Our Seven Crises; Louisville's Rising Left; What Adams, McGrath and Walker Are Up to

Aug 28, 2020

I’m very stressed out these days. I find that a lot of people that I talk to are also fairly stressed out. I work in the news business, but I regularly tell people to reduce their news consumption when they can. If it were not literally my job to be on the top of the news, I would drastically reduce my news consumption.

But there is a real reason for this stress. I think there are at least six big crises happening at once in America. And it’s kind of hard to ignore six crises.

The fairly-new crisis of a deadly virus that has killed more than 170,000 Americans and has the rest of us deathly afraid that one of our friends or relatives might contract it, or we ourselves.
The new crisis of a president who had already broken with democratic norms and values throughout his tenure accelerating his authoritarian and autocratic tendencies, including hinting that he will use his presidential powers to subvert a free and fair election so that he can be reelected. While he increasingly breaks with core democratic values, members of his political party are not only embracing his moves, but adopting them in states that they run. His authoritarian tendencies are likely to further accelerate if he wins a second term. His behavior means that the most prescient commentators on American politics are often people who live abroad and/or have studied dictatorships.
A longstanding crisis of politics, media, entertainment and institutions that has worsened under this president, with Americans increasingly distrusting entities designed to speak to and connect large numbers of Americans and conservative Americans increasingly turning to Facebook accounts and news programs that feature lots of false information from creators more focused on entertainment and profits than promoting the nation’s overall wellbeing.
A longstanding crisis of economic insecurity and inequality that has deepened because of the virus, with the stock market rising and companies like Amazon and Facebook seeing greatly increased profits while unemployment remains very high and many Americans are struggling to pay rent and facing eviction from their homes.
A longstanding crisis of anti-black racism, white supremacy, and resistance to an America where white male Christians are no longer the dominant figures that we are all more woke to than ever before, with this week a police officer in Wisconsin shooting an unarmed black man, then a white man shooting and killing two people during the protests of that police shooting.
A longstanding crisis of climate change that is often crowded out by other news but is perhaps the most important crisis.

In my view, there’s a seventh crisis related to the previous six--a status quo/normalization/resistance to change crisis. I have fully accepted that it’s not 2013 anymore--and that America in 2013 had some problems in terms of racial and economic inequality in particular that I wasn’t as aware of back then as I should have been. But when I watch journalists struggle over how to cover Trump, Republican and Democratic politicians desperate to cast policing in America as pretty good except for a bad officers or conservatives spend more than a year attacking a New York Times magazine edition that focused on the legacy of slavery in America, I see this normalization crisis. Many of us grew up revering our nation’s founders and the loudly-proclaimed greatness and exceptionalism of America, a land of opportunity where the arc was bending toward justice. Perhaps our fathers or our fathers’ friends were police officers, and we thought that was generally a great profession to be in. The best journalists had lots of contacts and connections with former staffers to both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

I think many of us are clinging to conditions and norms that don’t really exist anymore--and perhaps never did in the first place. And that creates a daily crisis on top of the others--trying to uphold a status quo that we kind of know is already crumbling, simply because the status quo is so comfortable to us and stepping into a new reality is uncomfortable. I think there are plenty of good Americans working in police departments, but if the system and current structure of policing ends up with unarmed black men sometimes being choked to death or shot, we may need to immediately stop clinging to our belief in the good officers and refocus on the policing system’s need for major changes. If we have internalized the idea that America is slowly but surely getting better in terms of how it treats black people and that Barack, Kamala and Oprah are proof, we can open our eyes, read the data and watch the news in Kenosha and adjust our perspective. If we think that a clear indication that politics is working is that the leaders of both parties can come together, we should consider in what circumstance Trump would treat Nancy Pelosi or Obama with respect--or just spend an hour looking at Trump’s Twitter feed. Bipartisanship may be over--at least for now. And we may have to accept that.

So if you are freaking out about the news, you should be kind of freaked out. There are people trying to address all seven of these crises. You could be one of the people. So we should not let our worry turn into fatalism and despair. But it’s not in your head--there is a lot to be worried about.

Meet Louisville’s Left

The dominant political figures in Louisville have long been left-but-not-that-left middle-aged white Democrats (Jerry Abramson, Greg Fischer). The city’s political climate has generally been Democratic but not super-progressive or liberal--a desire to address gaps in income and opportunity between black and white Louisvillians while bringing business to the city and not offending its heavily-white upper class or its majority-white middle class. Not that different than what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are proposing for the nation. That’s a useful political approach. I’m a product of it myself (I grew up in Louisville.) Its benefits included an aggressive school integration plan that helped me, a black person whose parents weren’t rich and who didn’t live in the fanciest areas of town, attend a high school far from my house that was one of the best in the state, putting me on a course to attend a good college and get good jobs after I graduated.

