In a piece with Julia Rock and Andrew Perez from 11/17/2020 (Biden’s First Climate Appointment Is A Fossil Fuel Industry Ally), they quote Democratic Congressman U.S. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana giving a blunt statement of the ConservaDem excuse for not even fighting for their own party's program: “When we govern, we will govern with our values but when we can't pass legislation, we shouldn't be out there talking about it.” (my emphasis)
Which raises the obvious question of how one might go about getting legislation passed without talking about it.
But many Democrats have gotten so used to making excuses for Democrats letting Republicans and corporate lobbyists slap them around, such a an excuse sounds for many of them like obvious practical wisdom.
The authors note:
During his 10 years in Congress, Richmond has received roughly $341,000 from donors in the oil and gas industry — the 5th highest total among House Democrats, according to previous reporting by Sludge. That includes corporate political action committee donations of $50,000 from Entergy, an electric and natural gas utility; $40,000 from ExxonMobil; and $10,000 apiece from oil companies Chevron, Phillips 66 and Valero Energy.This made me recall the much-discussed book by UC-Berkeley sociology professor Arlie Russel Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), that reported on her long visits and interviews with people in the Lake Charles LA area. Lake Charles is currently in Louisiana's third Congressional district, not represented by Cedric Richmond but by this ugly piece of work: Uniform misconduct: Inside the rise and possible fall of "The Cajun John Wayne," GOP congressional candidate Clay Higgins (Zack Kopplin, Salon 10/02/2016. This guy:
Richmond has raked in that money while representing a congressional district that is home to 7 of the 10 most air-polluted census tracts in the country.
Church is too dangerous they said. Thanksgiving was too much risk. Loved one in ICU?... can’t visit. Too risky.
— Rep. Clay Higgins (@RepClayHiggins) November 27, 2020
Welcome to Black Friday.
Means tax revenue.
Wake up America.
The left doesn’t care about YOUR health.
They care about THEIR wealth.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
— Rep. Clay Higgins (@RepClayHiggins) November 19, 2020
There is a preponderance of evidence indicating widespread election fraud. Americans should be appalled.
This will be a very interesting Holiday season in America.
Buckle up.https://t.co/CWxNIEUjgM
Hochschild styled her project as something like the national press sending reporters out to discern the mysterious ways of salt-of-the-earth Trump voters:
I have lived most of my life in the progressive camp but in recent years I began to want to better understand those on the right. How did they come to hold their views? Could we make common cause on some issues? ...Hochschild is a scholar, not a hack journalist, and she's a good writer. So her study has some fascinating portraits of her subjects. But I'm not sure she entirely avoided the "access" problem. If she had really pressed her subjects on "culture war" issues like racial attitudes or religious issues, they might not have been as willing to talk to her or to present their more appealing sides.
You might say I’d come to Louisiana with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me. An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.
And if you define a project like that vaguely enough, you maximize the chances that you'll find what you're looking for. And her definition of the undertaking seems to have been pretty straightforward: to find things out about conservative Louisiana white people that might sound sympathetic to liberals not intimately familiar with that social and political context.
So, she winds up with an elaborate version of the standard, saccharine answer: conservative white people vote for a democracy-hating, arrogant, bullying, narcissist like Donald Trump because they feel like the Mean Librulas aren't "listening to" them.
She described her first meeting with one of her favorite subjects in the book, who is notable to her because he has been active in protesting about severe pollution, which is a serious problem in that area:
I’d asked Mike Schaff to show me where he’d grown up because I wanted to understand, if I could, how he saw the world. By way of introduction, I’d told him, “I’m from Berkeley, California, a sociologist, and I am trying to understand the deepening divide in our country. So I’m trying to get out of my political bubble and get to know people in yours.” Mike nodded at the word “divide,” then quipped, “Berkeley? So y’all must be communist!” He grinned as if to say, “We Cajuns can laugh, hope you can.”Or maybe he was grinning because he was thinking, let's see if her response shows that she realizes I'm deliberately insulting her and trying to intimidate her a bit. Because in the context, that's clearly what he was trying to do.
But this brings us back to Congressman Cedric Richmond. Because his 2nd Congressional district is "home to 7 of the 10 most air-polluted census tracts in the country." And yet he happily takes big dollars from heavily-polluting industries and sides with them politically. Google provides this helpful overview of his stereotypically jerrymandered district.
And this demographic summary:
It has been a typical ploy for the last several decades for Republicans to draw legislative districts in such a way as to concentrate minority voters into as few districts as possible, which creates "safe" democratic districts like Louisiana 2nd, but minimizes the potential number of Democratic voters in other districts, in order to maximize the state's Republican representation in the House of Representatives.
Richmond won re-election this past November 3 with 64% of the vote against four other candidates, including two Republicans who together won 20% of the vote. Another Democratic candidate in the race got another 11%, making a 75% Democratic majority in that election. In the 2018 race, Richmond got 81%. (LA Secretary of State webpage)
Which brings me back to why Louisianians like Hochschild's white folks in the 3rd Congressional District might vote for Republicans like Donald Trump and the thuggish, grifting Congressman Clay Higgins, including people like Mike Schaff who are particularly concerned about Louisiana's very real environmental problems that are having both immediately and longterm negatives effects. There are many answers from sociological to moral and lots in between.
But part of the mix is the kind of messaging the parties are doing. So, here's Cedric Richmond, one of the most prominent Democrats in Louisiana, currently the only Louisiana Democrat serving in Congress, an established incumbent in a ridiculously safe Democratic District, who served as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus in 2017-19. He's being well-paid through campaign contributions from major polluters to not care about environmental issues. Much less try to build the environmental movement in Louisiana.
So if you are concerned about pollution in Louisiana, you don't see even the guy who is currently the only Louisiana Democrat in Congress fighting for environmental safety and climate science. So you really may not see a lot of reason to think that the Democrats in your state are any different than the Republicans on the environment.
And what's Congressman Richmond's message about how he and the Democratic Party should fight for their constituents' and for their own party program and political mandate? “When we govern, we will govern with our values but when we can't pass legislation, we shouldn't be out there talking about it.”
Republicans take a different approach. On climate change and everything else.
Now Richmond will be heading the White House Office of Public Engagement, where one of his tasks is said to be acting as a liaison between business and environmentalists. The Daily Poster reports:
Richmond has repeatedly broken with his party on major climate and environmental votes. During the climate crisis that has battered his home state of Louisiana, Richmond has joined with Republicans to vote to increase fossil fuel exports and promote pipeline development. He also voted against Democratic legislation to place pollution limits on fracking — and he voted for GOP legislation to limit the Obama administration’s authority to more stringently regulate the practice.
Overall, Richmond has received a lifetime rating of 76 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, and he scored 46 percent in 2018 — one of the lowest ratings of any Democrat in Congress.
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