A conservative view of Moral Monday
Published February 10, 2014
By John Hood
by John Hood, John Locke Foundation and NC SPIN panelist, February 9, 2014.
Any political movement that can turn out tens of thousands of protesters on a chilly morning in February must be deemed impressive.
To this conservative, the 2014 edition of Historic Thousands on Jones Street — an annual march initiated by the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and now associated with the Moral Monday movement — was a remarkable feat of organization, logistics, and marketing. The NAACP did err in claiming that as much as 100,000 people participated in the march through downtown Raleigh. An estimate of 15,000 to 20,000 is more realistic. But that’s still a huge turnout by Raleigh standards, even if some of the participants were bused in from other states.
If organization, logistics, and marketing were sufficient to produce favorable legislation or electoral victories, the Moral Monday movement would be destined for success. I don’t think that is what’s about to happen, however. While the movement has ample financial and human resources, its strategy is fundamentally flawed.
The conservatives now in charge of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of state government, and of most county governments across North Carolina, believe their policies are right. They don’t believe they are sacrificing morality on the altar of political expediency.
For example, while they believe their fiscal policies of spending restraint and tax reduction will boost job creation and economic growth, they also believe these policies combat the moral evils associated with oppressive government. They recognize that government is necessary to fund core public services, and that these funds must come from taxation. But they reject the morality of usinggovernment coercion to confiscate and redistribute income, particularly when the action is motivated by envy.
North Carolina conservatives also believe that while temporary assistance for needy families is an appropriate state function, they oppose public-assistance programs that discourage work, enable self-destructive behavior, supplant voluntary charity, and sustain a debilitating culture of dependency. This belief extends beyond concerns of cost. Conservatives believe such welfare policies are morally wrong.
On education, conservatives believe it is a moral imperative that children have the opportunity to attend the schools most likely to help them succeed — which is why they favor public-school reforms such as merit pay and parental choice measures such as charter schools and vouchers. You may think conservatives are mistaken to believe these policies will have the intended effects. But if you think accusing them of immorality for embracing these reforms will do anything other than make you look unhinged and disingenuous in their eyes, you are kidding yourselves.
I don’t typically write about social issues in this space. But I will observe that when conservatives who consider abortion to be the killing of innocent unborn children enact measures they think will discourage women from having such abortions, accusing them of immorality makes you look reprehensible in their eyes.
Finally, accusing Republican politicians of failing to respect the democratic process, as Moral Monday protesters routinely do, sounds grossly hypocritical to North Carolina conservatives who spent decades on the outside looking in as Democrats gerrymandered electoral districts, ignored legislative procedure whenever they found it convenient, and even resorted to criminal activity to keep themselves in power.
Democrats have never received a majority of votes for a legislative chamber and then, because of gerrymandering, won only a minority of seats. But that actually happened to Republicans in 2000, 2002, and 2004. Where were the liberal activists and special-interest groups when these abuses were going on? Did they attempt to obstruct the Democratic legislative majorities as illegitimate? No, because they generally liked the legislation that resulted.
To many liberal activists and Democratic pols participating in Moral Monday protests, these rhetorical and strategic considerations are irrelevant. They have no interest in trying to persuade conservative politicians to adopt different policies. They simply want to destroy them, politically and sometimes even personally, in order to regain power. I can think of many appropriate adjectives for this. “Moral” is not among them.
Conservatives should resist the temptation to ridicule or dismiss Moral Monday protesters. It makes those conservatives look small. And Republican politicians should learn to exercise their newly achieved power with grace, humility, and wisdom. Still, at its core, the Moral Monday movement is based on a self-defeating principle: that the only people deserving of respect are those who already agree with you.
February 10, 2014 at 6:45 am
Rip Arrowood says:
Polling numbers go down.
Spin goes up.
February 10, 2014 at 8:03 am
Rip Arrowood says:
Mr. Hood, do you have an estimate of how many of the 15 to 20,000 marchers in Raleigh were from other states?
I'd bet the percentage is about the same as confirmed cases of voter fraud in NC
February 10, 2014 at 8:15 am
Richard Bunce says:
NC Democratic Party needs to get over their political power entitlement built up over the last century. Their problem is not with the elected officials but the majority of voters that elected them.
February 10, 2014 at 10:33 am
Timothy Tyson says:
This is a coherent moral defense of the ultra-conservative "super-majority" in the General Assembly. While I don't agree with every single fact in the essay, I do respect its intellectual honesty. This contrasts sharply with those who speak for the extreme right contingent in the legislature, who claimed--unlike Mr. Hood--to be concerned with safeguarding women's health, not discouraging abortion; who claimed that there was massive fraud in the electoral system, with respect to the less important "voter ID" aspect of their new electoral laws and asserted that they were "updating" and bringing reform to things like doing away or sharply reeducating with pre-registration of high school students, Sunday voting, early voting, not to mention the reductions in polling places, especially those near college campuses and many other measures, all of them designed to hold down turnout, particularly among Democratic constituencies. (The only conservative official who told the truth about the "voter ID" bill did so on the Daily Show and got relieved of his duties.) It is true, as Hood points out, that the Democrats once dabbled, at least by comparison, in gerrymandering. One did not see Democrats, however, eliminating polling places in Republican-leaning suburbs or the solidly Republican mountain counties. What was it about early voting and same-day registration that needed "updating?" So by contrast, Mr. Hood's essay, though it did not deal with all of the issues that it might have, displays a strong and commendable intellectual honesty. Its clarity, civility, and grace deserve mention as well.