But the last few months have illustrated a rising left-left, very liberal segment of Louisvillians--the huge support in the city for the Senate campaign of Charles Booker, who ran on ideas like the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all; the weeks of huge multi-racial protests of the police killing of Breonna Taylor; and the increased criticism of Fischer. So I interviewed a few liberal activists and figures in the city myself and opted not to interview some others because my friends at Louisville Magazine and the Courier-Journal were already doing projects somewhat similar to this.

Generally, the activists I’m writing about fall into at least one and often three of the following categories: supported Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren during the 2020 Democratic primaries; backed Booker in his race against Amy McGrath; and personally attended some of the protests of Taylor’s killing.

Here’s what I have learned:

Many of these activists became engaged in left-wing politics pre-Trump, inspired by either the Ferguson protests in 2014 or events even earlier.

We’ve seen a wave of activism motivated by anger at Trump’s rise, particularly among white college-educated women. (Think of the women’s marches that happened across the country on Inauguration Day in 2017.). But the more progressive views among Louisville’s Left are rooted in previous political moments.

“I grew up in a liberal Methodist congregation where I was very active. I preached twice on "youth sunday" at church in high school and found church to be a radically inclusive place where I found community, acceptance, and a place of belonging,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, a 30-year-old who works on issues connecting religion and politics for the D.C.-based Center for American Progress, a think tank where many people who served in key roles in the Clinton and Obama administrations work.

He added, “Activism and my Christian faith have always been connected and guide my politics today. The illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq when I was 13 was the first time I really connected the two and was vocal about it.”

“I was 14 during the Ferguson protests in 2014, and I really didn’t know too much about America’s history and racial structure back then. But that really opened my eyes to things,” University of Louisville student and Courier-Journal columnist Quintez Brown told Louisville Magazine.

“Process is power,” 41-year-old Ben Carter, a lawyer who works at the Kentucky Equal Justice Center, told me. “I'm really excited that so many people are talking about gerrymandering, felon disenfranchisement, vote-by-mail, filibuster, etc. I've been nerding out on these things long before the cool kids showed up to the party. We need these things to be cool (and by cool I mean "in the public consciousness.”)

"I think what people don't understand about Black liberation is it's a duty," 40-year-old Chanelle Helm, one of the leaders of Louisville’s Black Lives Matter group, told the Courier-Journal recently. "It's not a cause, it's not something you pick up on the weekends. It is something that you've really got to feel in your heart."

Unsurprisingly, they don’t view the electoral defeats of Booker, Warren and Sanders nor the inability of progressives to force cuts to police funding here in Louisville or in many other cities as huge setbacks.

Joe Biden is the Democratic presidential candidate. McGrath is Kentucky’s U.S. Senate candidate. Kamala Harris is Biden’s running mate. Fischer runs Louisville, Andy Beshear runs the state. Nancy Pelosi spoke more at last week’s Democratic National Convention than all of the members of “The Squad” combined. It doesn’t seem likely that Biden will push hard for Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, a wealth tax or breaking up big tech companies if he is president. In my view, the left is gaining momentum, but still struggling both locally and nationally against more centrist forces in the Democratic Party.

The activists didn’t dismiss my view, but they had a different perspective.

“I would absolutely concede that we have little power, but I will also say that the ground is changing dramatically and quickly. Ideas that seemed radical, like defunding the police, which I ran on since December and have advocated for two decades, have become, if not policy, a large part of the public discourse, in the matter of a few months,” said Robert LeVertis Bell, a 40-old-year public school teacher who is active in Louisville’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and was the runner-up in the Democratic primary for a city council seat in the western part of the city (District 4) earlier this year.

“I think the Biden/Bernie task forces moved the campaign in a good direction. Do I disagree with some of Biden's policies? Sure. But his movement in a positive (progressive) direction because of the primary is undeniable, as is the energy on the left,” said Graves-Fitzsimmons.

“I was always going to be for Elizabeth Warren, whether she was electable or not,” Carter said. “But, the second piece of my support is this (and it's part of why I was early for Charles Booker): Donald Fucking Trump is President. If someone handwrings to me about electability, that's my, forgive the pun, trump card. I just don't think anyone knows who/what is electable anymore.”

“ I also think that some older Kentuckians just don't think a young Black man can win in this state, so they don't vote for him. This doesn't make sense to me. It banks on the racism of others, and then reinforces these notions for the next election,” said Ysabella Leon, who graduated from Manual High School this spring and worked on Booker’s campaign as a field organizer over the summer. She will be attending Transylvania University.

