The History Of Tennessee And Democratic Politics
And A Prime Lesson Why Progressives Don’t Really Care About Certain States
It has not escaped my knowledge over the last decade of reading so many articles from Progressive sites that when it comes to elected offices, progressives would prefer losing horribly in a glorious cause than winning marginally in a compromise. That is why so many of their articles about the true ‘horrors’ of America are set in states that are so deep red that they don’t even bother to campaign there. A red-state Democrat, in their minds, is just as bad a Republican, so why bother even trying? A recent article about Harlan Crow spent a fair amount of energy criticizing him for his political contributions to joe Manchin, Krysten Sinema and nine Representatives who they blame for ‘killing’ Biden’s infrastructure plan.
By kill, of course, they mean compromise. Many of these Democrats are in districts that are still swing districts where Progressive ideals will just not sell the way they will the way they are thought everywhere else. But this is not the point. In a progressive’s mind, it is always better to lose an election in a futile cause rather than elect someone who can possibly do a better job governing. It is why they spent so much time arguing and campaigning for Stacey Abrams to run against Brian Kemp in 2022. She lost to a bigger margin then she did in 2018, while Raphael Warnock won reelection. But I have little doubt that will do anything to diminish many in the minds of progressives who will no doubt have her running against MTG next year.
I bring up Georgia because if it were almost any other state in the South, progressives would be using her to fund-raise but not to campaign. As much as progressives claim that that Republicans do not believe in democracy, neither do many of them in the traditional sense. Why do I say that? Because they don’t believe in bothering to campaign in states that they consider wastes of time. They will rail against the fates of minorities throughout the South; they will argue about the horrid LGBTQ laws in the West and the Bible Belt, but that’s all for fundraising. They will not try to raise money for races in state legislatures in places like Wyoming or Utah, much less try to run a campaign for Congress. They will use a state like Idaho or Mississippi as a condition for everything wrong with America, but God forbid that they even try to build a grass roots there. In their minds, that state is a lost cause, should probably have never been admitted to the union, should go in the national divorce.
We’ve been hearing a lot about Tennessee in the several months based on the expulsion of two African-American legislators from the Tennessee State House for protesting for gun control. These legislators have become the flashpoint for so much national interest since then for very good reason and I have no doubt they will be the highlight of fundraising for months, if not years to come. But I have a word of caution for those two young men: don’t expect much more the progressive websites going forward if you have ambitions for a national career.
Oh I don’t deny that what happened to you was by far the worse example in a very long time of institutional racism writ large, that it was a violation of everything we consider Americans, and that you were treated abominably. But let’s be clear. The reason that you have been selected as this current subject of outrage is because you did so in a state that the Progressive consider ‘deplorable’. That they do so is a clear demonstration of how little regard they have for history of Tennessee.
I realize that trying to tell a version of history that is not ‘the People’s version’ or sanctioned by the 1619 Project is anathema to the Left who want to believe their version of history more than the one they were taught in textbooks. So I intend to focus on the political parts of it.
After Tennessee was admitted to the union in 1796. Several Presidents have come from Tennessee: Andrew Jackson represented in Congress, James K. Polk was Speaker of the House and then President. Tennessee was always divided between the western part that was mainly slavery based and the eastern part, which had a strong abolitionist movement. This division persisted throughout the antebellum era and lasted right up until the Civil War.
Of all the states that joined the confederacy, Tennessee had the lowest percentage of slaves as part of the union. When the war began, the state government was divided. Most of the Southern Democrats in the Senate left when their states joined the Confederacy. The sole exception was the junior senator from Tennessee, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was a believer in slavery but was loyal to the Union.
Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy in June of 1861 and it took two separate votes for it to happen. As a result, the Eastern part of the state considered seceding themselves to join the Union. The state provided more Union troops than any other state in the Confederacy and was at the center of some of the bloodiest battles in the entire Civil War including Shiloh and Campaign in Chattanooga.
Johnson had perhaps the safest seat in the Senate going into his reelection campaign, but when Lincoln appointed him military governor of the state, he took the job. I honestly believe if his government career had ended there, history would view him more kindly. He was loyal to the union and followed Lincoln’s policies, despite his not believing them. As a result, his life was threatened multiple times and he had to carry a gun with him. Johnson agreed to become Lincoln’s Vice President when he chose to run on what was known as the Union Ticket, the only bipartisan ticket in history. Two weeks before the election, Johnson declared all slaves in Tennessee free.
I will not try to paint Andrew Johnson as some kind of President who history has treated unfairly. On the contrary, I believe he was an unrepentant racist whose sympathies towards the Confederacy may have done more to ensure that Lincoln’s visions for unity were never realized. But he never gets credit for what he did right. And that is that after Lincoln’s assassination, when the voices in the North were crying out for vengeance and making sure that every member of the Confederacy was hung, he urged patience and peace and made sure the bloodshed — and the Civil War — ended. There were so many factors that could have led to the war going on far longer and perhaps ending in the Union fundamentally broken. Johnson’s decision to not act for vengeance was one of the key ones that led to it not happening. And it’s worth noting that Tennessee, for all the problems it would have immediately after the war, was the only Southern state to approve an amendment prohibiting slavery, a full month before it ratified the 13th Amendment.
