starting with the Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Hannegan.  For their part, the bosses were leery of Byrnes, a South Carolinian who was seen as hostile to the emerging issue of civil rights. While the Democrats were the favorites in ’44, the contest was not foreseen as a cakewalk; as historian Jordan points out, after the 1943 elections, Republicans held the governorships of 26 of the 48 states, boasting 339 electoral votes.  So if Democrats wanted to hold their presidential victory coalition together, they needed a unifying running mate for their paladin Roosevelt. If Wallace was too left, and Byrnes was too right—who could it be?  The answer: Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, a Democratic middle-of-the roader from Middle America. Truman was acceptable to Roosevelt with one stipulation. As he said to an aide, “Clear it with Sidney.”  That would be Sidney Hillman, president of the quarter-million-strong Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—and a major player in Democratic politics. This at a time when a third of the national workforce was in a labor union.  The implication being that if Hillman had said “no” to the choice of Truman, the Democrats would have had to go back to the drawing board for another pick, perhaps even sticking with the Hillman-friendly Wallace. One way or another, history could have been much different.  Yet Hillman acquiesced; the Truman pick went forward. And it all could have been just another backroom deal, cloaked in hack omertà. Except that four days after the convention ended, on July 25, 1944, New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, then the dean of newspaper pundits, printed those fateful words, “Clear it with Sidney.” It can’t be said for sure that FDR actually said what he was said to have said, and yet, as wiseguy journos are wont to say about something juicy: Too good to check! So the Sidney Story erupted. Were the Democrats now taking orders from a left-wing labor leader, based in New York City? Born in Russia, and long linked to Bolsheviks? Hillman himself was not a communist, and yet some around him were, including Earl Browder, the literal head of the Communist Party USA.  As Hillman biographer Steve Fraser records, Republicans went after FDR’s supposed words “with unalloyed enthusiasm.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee declared, “Hillman and Browder want to rule America and enslave the American people.” The GOP ran billboards blaring, “It’s Your Country—Why Let Sidney Hillman Run It?”  Why, the Hearst newspaper chain even ran a limerick contest. A sample:  Clear everything with Sidney the Czar, Yes, your job, and your family, your car. When he ruins the nation, Frank’ll take a vacation— And Browder will eat caviar. Despite all the ruckus, the Roosevelt-Truman ticket won the ’44 election. It was, after all, the middle of a great war; the Democrats deployed a winning meta-message, Don’t change horses in midstream. Nevertheless, the Hillman incident helped to cinch an oppositional tone for the Loyal Opposition. Republicans would campaign against Big Labor, and, yes, suspected Reds.  In fact, just three years later, in 1947, ascendant Republicans enacted the Taft-Hartley Act, allowing state-by-state decisions on mandatory unionism, so-called “right to work.” That legislation, still in place today, dealt a blow to private-sector unions from which they have never recovered. (So the center of gravity within the labor movement has shifted to the public sector, with vast consequences.)  For now, Hawley and the rest of us can mostly only speculate on the power of the left as it affected Harris’s VP-selection process. But the rhyming of 2024 and 1944 should be audible. Indeed, down the road, we shouldn’t be surprised if someone plucks out a quote such as, “Clear it with Bernie, Pramila, and Nancy.” That’ll sell some extra newspapers. Oops, I mean, get a lotta clicks. The post It Was Eighty Years Ago Today: Hillman Taught the Band to Play appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Here’s to Being Weird “Normality” is not a quality rooted in principle. Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock The selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the running mate to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is alleged to represent a win for the ordinary, the average, the homespun, the modest, the mainstream, and, above all, the normal. This messaging is surely not supported by the radical far-left record accumulated by Walz, which includes his enthusiastic support for near-unrestricted abortion and his endorsement of his state becoming a so-called “trans refuge.” A case for the candidate’s purported ordinariness is also not helped by his legitimately goofy, dorky, hyped-up persona, which manages to suggest both the fire-and-brimstone mania of Howard Dean and the polo shirt-wearing awkwardness of 2000-era Al Gore—neither of whom exactly call to mind Ward Cleaver.  