They think the protests showed Louisville (and America) are changing and will eventually move in a more progressive direction--but they are not sure the speed at which that shift will happen.

“Having been around the city and around activism/organizing in the city for a long time, what we've seen coming out of the movement around Breonna Taylor's murder has been exceptional. Obviously it's a part of a global movement that is largely without precedent but even in that context, Louisville has been surprising. I'm proud of the city,” said Bell.

“This has been the first time I've seen people power in action right in front of my eyes. It's caused me to rethink who's open to big changes--more than I could have fathomed,” 24-year-old public school teacher McKenzie Eskridge told me.

“What gives me hope in how organic the energy is right now is that it’s going to be harder for the power structure to contain it, bottle it up and put it back on the shelf,” Booker told Louisville Magazine. “And it’s allowing for new creativity and new voices to find themselves and to find their space. I’m in parts of Kentucky where it’s like 99 percent white and they are marching. I was in Prestonsburg, and they were like, ‘No lives matter ’til Black lives matter.’”

“Some people see an escalation and think we need more police to keep everyone safe. But if they're not keeping us safe, or de-escalating anything, what's the point?” said Leon. “I guess you could say I've become more 'radical' in terms of my thoughts on the police system. I've tried to do a lot to educate myself and others about the systemic racism in our country and our city being still so extremely segregated. I think it's a wake-up call for a lot of people.”

“There's been a game that has been played by Democrats for a long time that if you get a Black person next to you, that's going to pacify us," 26-year-old Black Lives Matter activist LuTisha Buckner told the Courier-Journal recently. “But with what's happened in the country with Black Lives Matter and the pandemic ...we want real change, real policies and real legislation."

When I asked what policy changes they wanted to see happen here in Louisville, many of them mentioned seeing charges filed against the officers who shot Taylor. Here are some of their other ideas:

“Compassion is certainly a wonderful value, but in a city where we have had great faith-based activism, I wish we could be leaders in a revitalized religious left that pushed for more radical change in our city rather than a focus on being nice to one another or interfaith dialogue,” said Graves-Fitzsimmons.

“I want Louisville to stop selling its delinquent property tax debt to out-of-state companies,” said Carter. “When we do that, we privatize the profits from the most collectible properties and cede control over the destiny of those properties to private debt collectors by giving those companies our tax liens. With those liens, private debt collectors, not the city, decide when and how to foreclose on a home. We—the city—should be making those decisions,” said Carter. He also said Louisville should adopt ranked-choice voting in its local elections.

“1. Cutting the LMPD's budget tremendously 2. Cancelling rent AT LEAST until there's a handle on this global pandemic 3. Passing the Clean Hands ordinance to prevent landlords from evicting tenants who complain about unsafe living conditions,” said Eskridge.

Thanks for reading.

This is a regular newsletter on elections, government, policy and power in Louisville and Kentucky. You can subscribe here. If you have been added to the distribution list for this newsletter but don’t think you want to receive it regularly, you can unsubscribe at the bottom--I promise I will not be hurt. If you have tips or suggestions for future stories, you can email me at perrylbacon@gmail.com. If you see a typo or error, please reach out, so I can at least fix that for the online version of this newsletter.

What Is Michael Adams Up to?

The 44-year-old Kentucky secretary of state, elected to that post in 2019, is a Republican’s Republican, with previous stints at Mitch McConnell’s campaign team, Gov. Ernie Fletcher’s administration, George W. Bush’s administration, the Republican Governors Association, and Mike Pence’s political action committee. He is a Federalist Society member, campaigned for secretary of state by pushing a photo ID law for voting that seemed like a solution in search of a problem but is GOP orthodoxy and is now strongly opposing a small property tax increase to boost Jefferson County public schools.

That said, Adams, working with Beshear, adopted a voting plan for November that included both expanded in-person early voting and expanded vote-by-mail. It is the kind of plan voting experts are pushing for amid COVID-19. Adams, in fact, seems open to listening to experts like Josh Douglas, an election law and voting rights professor at the University of Kentucky who says he has worked with Adams’ office on issues this year. This should not be surprising or remarkable. But Adams’s actions were kind of surprising considering that he is a Republican--he supported expanded vote-by-mail, even as others in his party back away from that position to line up with Trump’s newfound opposition to it; he worked with Beshear, even as other Kentucky Republicans seem determined to attack the governor whenever possible; and he seems interested in the views of non-partisan experts who probably are not that pro-Trump. And if you follow Adam’s Twitter feed, there is a lot of humor and sunshine and very little “fake news”, Trumpy rhetoric.