It is also true that Tennessee was one of the first states to fully embrace Jim Crow and not long after that become a member of what would become known as ‘The Solid South’, the bloc from after Reconstruction and for the next century. But Tennessee’s electoral history is more complicated and not all of its Democratic elected officials were as horribly racist as so many of their counterparts in the Deep South.
It’s worth noting that, perhaps because it was fundamentally a border state, Tennessee never showed quite the allegiance to white supremacy at its counterparts. In Warren Harding’s electoral landslide in 1920 and in Herbert Hoover’s in 1928, Tennessee went Republican. Indeed, in the 20th century the Democrats — and even a few of the Republicans — have been among the most distinguished to sit in the Senate.
Kenneth McKellar, who was in the Senate from 1917 to 1953 had one of the most impressive liberal records during six terms in the senate. Estes Kefauver headed committees on organized crime and anti-trust laws, ran two campaigns for the Democratic nomination for President, and ran as Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1956. Al Gore, Sr. who took over for McKellar, was one of the most consistent liberal when it came to Civil Rights. I discussed the Southern Manifesto in an article on Hubert Humphrey and mentioned that of all the major Southern Senators, the three most prominent ones not to sign where Lyndon Johnson — and Gore and Kefauver. Tennessee was Democratic even until the mid-1990s; in 1994, it still had two Democratic Senators Harlan Matthews and Jim Sasser.
Even the Republicans who have served in the Senate have been fairly distinguished. Howard Baker served as minority leader and was one of the most prominent Republican investigators into Watergate. (He famously uttered the phrase: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”) Fred Thompson served as lead council during Watergate; in 1994, he left acting to run for Senate in Tennessee and defeated Matthews. Lamar Alexander, who took over for him was a distinguished Senator famed for being bipartisan.,
I guarantee you not a single progressive knows who any of these distinguished men are. (Well, they know who Thompson is, but from his acting roles and for his disastrous run for President.) Progressives don’t care about elected officials in the past or what certain states might have done in the past. It does not fit their world view that at the end of the day, everyone who lived before them is a racist, misogynist, homophone because they did not have the values that they have been born with. They will demonstrate this repeatedly on Republicans of the past, have no interest in looking at any Democrat who does not fit their era of Progressives (they will castigate the Southern strategy and pretend that the Democrats didn’t spend a century embracing that same strategy).
It’s why at the end of the day, despite the fact that Tennessee has had Democrat Senators more recently then they did in Texas and that Tennessee has gone Democratic more recently in a Presidential election than Texas has (Texas last went Democratic in 1976; I’ll discuss Tennessee below) there has never been any serious discussion of turning Tennessee blue in progressive newsletters the way that they will with Texas or Georgia. Tennessee may only have eleven electoral votes, but that’s the same number as Arizona and more than New Mexico and Nevada, where they tend to spend a lot of energy over the last decade. You’d think they’d want to try and get that one in their pocket — particularly considering how much they seem to really revere the only politician from that state in recent history.
Few Democrats are more revered in this century than Al Gore. According to most progressive websites, he would have prevented 9–11, stopped global warming, made certain the Supreme Court was more liberal, etc. if he had not been cheating out of the White House by the Republicans.
To be clear, the latter claim is the only that is absolutely irrefutable; the rest is pure speculation. I think a huge amount of this beatification by progressives is done entirely in hindsight as well as their fundamental belief that a losing candidate is always better than an elected candidate.
Because I lived through the 2000 Presidential campaign, and I remember that the general reaction by the entire country was basically indifference. Nobody thought that Al Gore was better than George W. Bush at any time during the campaign; they were basically both viewed as elite children of privilege who were running for President out of progeny rather than qualifications. For all the arguments that Gore might have been more qualified, I remember the press and everybody else basically saying that while Bush was an idiot, Gore was stiff and dull. No one could work up any excitement during the entire campaign for either one of these men, and it reflected in the overall turnout: which was only slightly higher than fifty percent. America basically thought these two men were essentially the same, and essentially the popular vote reflected it. For all the claims that Al Gore was the choice of the masses because he won the popular vote, the difference was essentially 500,000 votes. Gore didn’t win in a landslide.
America’s entire reaction to 2000 was, who cares. The Republicans lost two seats in Congress and the Senate ended up as a fifty-fifty tie. America’s entire reaction to 2000 was a yawn, which is why at the end of the day as horrible as everything that happened in Florida was in the aftermath of 2000, I think the media may have been more excited about it than the voting public was.
