The Evolutionary Political Tree

 

With all the money and people the Democrats can tap for professional wordsmithing, why is it that their top candidates, and now President, can’t stop pissing off the very people they need to vote for them? Between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (who have a combined cumulative public speaking experience you could measure not in years but geologic eras), these leaders of their party have given Republicans verbal fodder to last a generation or, in more familiar terms, as long as the Neanderthals were our ancestors.

Just yesterday President Joe accused the governors of Texas and Mississippi of “Neanderthal thinking” when they announced lifting almost all Covid restrictions in their states. Not since Hillary’s line about Trump supporters being a “basket of deplorables” have the Democrats given the opposition the gift that keeps on giving. To this day conservative media uses “deplorables” as shorthand for elites who look down on working class masses with only high school educations. The very people who used to vote for Democrats. The same people Hillary mocked were all too happy to put that deplorable name on t-shirts and parade around in their own form of mockery all the way to the 2016 voting booths. Even in 2020 it was a cry at the Trump rallies, and short of 50,000 votes (legal and otherwise) across three states it would have propelled the Donald to another four years in the White House.

More importantly, Joe’s words reinforce, at many levels, the difference between elites and deplorables/Neanderthals. Not two weeks ago Texas went very Middle Ages electric, which is to say the power grid went off for a variety of reasons. After the lights went back on, Texas Governor Abbott could have pulled an Andrew Cuomo—that is deny, call it politics, and then go back to business as usual. But Abbott was front and center: the system failed and the legislature will come up with a remedy. There was no blaming green energy, shared power grids, or other DC salon discussion points—just plain talk that here is what happened and here is how we are going to fix it.

A bigger question for Joe is, do you really want to give Texas Republicans more ammunition? The state is poised to gain several congressional seats, all of which are redistricted by the Republican-controlled state legislature. I’m sure somebody in an Austin conference room already has a map out with labels “Neanderthal District-1, Neanderthal District-2, Neanderthal District-3…” And let’s not forget Florida, who I guess would be merely prehistoric on Joe’s Covid fighting scale. They will gain congressional seats from failed states such as New York, and I’m guessing they aren’t inclined to hand out goodies to the Democrats either. But in Texas, where Democrats have made significant inroads during recent statewide elections, do you really need to start off every campaign stop by distancing yourself from the leader of your party? When you are measuring victory by thin slices of the electoral college, I wouldn’t start by insulting the very places where you are trying to flip votes. Even Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday said he disagreed with opening up states, but didn’t go down the route of evolutionary name calling.

There are no perfect, or even very good, answers about what restrictions have worked, especially in light of destroying “non-essential” livelihoods, wiping out a year and a half of schooling, and, as the courts keep ruling, breaking the limits of governmental authority. It’s been a fairly poor experiment, and now some states are taking bold action, especially in light of the vaccine rollout. It’s the philosophy, right down party lines, as Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves put it, “’It was never to prevent all possible spread of Covid-19, it was always about protecting the integrity of our healthcare system.’” That question will not get answered here.

Say what you will about Neanderthals, but they weren’t too shabby making and using tools and their cave drawings could hang in any modern gallery wall, especially compared to some of today’s art. And maybe Joe was just having a grumpy old man day that people weren’t staying off his mask wearing front lawn. But what distinguishes our species from others is our large brain compared to our body size, a brain that remembers things on election day. And a brain that can create some great t-shirts, t-shirts I can’t wait to see on the campaign trail.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.