Virginia Is For Others

My home state of Virginia has become something of a Holy Grail for Democrats in the upcoming national election, but I fear they may be a little too sanguine about their prospects in the former Confederate capital. True, the auguries are favorable—Democrats can now claim control of the state legislature, two successive governorships, and almost certainly two seats in the Senate after the retirement of the lapidary John Warner this fall.

But recent success on the state level can mostly be attributed to the colossal incompetence of Virginia’s Republican Party, which bungled its way into grotesque budget deficits and finally turned all sensible people off with its theological crusade against the very existence of government—except, of course, for the biennial gesture of a gay-marriage referendum and legislation that would force black hooligans to pull up their pants (I’m not kidding). Even Bible-thumping racists realized that the need for roads and schools superseded these otherwise noble causes.

Senator Jim Webb—the swaggering, foul-mouthed, warrior-author and recent convert from Reaganite to renegade Democrat—is widely popular among the heavy-drinking, heavy-praying Scots-Irish who populate the southwestern hill country. But even he barely defeated the disgustingly stupid, backyard-barbeque bigot George “Macaca” Allen in 2006, amid widespread discontent with the Bush Administration’s handling of the economy and Iraq. And a Harvard-educated, cerebral crypto-Muslim is a much harder sell, especially one with an ethnically dubious name.

I admit that I’m trading in stereotypes here, and almost certainly oversimplifying the matter. Virginia is, in a sense, a microcosmic battleground for the dreaded and dreary culture wars. I hail from the prosperous, expanding, and relatively liberal northern Virginia suburbs, which have been a huge factor in the Democrats’ optimistic forecasts. In the same way Americans abroad, out of a sense of propriety, claim to be Canadians, I usually tell Cantabridgians that I’m from Washington D.C. I’ve never actually met any Appalachian Virginians, but I’ve always assumed they were kind of inbred yokels, bitter people clinging to their guns and religion. I know they probably consider me a left-wing Jewish homosexual pornographer. (Both caricatures probably have a degree of truthiness to them.)

These days an elitist cabal of Democratic strategists advocates abandoning the hopelessly benighted South and other states—like Ohio and Pennsylvania—that are falling behind in the new economy. But any victory they might win in this way is really quite Pyrrhic from an ideological standpoint: The yuppified Democrats would abandon labor unions and economic populism altogether, marginalize civil rights, and attract middle-to-upper class whites with a boring but effective message of competent governance. This strategic shift would only ignite another culture war, one perhaps just as divisive, fueled by the Oedipal resentment of pseudo-bohemian youth against their suburbanite parents. Given the choice, I’d choose the Confederate flag and NASCAR over Starbucks and league soccer.

Instead, I’m proposing a truce in the culture war, one that may very well help Obama in his quixotic quest for Virginia’s 13 electoral votes. Radically reduced federalism is the solution. If it makes me a liberal apostate, so be it, but here’s my proposal: Gay marriage, guns, abortion, the death penalty, drug laws, and a host of other issues should be deferred to state governments. Many federal taxes should be contingent upon a state’s desire for access to federal programs.

Surely, this could be called a reactionary’s utopian fantasy (I prefer to think of it as an anarchist’s utopian fantasy). It may also be objected that what I am actually recommending is the country’s dissolution. I recall Einstein’s story of a colleague who, in response to the sage scientist’s fervent pleas for nuclear disarmament, quipped: “Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?” I’ll never plunge into such depths of misanthropic despair, but I could with some degree of sincerity ask the same question about the disappearance of the United States.

Besides, I don’t have to worry about the future of my home state, since I don’t plan on living there ever again. Virginia sucks, blue or red. I think I’ll raise the white flag in this ridiculous Culture War and move to California.


David L. Golding ’08-’09, a Crimson editorial writer, is an English concentrator in Dunster House.