To be clear, if it happened today, I am certain that all the Progressives who spent the last three years mocking every action that Donald Trump took in the aftermath of the 2020 elections would be doing every single thing that he and his cronies did. They might have been more justified, but I have little doubt that they wouldn’t have been just an insidious behind the scenes. They would have demanded Gore be angrier every step of the way; they would find their own Sydney Powell’s and Rudy Giuliani’s to fill up MSNBC arguing to ‘Stop The Steal’, they would have had demonstrations outside the Supreme Court. They would have demanded that Al Gore not concede, not engage in a peaceful transition of power. I can see one of them whispering to Gore before the count was certified: “Your Vice President. Just say you won and we’ll back you.” That so many of these people no doubt spent much of the actual 2000 campaign voting for Nader would not matter. All of them, of course, would be spending so much time on Florida that they would ignore something so glaring that I’m kind of amazed history has forgotten it.
I remember trying to predict how the electoral vote would be like in 2000. My method was completely unscientific; I decided to look at historical voting patterns by state over the last thirty years and see if I could figure out what the count would be. A couple of days before Election Day, I predicted Al Gore would win — but not because he would carry Florida.
I did not think Gore had a realistic chance of carrying Florida. Florida had gone Republican in four of the last five Presidential elections; the fact that it had been carried by Clinton in 1996 seemed an anomaly. Jeb Bush was the governor; in my mind I figured Florida was safe for Bush. No I predicted it would be a very close electoral victory but Gore would win — because it never occurred to me that he would lose Tennessee. It was his home state after all, and Clinton had carried it both in 1996 and 1992. Tennessee had gone Republican under Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to be sure, but certainly the Gore campaign wouldn’t be foolish enough to take his home state for granted.
By the way, ever since Adlai Stevenson defeat in 1956 until the present day, only two Democrats have ever lost the state that they represented, either as Governor or in Congress. The first was George McGovern, who only carried Massachusetts and D.C.
The second is Al Gore.
They don’t tell you that in the saga of the 2000 election, that if Al Gore had carried Tennessee, he would have had 278 electoral votes. Florida would have been a side-note in history; no one would have ever heard of Katherine Harris or hanging chad; the Supreme Court would never have intervened. Because by making it about a fraud, it’s a better story. The Gore campaign made countless mistakes in the 2000 run for the White House, but as long as progressives can argue fraud, they don’t have to acknowledge any of them.
And they’ll never talk about Tennessee because that never fits in to the progressive message that fits into so many red states, particularly Southern ones. The citizens of Tennessee; are homophones, they’re Klansmen, they’re Bible-Thumpers — and they don’t even bother with the ‘some of them are good people’ part. As far as progressives are concerned, there are only two good people in Tennessee: Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift.
I’d actually like to give a message to Justin Pearson and Justin Jones. I approve of your stand, it’s horrible what happened to you, it’s one of the worst examples of what our country is capable of. That said, I hope your happy with your spots in the Tennessee legislature because this is where your careers in public service will end. Not just because of the Republicans in your states, but because of the Progressives that have chosen to embrace you…right now.
Now, they think you make a good story because you’re two young African-Americans who lost your seat in a state they consider utterly irredeemable. They call you part of ‘The Tennessee Three’ even though your colleague Gloria Johnson was also one of them and wasn’t expelled. It’s a good name because it sounds imposing, you know like ‘The Squad’. Optics matter more than policy or governing.
At some point, one of you, perhaps both, will be asked to run for a Congressional seat. It will be a doomed campaign because, rather than try to run as a candidate that will help make things better, progressive campaigners will argue some variation of ‘moving fast and break things’, which is saying of your generation that you’re fond of, even though it’s the anathema of the system. It’s not about fixing things with progressives. Fixing things takes work. And there is no room for compromise or winning hearts and minds that disagree with you. AOC, your generations spiritual leader, has made it publicly clear that things like bipartisanship should be avoided at all cost and that legislation, compromise — basically every part of governing — matter less than trending on social media. That this is just a variation on the photo ops that older politicians build their careers on is irrelevant.
They don’t want you to win, anyway, because the worst defeated candidate is better than the best elected official. They are incapable of understanding that a Democrat in Tennessee can not run the same campaign as one in Vermont or California. Moderation, as I said at the start of the article, is a worse crime than being a conservative. It’s why they’re more interested in getting D.C. or Puerto Rico as states than trying to build a grass roots movement in states such as Idaho or Mississippi. At the end of the day, progressives are great for fundraising off of outrage, but they’re not interesting in electing representatives there. Governing has never been much higher on leftists ideals then it has been for the conservatives they claim are making it impossible. No one ever says anything about ‘owning the cons’ but I get the feeling progressives prefer to that to actual governing.
So enjoy your moment in the sun. Eventually, when there’s another, more recent egregious moment of acute racism/sexism/ homophobia/ in some deep red state involving legislators, the Progressives will move on to that and forget you. They’re fine raising money of your outrage, but don’t expect them to help if you actually want to do something as ridiculous as good for the people of your state. As far as their concerned, Tennessee is irredeemable. Always has been, always will be. It’s not true, but they don’t let the truth get in the way of a good outrage.