OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
We must reject
toxic lies of racism
t was difficult to dispassionately follow the news last week-
end, as groups of neo-Nazis and counter-protesters clashed
in Charlottesville, Virginia. One woman was murdered. Two
police officers died in a terrible accident.
That much anger, hate and violence is hard to stomach, and
it surely left Americans across the country seething as Nazi and
Confederate sympathizers marched angrily through our public
space.
In the wake of the violence, about 100 people locally turned
out Sunday night at a vigil organized by Indivisible North Coast
Oregon, sang protest songs and observed a moment of silence for
the fallen.
In Charlottesville, dozens of major issues were at play, but
there’s one fact that can hopefully find universal agreement: You
can either be an American, or you can be a Nazi — you can’t be
both. You cannot call for the overthrow of America’s core princi-
ples and still call yourself a patriot.
Photos of protesters waving American, Confederate and Nazi
flags are incongruent. Those governments — their principles and
their history — are opposites, enemies. They opposed each other,
they warred against each other.
Removing flags from public spaces and tearing down statues
doesn’t “erase history.” It just doesn’t hold that history in high
regard and encourage its celebration.
Germany long ago unceremoniously destroyed Nazi-era mon-
uments. That history certainly hasn’t been erased — most people
are crystal clear on what the swastika stood for. And what it stood
for is disturbingly undergoing a resurgence here in America.
There is no reason a patriotic American would tolerate or pro-
mote Nazi ideals. It’s the flag of a government that declared war
on the United States, that killed hundreds of thousands of our
brave soldiers and millions of other people. A government that
waged world war.
We have freedom of speech in this country, but allowance
should never be confused with acceptance.
As U.S. Sen. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, said Saturday, “My brother
didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged
here at home.” Every one of us should proudly endorse this view.
We must stand up for that most American (and Jeffersonian)
of beliefs: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. Wherever they arise, we must always reject the toxic
lies of racism and the anti-American ideas and speech that were on
display in Charlottesville.
I
Astoria taking right steps
with police department
T
he city of Astoria is taking exactly the right strategic steps
to fix the beleaguered police department after the sudden
retirement of Police Chief Brad Johnston.
Johnston’s Aug. 2 retirement came after the findings of a
Portland labor attorney’s independent assessment of the depart-
ment ordered by City Manager Brett Estes. The assessment found
the department was at the “point of a crisis” and fraught with lead-
ership failures and staffing shortages that created unsustainable
overtime and deep morale problems.
The assessment also found Johnston exercised “extraordinarily
poor judgment” that resulted in a violation of city travel and eth-
ics policies. Estes said Johnston was aware of the findings prior to
his retirement, and that his decision to leave was “made in his own
volition.”
Instead of simply hiring a new chief, the city, through Estes,
is taking laudable steps that should provide both immediate lead-
ership and time to strategically address other issues the inquiry
raised.
The city’s first move was to tap the Oregon Association Chiefs
of Police interim leadership assistance program and hire Geoff
Spalding, who retired as chief of the Beaverton Police Department
in 2016 and had 31 years of experience with the Fullerton Police
Department in California, to lead the department on an interim
basis until a permanent hire is made. Estes said the hiring pro-
cess could take up to six months. Meanwhile, the well-qualified
Spalding will begin work Aug. 28.
The city is already addressing staffing issues in Astoria 911
Dispatch, which Johnston also supervised. City councilors
approved the hiring of an operations supervisor for the center,
which it did not have before.
Once Spalding begins, he will have time to address other staff-
ing issues and rebuild relationships and confidence among the
officers. He’ll also be able to work with staff in identifying the
qualities they desire in a new chief, which Estes can then use in
the hiring process.
While it’s not an immediate fix, it’s the smart fix for the depart-
ment, one that should provide long-term benefits.
Our house divided
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
S
ummertime, sweltering and
stressful, makes our cold civil
war feel hot. The madness
and violence of
last year crested
in the summer,
with the shootings
of cops in Dallas
and Baton Rouge.
Now the dog days
are here again, and
with them a new spasm — white
supremacists with tiki torches, antifa
and the alt-right going at it, a white
nationalist running down protesters,
a little Weimar re-enactment in the
streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.
So while the president blathers
about how some of the torchbearers
were fine people, other people are
talking about whether we could
have a civil war for real. In The
New Yorker, Robin Wright quotes
a State Department expert on inter-
necine conflict whose personal esti-
mate is that “the United States faces
a 60 percent chance of civil war
over the next 10 to 15 years.” Lest
you doubt his science, he was part
of an informal poll by the military
journalist and historian Tom Ricks
earlier this year, which produced
the lower but still notable consensus
estimate that we have a 35 percent
chance of falling into civil war.
What do these bets mean? Their
language evokes our own 1860s,
1930s Spain or contemporary Syria.
But Ricks says he means something
narrower — a period more like the
late 1960s and early 1970s, with
serious and sustained political
violence and widespread resistance
to political authority, but without
Chancellorsvilles or Guernicas.
That seems more plausible
than what people usually mean by
civil war. But we are still not close
to even that level of breakdown,
nowhere close to the social chaos
and revolutionary fervor that gave
us 2,500 bombings in 18 months
during Richard Nixon’s first term.
