From Wayne Flynt

Wayne Flynt: Alabama taught political lessons in 2017

Wayne Flynt

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By Guest Voices 
on December 29, 2017 at 9:55 AM, updated December 29, 2017 at 9:57 AM

By Wayne Flynt, an historian of Alabama who has written nine books about the state. He is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Auburn University. 

Fortunately, my understanding editor allowed a delay updating "Alabama: History of a Deep South State, Bicentennial Edition" until after the December 12 senate election.

In case you were vacationing on Mars, this was not a good year for Alabama's Republican Party.  For the first time in 229 years of American democracy, the chief executive, legislative, and judicial officials of a state were removed from office for ethics violations.

So, in the tradition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas," I will list the six most important lessons learned and the six most embarrassing arguments made during the first twelve days of December, 2017.

• Learn from your opponent. Donald Trump's strategist Steve Bannon focuses on the base above everything.  So did Doug Jones.  Without an unprecedented turnout of African Americans in an off year special election, he loses.  African Americans did not let him down. They constitute 26% of the population and cast more than 30% of the votes.  But Trump, Bannon and Moore saw the GOP base diminish, not grow.
• Revenge is sweet.  Bannon crafted a slash-and-burn war against Alabama's Republican establishment to defeat Luther Strange.  On December 12, the GOP establishment got even.
• Republicans who share Trump's misogyny should beware of college educated suburban women.  Although statewide a bare majority of such women voted for Moore, his percentage was well below their turnout for Reagan, McCain, and Romney.  And they were much more likely to believe charges of sexual abuse by Moore than white men.
• American politics may indeed have a moral bottom.  Decency seems still to matter more than ideology and party in some places among some people.  Maybe not among white evangelicals, who gave Moore 80% of their votes.  But the white evangelical share of the vote dropped enough from the 2016 presidential election to account for Moore's loss. 
• Most promising for Democrats was both the size and preference of millennials who voted by a small majority for Romney in 2012 but by a 20 point margin for Jones in December. 
• The national press doesn't have a clue about Alabama history.   If I had a thousand dollars from every reporter from Sirius XM radio in Toronto, the American reporter for the largest paper in Sweden, their colleagues from NPR,  Associated Press, New York Times, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist and others who kept reminding me that in the most conservative red state in America, Jones could not win, I could retire to the Redneck Riviera.  The starting place for understanding Alabamians is that they don't like to be told what to think or do, not even by presidents they vote for.

Then there are the six embarrassments.

• State auditor Jim Zeigler deserves first place by comparing Roy Moore to Joseph: "Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter.  They became the parents of Jesus."  This startling revelation took Bible scholars by surprise because the Bible is silent on the age of Jesus' parents, forcing scholars to infer their age by the social customs of the times: By that measurement, Mary would probably have been in her mid-teens, Joseph in his upper teens (not his 30s as Moore was).  Some Moore followers compound the embarrassment by recalling fourteen-year old mothers who gave birth to them.  Before revealing too much family sexual genealogy, cheerleaders for teenage sex might want to reflect more deeply on the subject.  If your boy has sex with a girl under 16 in Alabama  that is considered statutory rape and a felony.
• The women waited for decades to report what Moore did.  Actually they did not.  As the Washington Post story documented fully, they told mothers, aunts, cousins, and best friends.  Why the families did not report this to officials is unreported but pretty obvious in the well documented history of both sexual abuse and Alabama history.  They were mainly poorly educated, working class families in a manufacturing town with a long history of extralegal violence against African Americans, labor organizers, and outsiders.  Moore was a West Point graduate, a Viet Nam veteran, and a powerful public official.  If you think most Alabamians would believe women's accounts about such a man then or now, talk to any rape counselor of your choice.
• Despite initial Republican revulsion at Moore, the party rallied round him except for Senator Richard Shelby, the nearest thing to a statesman in this benighted party. Trump urged voters to elect him, and Alabama's God-fearing Republican officials fell all over themselves endorsing him.  After Moore's loss, President Trump suddenly remembered that he knew Moore would lose though he had said three days earlier in Pensacola that he knew Moore would win.  Now Republicans just want to forget that GOP briefly stood for the party of Grand Old (alleged) Pedophile.  Funny how quickly we revise history.
• Governor Kay Ivey's announcement that she believed the women accusers but would vote for Moore anyway.  That, of course, means that she knowingly voted for an alleged pedophile, which must cause some heart burn with an impending gubernatorial election next year.
• It was only the women's word against Moore's.  Does that mean that the only way to convict a pedophile is eye witness testimony?  Does any rational person believe pedophiles invite friends over to watch the sexual abuse of a child?  Just for future reference, most pedophiles are found guilty because of repeated patterns of conduct over years involving many victims when one courageous person comes forward, opening flood gates of memory long repressed in others. 
• Doug Jones was a baby killer, which is worse than being a pedophile.  That is moral equivalency on stilts.  The bizarre reasoning that led to such conclusions goes like this:  Jones believes in a woman's right to choose for herself the most intensely private issues of sexuality and reproductive rights.  Therefore, his critics reasoned, he believes in abortion.  Therefore, he is a baby-killer.  No ancient Greek familiar with the syllogism or half-literate Alabamian who never heard of one would give that argument a grade higher than F-.  The argument is rooted in  yearning for an American theocracy, where people who commune directly with God pass along  insights to the rest of us as Puritans in New England once did to dissenting Baptist Roger Williams, running him into the wilderness and enforcing their religious beliefs by colonial enactments and capital punishment. The result in December was this letter to AL.com: "I would vote for Satan over Doug Jones if Satan was pro-life, pro-Christian, pro-2 Amendment, and wanted to build a wall.  Jones is for everything God condemns."  If you believe nine women's accusations and Governor Ivey, that dude you voted for seemed like Satan to a lot of young Alabama women.  The bottom line to the abortion debate is actually pretty simple. If evangelicals cannot win this debate with their own children, in their own homes, churches, and Bible classes, they will not win it at all. They cannot establish by coercion what they cannot win by persuasion.  Especially is this true in light of recent cases in Tennessee and Pennsylvania where "family values," anti-abortion, male Republican congressmen admitted paying for their mistress's abortions.

As 2018 begins, I take pride that my deep red Republican state moved beyond journalist predictions and silly political arguments to act with reason to help preserve the integrity of American democracy.