Statewide elections promise to shape Virginia in 2021
Intensity of the past year suggest upcoming campaigns should be watched
What will matter to Virginians in 2021?
Or, more to the point, what will shape the state elections this year?
It’s frequently asserted, to cliché, that elections turn on the future. That’s where we’re going to live, the campaign logic explains, so lock onto that.
Even so, there’s long been a tendency in Virginia to keep a grip on the past, always careful not to outrun the electorate in a mad rush to the horizon.
This thought came to mind after an old friend sent me a shopping bag for Christmas. The bag was the gift, understand. Across it, the letters read, “ROBB: A Governor to Build on Virginia’s Best.”
Inside the “O” of “ROBB” was an illustration of the Virginia
State Capitol. A young lieutenant governor was looking for a promotion in 1981.
Now, that was 40 years ago and, depending on where you fall on the great cosmic timeline, that either sounds like ancient history or a not-particularly-distant-memory. Locate me in the second category.
The thing about the Robb slogan was that the candidate (along with his bag makers) assumed that there was a Virginia “best” worthy of building upon.
Robb had made a calculation that political success in Virginia involved some figurative, but positive teether to the past. We had, in other words, done some things right, some things worth preserving. Robb wasn’t cutting yesterday loose.
Who would position themselves so now, I wonder? Who would preserve “legacies?” Who would even acknowledge legacies worth preserving?
Just glancing over the emails from the many (lord knows) Virginia campaigns gearing up, you find booming references to
“racial justice” and “environmental justice,” obviously based on the proposition that Virginia is a tad short on that front.
And that’s just for starters. There’s a lot more rhetorical “do different” than “build upon.” It all constitutes a thoroughly unsubtle indictment, goes off in assorted directions and arrives unaccompanied by cuddly references to Virginia’s storied past.
We’ll see how this campaign positioning plays out in real choices. Details often take grandiose political objectives and render them problematic.
Nevertheless, the intensity of the past year — with the once venerated being reviled, monuments crashing down and reckonings demanded — strongly suggests that the 2021 campaigns may bear close watching.
Because, in some respects, these on-coming campaigns — sure to be about the future in most
respects — may be consumed by Virginia’s past as seldom before.
We may not even be getting away from the past at all, but diving straight into it, sans the romantic blinders so long employed.
It’s not just Virginia. The new issue of “Foreign Affairs” landed in the mailbox this week and there’s Yale historian David W. Blight expounding on Reconstruction. “Justice, Power, and the Civil War’s Unfinished Business” ran the headline.
“Some of the convulsions of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Blight says, “advanced the American experiment, and some set it back.
“It should be clear to all now that history does not end and is not necessarily going to any particular place or bending in an inevitable arc toward justice or anything else,” he says.
Blight, an often thoughtful,
if occasionally overwrought, commentator, concludes his essay with his country in “desperate need of a remaking.”
OK. Remaking.
So what does that look like? What does it take to get there? And will Virginia provide guidance?
If, for instance, America wants to work over Reconstruction, you’ve come to the right place. If there were mistakes to be made, we probably made them all. On this topic, the historic details in Virginia truly do get dreary.
On the other hand, Virginia provides such a handy mixture of all that’s possible: a venue for all seasons, all enthusiasms. Our elections roll right in after the national elections — so, come one, come all, bring the debate here.
We’ve got rural reaches teeming with hand-held artillery and Constitution-clutching sheriffs.
We’ve got suburban expanses
enlivened by progressive aspirants. We even have a jurisdiction that put a socialist in the General Assembly.
We’ve got agriculture, manufacturing and data centers coiling about like kudzu. Coal mines at one end and seaborn wind turbines at one other — that’s Virginia. We’ve got it all.
As for the original thought — what will shape the Virginia 2021 elections — we’ll see, huh?
After writing editorials for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co., the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.