Honesty and suffering Wyoming.

I should note here that I'm cynical about politicians and politics once a person leaves the local realm.

Now, I don't feel that way about politicians at the local level.  The ones I've known personally were genuinely engaged and had entered into politics as they had real concerns about their communities, or schools, etc.

And, of the few state legislators I've known, most fit that same description.

Theodore Roosevelt, long before he ever ran for the Oval Office, once rebuked a reporter for suggesting that he might some day occupy it.  In doing so, he stated that a person must never tell a politician, which he already was, being in the New York Assembly, that he might some day be President as he'd quit being his natural self and alter positions so that he could obtain that goal.  

There's really something to that.

Harriet Hageman is in the category of politicians I've met and sort of once somewhat knew.  

During the recent race, I was frankly shocked by a lot of her conduct, which I at first attributed to her simply wanting to be in Congress. Since that time, I've come to wonder if in fact she may believe the positions she's taking, in which case that's scarier yet.  That would likely mean that of our three person Congressional delegation, she's the only true ideologue, and not in a good way.

Back in April, Harriet Hageman spoke in Powell and made this statement:

I’ve really got a dog in this hunt, I’m from Wyoming. My family’s from Wyoming … Wyoming is my passion. The way that I put it is that when Wyoming prospers, my family prospers. But when Wyoming suffers, my family suffers.¹

That's the very first thing I've seen attributed to Hageman which would give a person a reason to vote for her.  That same reasoning applied to the primary candidates who ran against Cheney when she first ran, and won, which of course means that a lot of the people who might find this view appealing now, apparently weren't all that worked up about it back when, including Hageman who at one time supported Cheney.  None of which means that it isn't a good point.

Mind you, there are a lot of reasons not to have voted for Hageman, although most Wyoming voters who participated in the off year election did. The big reason for that is that most Wyoming voters bought the Trump lie that didn't sell nationwide this election, that the election was stolen.  

Wyoming's voters, frankly, have been buying a lot of cheap fibs and obfuscations in recent years, so perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.

So we should hope that Hageman really means what she says, and that she remains capable, as an attorney should be, of analyzing the facts.  Given her age and status, she won't be personally culpable for failing to do so.  I.e, if what she has been selling turns out to be a bill of goods, well she'll go on to retire and not bear the brunt of it.

Hageman says she has a dog in the "hunt" as she's from here and her family is too.  And she is from the Ft. Laramie region and her family is here, in agriculture, although unlike those of us who have kids who to worry about for the future decades hence, she has no children, so that's really worrying about her extended family.  I have no reason to believe that she doesn't genually bear them in her heart.

In any event, however, worrying about what happens when Wyoming suffers means, more than anything else, looking at the world honestly, and not at some romanticized past that never existed and which, to the extent it did, is evolving.

In 1960 Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, addressed the reality of the state of British colonialism to the South African parliament, stating:

The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it. 

Macmillan was right, and there was no holding back the change those winds brought.  But he had a concern beyond that, and stated:

As I see it, the great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West. Will they be drawn into the Communist camp? Or will the great experiments of self-government that are now being made in Asia and Africa, especially within the Commonwealth, prove so successful, and by their example so compelling, that the balance will come down in favour of freedom and order and justice?

Not everyone was willing to accept the storm that had arrived.  Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, did not, and took his country out of the British Empire.

Rhodesia no longer exists. Zimbabwe, a wreck of a country, exists in its place.  Many of the departing African colonies have had terrible post-colonial histories, but Zimbabwe has one of the worst.  It's story is complicated, but in part that disaster can be put at Smith's feet.  MacMillan proved correct, Smith's actions gave strength to Marxist revolutionaries, who won, and who effectively destroyed the country's economy.

Elections have consequences, as they say, and so does ignoring reality.  Wyoming has a lot of going for it, but it doesn't control every trend in the United States or globe.  Every time somebody says "electric cars will never work here", they cast a vote for fantasy.  That's a minor example, but it's a relevant one.  Harriet Hageman claimed, back in April when she gave her speech in Powell, that her first act in Congress would be to introduce a bill requiring the United States to use American energy.