Adams, in some tweets since his voting plan was announced, has implied that he has gotten some blowback from people in his own party. And he seems okay with it.

“I’ve taken immense heat for my decisions on how to make our elections safe and successful, but notice no one is arguing I've made these decisions in my own or anyone else's political interests,” Adams said in a recent tweet. “Show me the door in 2023 but until then I'll act on my knowledge and my conscience.”

I will take Adams at his word that he is doing what he thinks he is right, regardless of the politics. But I also think that Adams is making an interesting political calculation that others in his party are not--total obedience to every edict and whim of Trump may not be necessary to advance in GOP politics. I am not sure Adams is correct in this assessment.

I Know What Amy McGrath is Up To

McConnell and McGrath are having silly, predictable jockeying over the exact parameters of the debates they will have this fall. All of that is normal for campaigns and the kind of news I usually skip over. Here’s the one interesting element: McGrath is pushing for Libertarian Party candidate Brad Barron to be in the debates with her and McConnell. This matters. Andy Beshear won the governor’s race last year by around 5000 votes, with John Hicks, the Libertarian candidate getting more than 28,000 votes.

We can’t be sure that most Libertarian voters would automatically back the Republican in a Republican v. Democrat race, but I think that’s a reasonable assumption. In 2019, Hicks got 2 percent of the vote without being in all of the debates between Beshear and Bevin--so it’s not like Barron needs the debates to win votes. But McGrath is assuming, smartly in my view, that she will have a hard time getting 50 percent of Kentuckians to vote for her, but perhaps she can win with say 48.5 percent, if Barron gets. 3.5 percent.

I Also Know What Justin Walker is Up To

Walker is the 38-year-old Louisville native and one-time law clerk for Brett Kavanaugh on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court who spent the summer of 2018 as one of Kavanaugh’s strongest defenders, making numerous television appearances to promote Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. That pro-Kavanaugh advocacy helped put Walker on McConnell’s radar screen. He got Walker a White House meeting with Trump, who nominated Walker to a federal district court seat here in Louisville. Then, after Walker had only been in that seat for a few months, McConnell aggressively and successfully pushed for Walker to be on the powerful DC appeals court on which he had once clerked.

It’s hard to imagine Walker being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Trump if the president won a second term. But Walker would be in his mid 40s with a record of great clerkships and prestigious judicial appointments if there were a Republican administration starting in 2025. And he could further ensure he was on the short list for such a seat if Walker say, issued a lot of opinions that clearly signaled that he would be a strong, consistent conservative voice on the bench, more Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas than John Roberts, Kennedy or even Kavanaugh.

I think Walker sees that possibility too. In one of his major rulings from the bench, in April, the judge issued an over-the-top ruling that included unnecessary references to Abraham, Isaac, the pilgrims, slaves and the Ku Klux Klan, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser described it at the time. “On Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter,” Walker wrote in dramatic terms.

In reality, in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak, Fischer was expressing wariness about some churches holding drive-in services, as there was some evidence people were not social distancing at those outdoor services. It’s not clear the city had a formal ban on such services or was ever going to enforce such a ban--which Walker might have learned if he had given city officials a chance to contact him before his ruling.

It was almost as if Walker wanted to issue a big-time ruling advertising his support for religious freedom--”auditioning” to conservative activists who are trying to figure out which lower-court judges should be put on high courts, as Millhiser described the move.

Speaking of unnecessary decisions. Earlier this month, Walker, who has not yet moved to his new DC Circuit post, ruled in favor of a Louisville photographer who argued that her religious freedom should exempt her from having to take pictures at same-sex weddings. Here’s the thing--no same-sex couple is demanding that she take their wedding pictures! She wanted preemptive protection from Louisville’s fairness ordinance. It seems like Walker wanted to further establish his religious freedom bonafides for basically no real legal reason.

Walker’s replacement

Benjamin Beaton, an attorney in the Cincinnati office of Squire Patton Boggs, a prestigious national law firm, has been nominated by Trump to replace Walker on the district court in Louisville, as the Courier-Journal recently reported. Beaton was actually a clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most liberal members. Sometimes justices hire clerks who they are not aligned with ideologically, so that’s not too out of the ordinary. The 39-year-old is a Federalist Society member, so I would not expect his rulings on more ideological issues to be that different than Walker’s. But his resume suggests he might be less eager to issue over-the-top bombastic rulings and interject himself into cases where he is not needed--probably a good thing for a district court judge.

Thanks for reading.