The chasm between Walz’s alleged normalcy and the actual normalcy of his positions and persona will be settled in the fullness of time, but for now, there remains one rather perplexing question: Why do the Democrats feel the need to present the Harris-Walz ticket in terms of normalcy at all? After all, a mere four years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic, Democratic politicians and talking heads were among those most adamant in insisting on the indefinite tabling of nearly every feature of normal life. What could be more abnormal than refusing to exit one’s front door for fear of coming down with a runny nose and sore throat? What could be stranger than wearing masks in nearly every public setting and, among the faithful few, even some private settings, including inside one’s own automobile? Indeed, what could be weirder than being compelled to use a vaccination card used to gain admittance to a concert or show? Yet let us not forget the far left’s success in twisting our sense of who was, and who was not, normal during the worst days of the pandemic. Compliance with these outlandish measures was presented as a kind of test of normalcy: Even though those who refused to wear masks or resisted mandatory vaccination were plainly on the “normal” side of the argument—to the extent that such measures represented a shocking deviation from normal life—because they were not in the majority, and because they had no voice in the mainstream media, they could be characterized as social pariahs.  Emblematic of this thinking was President Joe Biden’s disgraceful address in September 2021 in which he not only announced mandatory vaccination efforts but attempted to portray the group he referred to as “the unvaccinated” as outcasts from polite society. “The unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals, are overrunning the emergency rooms and intensive care units,” the president said, to his everlasting shame.  In the lexicon of the Democrats, yesterday’s “the unvaccinated” is today’s “weird” or “creepy.” Their use of such bullying language is intended to make their political adversaries appear estranged from the mainstream.  Here we come to the heart of the matter: For the far left, “normal” has nothing to do with what’s morally, ethically, or spiritually right, but merely with what’s widely accepted at any given moment. For example, cohabitation—or, as I still prefer to call it, “shacking up”—has become so ubiquitous as to cease to cause a scandal even in upstanding families. Thus, the prevalence of cohabitation works to confer a patina of ho-hum ordinariness on the practice, but such prevalence says nothing about its morality or lack thereof.  Such is the case with countless other social evils: abortion, the involvement of male athletes in women’s sports, the casual use of marijuana entirely independent of the pretense of its supposed medicinal benefits. The omnipresence of these things may have rendered them “normal” among wide swaths of the public, but they remain wicked, pernicious, or otherwise evil all the same. Even so, this sort of “normalization” can have a numbing effect on the morals of a culture:  The Harris-Walz campaign is counting on swing voters and independents exhibiting a glum, tired-out indifference when it comes to their social agenda, or (even worse) simply giving in to that agenda as a consequence of years of subtle peer pressure: If your seemingly respectable next-door neighbor is vaping, can it really be so bad? Or, in a pandemic context, if everybody in the outdoor garden store is wearing a mask, can it really be so weird? Of course, it is—but not in the eyes of our cultural commissars. Ironically, those of us who call out such objectively bizarre behavior may cease to be considered “normal” in the eyes of that purported paragon of regular guy-ness, Tim Walz.  Yet we ought to shrug off Democrats’ branding of us as weird, and simply laugh off their self-branding as models of normalcy, because their categories are silent about actual matters of right or wrong, and speak only to one’s conformity to society’s conventions. This sort of groupthink should be resisted with the same forcefulness with which our mothers once schooled us with that famous maxim: If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you do it too? Or, to put it another way, if being called “normal” means making common cause with the radical policies of Harris-Walz, thanks, but no thanks. The post Here’s to Being Weird appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Has Walz Betrayed the Upper Midwest? The Minnesota governor is no heir of the family-oriented prairie populism of yore. Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock Tim Walz’s selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate is a reminder that many commentators just don’t get rural America—certainly not the heavily German and Scandinavian portions of the upper Midwest that Tim Walz hails from. In the eyes of many opinion writers, rural people are straightforwardly rightwing, favoring abortion bans and libertarian economics with equal fervency. They are said to be motivated by racial resentment, as if the gothic obsessions of the Old South have equal resonance across the interior of the whole country. Look closer at the political history of this region, though, and you’ll see something different. Around the turn of the century, the upper Midwest gave birth to a culture that embraces social and economic progress while insisting on a fundamentally conservative understanding of family and community. This unique mix can be seen in the region’s simultaneous opposition to abortion and love of women’s sports, its history of support for small business and state-owned enterprises Tim Walz comes out of this political culture, but has departed from it. Certain elements of his record—such as creating standards boards for nursing homes and banning non-compete clauses for employees—are in the best tradition of the region’s reforming history. Others—like his indifference to unborn life and support for child-sex change operations—are not. Democrats are hoping that Walz will help with outreach to rural voters, but there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for him in the part of Nebraska where he has his deepest roots. Boyd County, a narrow strip of land near the South Dakota border, is populated by families of German farmers: Vogts, Zeislers, Reimans, Schmitzes (yes), Blums. His mother comes from one of these clans and still resides in the county—not far from my own family’s farm.  This is the place where Walz’s parents were married and where he graduated from high school. But there is little excitement for the local boy made good. “I don’t think many people around here are going to vote for him,” one local said to me. “He’s real liberal. I don’t like him much,” texted another.  The idea that rural voters can be won over by a candidate who simply looks like them is refuted by recent history. Consistent with patterns across the rural Midwest, residents of Boyd County voted for Barack Obama at higher rates than they did for Joe Biden. What mattered wasn’t the candidate’s skin color, but his ability to relate to voters while offering an appealing set of policies.  Walz should be positioned to do this. Even as he moved from Nebraska to Minnesota, he remained in a region marked by important commonalities. Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas are the states with the highest rates of German ancestry. These are also states that became known for “prairie populism” and “sewer socialism,” political traditions that were willing to undertake ambitious public schemes where it seemed to make practical sense.  Often they enjoyed remarkable success. Nebraska is the only state in the union supplied entirely by public power. No one in it has consumed a private kilowatt-hour of electricity since 1949 (as of 2022, Nebraskans enjoyed the fifth-lowest average electricity price in the country). It is the only state to have adopted a unicameral legislature, and the first to hold an all-female gubernatorial contest (between Kay Orr and Helen Boosalis in 1986).  The other states in the region have similar histories. In the first decades of the twentieth century, South Dakota established a system of state hail insurance and farm loans, as well as a state-owned cement plant and coal mine. North Dakota, under the influence of the Nonpartisan League, went even further, setting up a state-owned railroad, bank, and mill. Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party likewise championed small businesses, cooperatives, and public ownership of select industries.  Even as Minnesota has trended to the left of its more rural border states, it has combined its progressivism on economic questions with a relative conservatism on social issues. As the political scientist Michael New has noted, “Historically, Minnesota pro-lifers have done well enacting protective pro-life laws in a liberal political environment.”  Under Tim Walz, all that changed. Even the state’s modest abortion restrictions were repealed, making it possible to refuse treatment to a child born alive during an abortion attempt. Just as Republican legislators in the region’s red states have tried to turn the political culture in a more straightforwardly libertarian direction, Walz has steered Minnesota toward full-spectrum progressive orthodoxy. Neither party seems prepared to take up the mantle of the political tradition that once flourished in the upper Midwest. It holds that government need not be the problem but can be part of the solution—when treated pragmatically. It assumes that it is possible to embrace the advancement of women while insisting on the dignity of unborn life. America could use a candidate who combines a progressive streak with a few conservative instincts. Tim Walz isn’t it. The post Has Walz Betrayed the Upper Midwest? appeared first on The American Conservative.

UTL COMMENT:- Well there you go...!

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