Well fine, pass that bill (it won't pass), but what she means is almost certainly petroleum oil and coal.  California, with a population dwarfing ours, is already legislatively phasing out the use of petroleum.  Congress isn't going to be able to mandate a change in course that's already been taken, and not just here, but all over the globe and in the hearts of minds of consumers.

Wyoming has a lot going for it economically, and a lot of that predates its oil and coal history.  But will it value it, or will it insist that we return to the 1980s and expect others to go along?  I fear the latter is almost certain.

In addition to that, when Hageman claimed nativist grounds for people to vote for her, she ironically pointed out something that's very much impacted our recent political history.  Yes, Cheney was not from Wyoming but John Barrasso isn't either.  Foster Freiss, whom the far right here adored, very much was not.

Nor are a host of Wyoming political figures, some of whom are angry relocates from points further east.

The point isn't that you have to be born here to win elections or to run, but rather this. We should be very careful about taking our political views from out of state imports, whose presence is usually temporary.  In recent years, particularly in the COVID era, we've received a lot of new people, but the backstory is a lot of them leave pretty quickly.  The myth of Wyoming is that "everyone is so friendly", which isn't really true.  It's easy to mistake politeness and curiosity for friendly.

Wyoming is a hard place to live and work.  A lot of people flood in when the price of oil is high, and then hang for a while when it drops until they chase the dollar somewhere else. A lot of those people bring their views, often from the west of the Missippii, south of the Picket Wire region, and that temporarily impacts views here. Freiss, when he ran for office, had a campaign style that somewhat resembled something out of 1970s Alabama, for example.  When they leave, that view usually goes with them.

Likewise, Wyoming throughout its history has had influxes of outsiders, people born well outside the region, who prove to be temporary.  Nice summers are attractive at first, but long winters, no services, and the howling wind take their toll after a few years, and they move on. Something like 50% of people who move here just to move here move on in less than a year.

At the end of the day, Wyomingites, those born here who stayed, and those who moved here, mostly from neighboring states that have a lot of the same character, are invested in the state in ways that others aren't and want its character preserved. That means its entire character.  You can't be the Congressman from the Oil Industry, or the House member from Coal, or the Representative from farmers in Ft. Laramie.  It's the whole smash, and those who have lived and endured here, rather than those taking up temporary residence of a fictional Wyoming that exists only on Yellowstone or Longmire, do have opinions that matter more than those moving through.

That means being honest.  Honesty starts with being honest to yourself first, and then to everyone else.  It's a character trait that's really departed from national politics to a massive degree in recent years.

So, don't make Wyoming suffer, starts with being honest.

Footnotes

1. There's's a mixed metaphor at work here.  The dog/hunt line is usually "that dog doesn't hunt", which is a phrase given to dismiss an argument that doesn't work.  The other line, which Hageman must have been recalling, is "I don't have a dog in that fight", which means that you aren't betting on a dog in a dog fight.  I.e., you have no personal interest in the outcome.

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Getting the wrong message. Abortion and the 2022 Election.

Since the election ended, I've seen a lot of hand wringing from some, and rejoicing from others, that the abortion issue supposedly motivated people at the polls to vote against Republican candidates.

Baloney.

First of all, in most locations, abortion wasn't on the ballot.  It was in some places, namely Montana, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont and California.

Montana's was shocking in that Montana does not allow for abortions pass the point of viability, and the proposed law would have required physicians to assist any such aborted baby born alive.  The ballot measure failed.

Kentucky has a trigger law that's now being litigated, but its ballot measure stated:

Are you in favor of amending the Constitution of Kentucky by creating a new Section of the Constitution to be numbered Section 26A to state as follows: To protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion?”

Voters rejected the amendment.

Michigan put a right to an abortion, of some sort, in its state constitution.