The chaos during Trump’s ascent
and presidency has been extreme by
the standards of recent politics but
not by the standards of America’s
worst periods of crisis.
So why the civil-war anxieties?
In part, because our media envi-
ronment breeds hysteria; in part,
because Trump himself does so.
But the underlying reason people
are worried is a plausible one:
America’s divisions are genuinely
serious, our cold civil war entirely
real.
Our divisions are partisan: The
parties are more ideologically
polarized than at any point in the
20th century, and party loyalty
increasingly shapes not just votes
but social identity, friendship, where
you live and whom you hope your
children marry.
Our divisions are religious: The
decline of institutional Christianity
means that we have no religious
center apart from Oprah and Joel
Osteen, the metaphysical gap
between the secularist wing of lib-
eralism and religious traditionalists
is far wider than the intra-Christian
divisions of the past, and on the
fringes you can see hints of a fully
post-Christian and post-liberal right
and left.
Our divisions are racial and
ethnic and class-based and
generational, conspicuously so
in the Trump era. And they are
geographic: The metropolis versus
the hinterland, the coasts against the
middle of the country. It would not
be hard to sketch lines on a map par-
titioning the USA into two or three
Denise Sanders/The Baltimore Sun
Workers remove the Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jack-
son monument in Wyman Park early Wednesday in Baltimore.
or four more homogeneous and per-
haps more functional republics. And
if you imagined some catastrophe
suddenly dissolving our political
order and requiring us to start anew,
it is not at all clear that we would be
able to forge a reunited republic, a
second continental nation.
Moreover, our divisions induce
a particular anxiety because each
of our two main factions reigns
supreme in one particular arena.
Conservatism is (somehow)
politically dominant, with control
of the legislative and executive
branches and a remarkable power
in the states. Meanwhile liberalism
dominates the cultural commanding
heights as never before, with not
only academia and the media
but also late-night television and
sportswriting and even young-adult
fiction more monolithically and —
to conservatives — oppressively
progressive.
A house
divided
against itself
can sometimes
stand for quite
a while — so
long as most
people prefer
its roof to
the rain
and wind.
So both sides have reasons to
feel threatened, disempowered and
surrounded; both can feel as though
they exist under a kind of enemy
rule.
Thus described, it may sound
remarkable that we haven’t plunged
into domestic chaos and civil strife
already. But not every American
is a partisan, there is still more to
life than politics for most of us, and
under the right circumstances peo-
ple with deep differences can live
together in peace for a great while
— so long as events do not force a
crisis, so long as the great political
or social questions don’t feel so
existential and zero-sum that they
cannot be managed or endured.
Slavery was such an existential
issue — but its closest analogue
today, abortion, does not lie so close
to the center of our politics. Race,
immigration and religious liberty
are all volatile, but the specific con-
troversies are more incremental than
existential: Voter-ID laws are not
Jim Crow, and toppling Confederate
statues isn’t Reconstruction; refugee
restrictions aren’t internment camps;
fights over the rights of Christian
businesses and colleges are not a
persecution.
An economic crisis can spur
a crackup. But our wealth and
the welfare state both cushion us
substantially, as we saw after the
Great Recession. Wars can lead to
dissolution: Opposition to the War
of 1812 brought New England to
the brink of secession, opposition
to Vietnam helped give us our
last era of calamity, and of course
defeat in World War I broke up the
multiethnic empires that the United
States increasingly resembles. But
our wars are so professionalized and
technologized that even unpopular
ones can be sustained a long time
without pushing domestic politics to
a breaking point.
This leaves the most likely near-
term threat to our fractured republic
as either something external to the
system — a worst-case pandemic or
terrorist attack, a climate-change-in-
duced catastrophe — or else a
threat concentrated at the top, in
the imperial presidency around
which our democratic derangements
increasingly revolve.
If you asked me to script a path
from where we are today to a period
of violent division or disunion, I
would invent a character with some
of the qualities of a Trump and
some of an Emmanuel Macron — a
charismatic leader who appeals not
just to the extremes but to some
populist or technocratic center,
and who promises an escape from
polarization and division and from
the gridlock that those divisions
have induced.
Then I would have this char-
acter retain his mystique more
successfully than usual for recent
presidents, and use it to pursue an
agenda at once extraconstitutional
and fairly popular, so that insti-
tutions would either struggle to
contain him or simply surrender in a
way they won’t for our current chief
executive. Then add the right crisis,
or the right cascade of them, and
imagine one side or the other in our
current cold civil war seeking actual
“Second Amendment remedies”
or forming a for-real Resistance
against presidential tyranny — and
suddenly you could have the kind
of strife that the experts cited
by Wright and Ricks seem to be
envisioning.
But watching Trump stagger
and Macron’s poll numbers sink,
I would still judge my imagined
scenario remote.
Things are getting worse in many
ways, and the rest of the Trump
era does not promise much in the
way of healing and reconciliation.
But despite what scripture tells us,
in politics a house divided against
itself can sometimes stand for quite
a while — so long as most people
prefer its roof to the rain and wind,
and relatively few have a clear and
pressing incentive to start knocking
down the walls.