As for the future of the Moral Monday/Forward Together movement, which grew out of the NAACP and HKonJ's years of organizing--which Hood, unlike most observers of whatever ideological bent, sees clearly--this will only become clear in the fullness of time. Registering a broad, deep moral dissent to what the ultra-conservative Pope-Koch forces are doing is worthwhile in itself.
Hood did not, however, recall our many demonstrations against the shortcoming of the Democratic-controlled state government, particularly with respect to education. Those were much smaller because we had not yet built the movement and because fewer people "got it" at the time; their policies, while irresponsible at times, were considerably less drastic. They also probably listened more closely because African Americans--the movement was far more black back then--were a significant constituency. Though we have always remained nonpartisan, Democrats may have feared that bad grades from us might resonate beyond our ranks. And probably more Democrats and independents agreed with us, generally, though certainly far from a majority, at least in the legislature.
But Hood commits the mistake, common to commentators on nearly every side, of faulting the Moral Moral/Forward Together because we are unlikely to persuade members of the far-right super-majority from changing their votes. Of course we are not. That's shooting fish in a barrel. One recalls the state legislator who was considering an independent vote and got a visit from Art Pope himself on the floor, and changed his ways immediately; the discipline of campaign money and Tea Party "primary-ing" is strong; moderate Republicans who might side with conservative to moderate Democrats are a thing of the past, apparently. We cannot expect such solons to look out the window at the marching masses and say, "You know, these people have a point," and alter their vote, even in the rare instance when they might feel that way. We'd be happy if they'd have a change of heart, but it's batting down the flimsiest of straw figures to fault us for counting on it.
What might be accomplished by these protests, however, is the building of a coherent, big-tent political and social movement that energizes and informs the population at large to participate in the democratic process, whether by praying for change, simply reading the newspaper, by engaging in political discussions, by protesting and/or by taking their convictions with them to the ballot box, regardless of party. Like many Republicans, we don't shrink from bringing our moral sensibilities into politics; those who deny that they do so are fooling themselves anyway, in my opinion, but that's another topic entirely. These protests won't change things overnight but if the energy continues to build, it might well have consequences, especially in statewide races that are not subject to gerrymandering. Those who pass policies that astound and infuriate a majority of the people are subject to losing elections, especially when more and more people become aware of said policies.
Much of what Moral Monday/Forward Together has accomplished in the way of congealing and mobilizing public opinion has been simply a matter of exposing what the far-right legislative caucus has been doing. We don't have to explain why these things are bad for most North Carolinians; that is self-evident to folks outside the far-right bubble. We just have to publicize what they're doing. Unfortunately, many citizens, cynical, tired, busy, despairing, whatever, pay little attention to politics day to day. This movement is changing that. The super-majority has done everything thinkable and (mostly) legal to suppress future voter turnout. We believe that this is bad for the body politic, bad for democracy, and leaves corporate money talking more loudly than ever. People don't like that. We're letting them know what else is going on in Raleigh that they won't like. The American Conservative pointed this out last August in an article that is well-informed and worth reading.
We remain firmly non-partisan--we've been quite ardent about this because we learned long ago that Democrats as well as Republicans succumb to the lure of corporate campaign money and will occasionally sell the common good for the right price. But simply as a betting proposition, I would speculate that it is possible to imagine a gentle mountain populist Republican in the Jim Holshouser mold gaining a lot of ground among Moral Monday's folks, who include a fair number of Republicans and many independents as well as many, many independent-minded Democrats who are registered with but hardly owned by the Democratic Party. My father, an Eleanor Roosevelt liberal who got arrested in a Moral Monday protest at 83, remembers Holshouser fondly and voted for the Republican proudly.
Hood offers a cogent defense of the conservative position and I believe, as he believes of the movement, that it is worthy of attention. But I hope that he will reconsider his notion that we only respect those with whom we agree. The movement itself has cast a very wide net and will not grow more narrow but likely more broad. It is possible that differences among us will eventually lead to splits, but I don't think so. On issues like education, the ultra-right has made terrible political mistakes--and worse, bad policy decisions--and the vast majority of North Carolinians only need to understand them in order to join this movement or follow its lead. We don't split hairs or embrace sectarian true believers. It doesn't take some kind of ideological program to see that you can't push people off unemployment when jobs are nearly impossible to come by and block healthcare for the poor nor raise taxes on poor families while cutting them on the wealthiest families and call that "moral." Kindness is not all that complicated. Many Republicans don't approve of chopping public education and cutting pre-K programs for at-risk kids and implementing a school voucher program, let alone Democrats and independents and especially church people, who are wildly overrepresented among the Moral Monday marchers, in case you didn't notice. The leadership of the Roman Catholic, United Methodist, Presbyterian, Jewish, Episcopalian, Unitarian, and Lutheran Evangelical, among others, have endorsed the purposes of Moral Monday as consonant with their readings of the Scriptures.
Even conservative strongholds in places like the virtually all-white mountain counties are shaken by some of these radical right policies. It's one thing to lean over the bar at the corner taproom and say, "You know what we ought to do? We ought to blah-blah-blah!" People will tolerate, even join in, venting like that. But go to the legislature and start doing it, and the same people might just vote you out. And here is where Hood's point--the ultra-conservative super-majority doesn't care what we think--may just come around and bite his colleagues in the hindmost parts.