Vermont did as well, passing an initiative that stated:

That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.

And California also put a right to an abortion into its state constitution.

So, in terms of the 2022 midterm election, what does this really tell us?

Well, this issue wasn't on the ballot in most places.  Indeed, it brings up a real irony in regard to Wyoming, which enacted an anti Obama Care amendment out of the nonsensical fear of "death panels" securing individuals right to make their own health care decisions that risks being interpreted the way that these new constitutional provisions in various states do.  It'll be interesting to see if the new legislature attempts to amend the bad amendment.  Having adopted the thesis that everything associated with Obama Care must be bad, they can't really simply repeal the amendment, which would make a lot more sense.

Anyhow, as this issues was only on the ballot in these states, it probably says more about these states.  All of them have a strong liberal streak in them, even Montana, so if it brought people out to the polls, those states weren't going full MAGA hog wild anyhow.

Indeed, only really Wyoming went full MAGA, with the state really diving into the shallow end of the pool head first, for which we'll pay in the next couple of years, but that's another topic.

Nationwide, what this really probably tells us is this.

Yes, abortion matters to a lot of voters, but it isn't the only thing that matters to a lot of those voters.  Democracy as on the ballot over the entire country, and for a lot of people that outweighed abortion as they feared that a vote for the GOP was a vote, well, for something that looked disturbingly a bit like this:

That doesn't make those people, however, liberal progressives.

Rather, its a lesson to the GOP about it looking like, well, something like this:

It's also a lesson on something else, which I've long noted.

The "two party system" is stupid.

And its beginning, finally, to erode.

In Alaska its basically been abandoned, which has led to the rise of a Native American Democratic to Congress from Alaska, and which will be the source of a runoff between two Republican contenders for the Senate, one incumbent moderate and another a MAGA Republican.

If we had that system in Wyoming, I"m not sure that the results would have been a lot different, but what you would have had is two Republicans contending for Secretary of State. The Bonapartist one that won, and a moderate that lost to him in the primary.  And the Governor's race would have been between Gordon and Bien, for what that's worth.  I think Gordon would still have won that, but there's no denying that race made more sense than the one against a Democratic whose name we've already forgotten.

And more than that, there's utterly no reason that all of the issues conceived as "conservative" or "right wing" or progressive or "left wing" should be linked.  And I think in this race, the voters started to decouple them to the disadvantage of the Republicans who have really linked them in a hardcore fashion.

If you listen to the GOP, if you oppose abortion you also have to support the death penalty, be a climate change denier, and believe that Donald Trump took every single vote cast in 2019.

That's absurd.

Indeed, I'll be there were a lot of conservative, Catholic, women who went to the polls and voted for the Democrats even if they were registered Republicans as they were worried about democracy, the environmental health of the country their children will live in, and want something done about firearms. They probably also opposed abortion, but weighting it all out, they thought the Democrats a better bet.

The messages, and there are two, are pretty clear.

The big message is that the two party system needs to be deinstitutionalized.  That would be the end of "voting the straight ticket" as there'd be no straight ticket.  People would have to run on their own merits and the ability of the parties to shovel out, well this;

would be greatly reduced.

Indeed, it might mean that candidates actually had to engage their brains a bit when they endorsed platitudes and explain them, and that voters might actually have to pay attention to what was actually proposed.

Indeed, on that score, there are probably quite a few Wyomingites that will be surprised to learn what they voted for, when they perfunctorily voted for Republican legislators, this upcoming winter.

As doing that, although it seems to be slowly taking hold, will take some time, the next best thing would be for people to reassess their loyalties to either of the two primary parties.  Probably a lot of Republicans in the middle, and the two or three Democrats left in the middle, and lots of independents, really belong in the American Solidarity Party.  Should the GOP not sink under the waves with Donald Trump, as it increasingly looks likely to do, the MAGA folks would really be better off in something like the Constitution Party, rather than the Grand Old Party, and so on.

In the near term, however, the Republicans need to wrest the ship's wheel away from Captain Donald "iceberg?  I'm not hitting any iceberg" Trump.

In doing that, the GOP is going to have to come to the realization that embracing a big lie is killing it, and that embracing some of the extreme positions those who embrace the big lie do is driving people away.

Finally, while I've seen some real anger in some quarters on how voters didn't turn out, in some places, to vote  Republican and therefore pro abortion issues advanced, consider this.

The entire legal position in opposition to abortion has been limited to Roe v. Wade since 1973.  I.e., that it was wrongly decided.  Society wide, the anti-abortion forces have done a terrific job of attacking abortion, and it has declined in the US from post Roe highs.  But that doesn't equate with a complete ending of support for it entirely, and the fact that the basic legal point was, and always has been, that voters in the states should decide ironically somewhat weakens the argument on a state level.  I.e., having said for 40 years that they should decide, they're getting to decide.

There was always another position, which was that a right to life existed on an existential and natural law level.  But that argument was never made as a legal one, as the fear was that it was too scary of a proposition for many jurists.  So now the second part of this work begins, that being that anti-abortion forces, who have been hugely successful in changing minds, need to keep at it.

But the efforts of the hard right in the GOP, which would link every hard right program with abortion, don't help that.

So, there's no cause for despair.  The failure of the anti-abortion forces, in the few places they failed, doesn't mean a society wide rejection of their views.  It means that for a lot of voters, when they go to the polls, they are thinking of a lot of other things, and on this issue, they may not even have thought that much.  If the last person they heard talk about it was also talking about how Donald Trump should be President for Life and the danger of Jewish Space Lasers, and just viewed it as one of the list of items on some sort of political grocery list, well. . . . 

Blog Mirror: Did the Pittsburgh Steelers Save the U.S. Senate?

Uncle Mike takes a look at the recent election:

Did the Pittsburgh Steelers Save the U.S. Senate?

Takeaways, so far, from the 2022 General Election.

Early takeaways.

1.  Poll models are existentially wrong.

There is no longer any reason to pretend otherwise.

For weeks prior to elections, we read of poll results. They were wrong in 2022, wrong in 2020, and wrong in 2016.

They're wrong.

Something is amiss in them, one thing simply being that younger generations don't really care to talk to pollsters.

This might be, overall, a good thing.

2.  Conservatism retains a strong appeal, but Trump doesn't.

Edmund Burke.

Trump caused the Republicans to lose the House and Senate in 2018.  He lost the Presidency in 2020, and never secured the popular vote in the first place ever.

The midterm election always sees a return of the party of power, something that may be a good thing, democratically, or not, but it's a fact.  This year there's real doubt that will happen, and Trump is the number one reason why.

Trump, whose appeal to anyone completely escapes me, loves Trump only the way that Trump and his acolytes can, and he's going to announce next week that he's running for the Oval Office.  In normal times, the GOP would send a delegation to Mar-a-Lago, invite Trump to go fishing and require Lindsey Graham to go along to listen to Trump's weird, weird diction in the same way that Uncle Colm is used by the girls to talk to the police in Derry Girls.  But these aren't normal times, so he's going to go ahead and run and the Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, will fall right in line.

An opportunity exists here for other Republicans to take advantage of this and push for the Presidency.  The problem with that, however, is Trump.

The ultimate irony here is that the elections from 2016 forward have demonstrated that there is a strong base for a conservative political party, including a conservative political party that includes populism.  People are, in many areas, voting culturally, and voting culturally for a return to Western values. There's nothing wrong with that, and the concept that these have been under attack by the left is correct.

But linking that movement, to Trump, will kill it.

3.  Wyoming has become the Post Reconstruction South.

Eh?

Bear with me.

In 1860, as we all know, the Southern states attempted to leave the United States and form their own country over the issue of slavery.

Most Southern whites, throughout the South, were yeomen.  Small independent farmers.  

The Civil War was about one issue and one issue only, race based slavery.  But slavery impacted everything in the South, most particularly its economy.

It's sometimes claimed, and indeed has been recently, that only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves prior to the Civil War.  I recall hearing that myself when in school, and even recently apparently somebody in the Internet claimed that only 1% of Southerners owned slaves in 1860.  A pretty detailed analysis of that shows that's actually incorrect, and a whopping 30.8% of free Southern families did, a pretty high number.  You can knock the percentage down by addressing only individuals, rather than families, but frankly that's unfair and inaccurate in an era prior to female suffrage.  And it's also been knocked down by including the entire Southern population, but you can't really count the enslaved in this analysis and have it make any sense.

At any rate, the reason that we note this is that about 69% of Southern families didn't own slaves, but that 30.8% that did dominated the culture and the region's economics.  Owning slaves was thought to be a necessity by planters, the large industrial farming class, just as serfs were in fact necessary to the feudal system.  The planter class absolutely dominated the economics and the politics of the South, even though the majority of Southerners were not in the class and in fact, as noted, were yeoman.

Not all yeoman were poor, as is sometimes claimed, and some of them owned slaves as well.  But the planters, who were the wealthy class in the South, completely dominated its economy and politics.  It would not be proper to take a Marxist view of this and assume that they dominated it simply because they were wealthy, but their wealth had the practical impact of making them the only really educated class and the only class that had time for leisure in the sense that Josef Pieper has written about.  This meant that their own self-interest became the interest of the entire region and were regarded as such.  When barefoot Southern farmers hit the road to fight against the North in the Civil War, they were pretty convinced that their interest and the planters were the same.

They were not.

That became pretty evident during Reconstruction, but the domination of the planter class actually never waned.  White Southern yeomanry had more in common, economically, with the recently freed slaves than they did with white planters. For a time it briefly looked like they'd act accordingly.  And during Reconstruction, they found themselves nearly violently at odds with the planter class.  Yeoman who had always made use, for example, of the woods as commons for the grazing of cattle and for hunting found themselves suddenly fenced and locked out, and nearly resorted to arms over it.

To a degree, what prevented that from really developing is that while the yeomanry did not feel itself aligned with the planters at first, planter propaganda, the nature of being occupied by the North, and the shared experience of the Civil War won them over against their own interests.  The monied and powerful classes of the South backed the concept of "The Lost Cause", a noble struggle for "Southern Rights", which wasn't about slavery at all, but about something else, never mind that it couldn't be rationally defined as it didn't exist.  All Southern officers were noble, all the enlisted men stalwart loyalists, sacrificing themselves to the cause.  The myth lasted so long that the dedication of Stone Mountain in the 1970s could still be regarded in the Oval Office as a noble thing, and not a monument to treason.  Southern yeoman remained in second class status and following Reconstruction were basically heavily marginalized along with Southern blacks.  The entire region declined into second class economic status as it clung to an old economy benefiting mostly the already wealthy.  Education became second rate. 

That all started to change during the Great Depression, but it really took into the 1970s for it to break.  We'll omit that part of the story, as that would be secondary to what we're looking at now.

Wyoming is now the New Post Reconstruction South.

How so?

Consider this.  Plantation economics had originally made the South one of the wealthiest parts of the United States.  Cotton actually was the second crop subject to the plantation system.  Tobacco was first, and tobacco made the south wealthy.  Cotton followed and added to that.  The North wasn't poor, but in the pre industrialized country, agriculture was king and the South had market agriculture, producing tobacco, cotton, and corn based alcohol, all for sale.  Nothing like it existed in the North.  Going into the Civil War, they still believed that this was the case.

It wasn't.

Wealth had moved to industry by 1860 and the North had taken advantage of it.  It was much more economically developed, and as a result, much more of the wealth had gone down hill to its population.  It also had an economy which acknowledged and accepted government assistance, which made for good roads and canals.  It was more affluent, better educated, and much better informed.  The South fooled itself into believing the opposite and entered into a war it couldn't win as a result.  After the wear, the class that had controlled that wealth maneuvered to keep it, and did so successfully, keeping the South in a state of existence that, but for slavery, closely mirrored that which had existed before the war.

So what does this have to do with Wyoming?

Quite a lot.

The original wealth of the South came from simple farmers, true yeoman, the class that Thomas Jefferson hoped thought necessary to democracy and hoped to see flourish in the country even though he was a planter. The conversion to a planter based economy took some time.

That's true of Wyoming, to a degree, as well.

The first European cultured people to enter Wyoming weren't Americans at all, but rather Quebecois.  French culture people were pretty prominent in the state early on, and it was really the fur industry they built that caused the early private fort system to come about.  The government followed in the 1840s following the Mexican War, when the Army first marched into the purchased Ft. Laramie in order to guard the trails to the Pacific Coast that were developing.  The first really Wyoming based economic endeavor to some about after trapping was the livestock industry, which didn't enter the state until the 1870s, for the most part.

But even as early as the 1880s petroleum was seen as the state's future.  By the 1890s, it was common for newspapers to put remote oil prospects on the front page, even as the livestock industry was dominating the actual economy and providing for most of the state's employment.  Coal had an even earlier appearance, being first mined by the Union Pacific railroad to fuel its trains.

It was really World War One, however, that gave Wyoming an oil extraction, and at that time refining, economy.  And much of that was locally centered.  Refineries sprung up all over the state in this time period.  Casper saw not only three refineries develop, but major structures as well. The Oil Exchange Building was completed in 1917.  The Pan American Building sometime after that.   The Ohio Building in the 1940s.  The Sinclair Building, now only a memory, was built during this time period as well. The big club, where all sorts of business deals were made, was The Petroleum Club.

So we based our wealth, after 1917, on the extractive industries.

We did nothing wrong whatsoever by doing that.

But times have really changed, and they're in trouble.  

We can't and won't accept that.

The US of 2022 isn't the US of 1917, or 1922, or even 1962, or 1982.  But we basically are looking back to 1982, or so, economically, culturally and politically to an era when things were better for us.  

And this requires us, apparently, to now believe in The Lost Cause.

At one time if you talked to Southerners, everybody's Civil War ancestor was a colonel of epic heroism, not a deserter from the Confederate armies, even though a huge number of Southern soldiers became just that.  And they didn't fight for slavery, but for their culture.

We haven't been able to adjust to the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, twice, so we now have that as our Lost Cause Myth.  The brilliant super genius "very good genes", as Trump would have it, didn't lose, the election was stolen.

Never mind the clear evidence that Trump was planning to steal the election prior to the election occurring.  Never mind the destruction of the U.S. Post Office as part of that.  Never mind the effort to undermine COVID voting protocols.  Now, listen to people like Chuck Gray and you'll learn that 10,000 mules were employed in a nefarious plot.

I don't know how many Wyomingites really believe that, but probably about the same number, percentage wise, of Southerners at one time that believed that Uncle Euclid was a Colonel in the Confederate Cavalry, and not a barefoot infantryman in who deserted.  There were likely always doubts.  But like Homer Stokes in Oh Brother! Where Art Thou, there are underlying issues that people really have in mind.  "That ain't my culture and heritage".

The ultimate problem is that this is going to, long term, marginalize us economically and politically.  Just like it did the Post Reconstruction South.

4.  Democracy can work for the left.

As we've noted elsewhere, the real starting point in the attack on American democracy was by the left going towards a Court oriented aristocracy.  If Americans wouldn't reform and usher in the new liberal era on their own, the Courts could rule and force them.

The left was pretty comfortable with that.

Now the Courts have stripped that role away from themselves and returned issues that never should have been determined solely by nine ancient people with Ivy League law degrees to the people, effectively telling them they'll just have to figure these things out for themselves.

And low and behold, they actually can.