I wondered if each day’s walk along the C&O would feel similar. For the most part, they haven’t. That said, today’s had resounding echoes of yesterday’s. Once again, I followed the C&O all morning, including a stunning stretch in which the land along the left side of the towpath slipped away completely, leaving me walking with a craggy wall to my right and a dropoff to the surging Potomac on my left. Near the midpoint of my walk, I broke with the C&O to veer inland to see historic Fort Frederick. Then, I followed the Western Maryland Rail Trail for a bit before reconnecting with the C&O for the home stretch to Hancock.
That said, Fort Frederick was a much shorter detour than Antietam. The fort saw action in three wars–the French and Indian, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. Given that, I wasn’t prepared for the pristine stone walls of the looming rectangular structure, with pointed bastions poking forth from each corner. I should have immediately sniffed out the restoration work, given its impressive condition, and indeed the fort was significantly repaired in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Regardless, I had the fort to myself, with not a single human in sight.
Otherwise, the walk was quiet and cool, with bright blue skies mostly winning their struggle against the evening’s clouds. Aside from a few raindrops in yesterday’s walk and the opening steps at Cape Henlopen, this remains a dry hike. I should be thrilled. I am thrilled. And yet, I wonder how often the National Weather Service needs to issue a serious wildfire risk in this part of the country in early March, as it did today. A very worrying summer may be ahead of us. I will be walking through that, too.
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On most days, I figure out what I’m going to write about only after the walk, after the shower and laundry and feeding, when I sit down and deliberate over what occurred. Occasionally, though, I know exactly what I’m going to write about ahead of time. For example, last Tuesday I knew I would write about the experience of being in Washington DC on Super Tuesday.
Oh, wait–I didn’t write anything about that.
Given the political climate a couple of weeks earlier, when I was still sitting comfortably at home, I expected high drama on that stacked day of primaries. Instead of seasons 1-7 of Game of Thrones, though, Democrats received season 8 in a single week, with months’ worth of plot lines and capable contenders all falling to the wayside. (I didn’t watch the show, but based on all the moaning I endured, I think that analogy works.) By Tuesday morning, most had bent the knee to Biden and Super Tuesday only served to reinforce his primacy.
In Portland, Oregon, the overwhelming majority of people that I am surrounded by fall on the liberal end of the spectrum. Even the conservatives tend to be Never Trumpers, their teeth already well and truly gritted in preparation for a presidential vote to be cast for a Democrat. And yet, there is precious little vocal enthusiasm expressed towards Biden. The moderates that I know were drawn more towards Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and even Kamala Harris. Greater excitement tends to surround Bernie and Warren–heck, even Yang! (Of course, even Biden outshines Bloomberg.)
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been listening to Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized. It’s difficult to summarize an author’s nuanced argument when you’ve been listening to it while walking, and I’m sure I won’t do it full justice here, but I’ll give it a shot as I find it useful here. Klein quickly challenges the notion that the Democrats are the party of identity politics, asserting that everyone engages in politics as an expression of their identity. He explains that there is a conceptual difference between our political identities and our other diverse markers of identity. However, importantly, in recent years the relationship between the Republican political identity and the personal identities of its members have become ever tighter. There is greater homogeneity there, with Republican expressed ethno-religious values aligning ever more closely with its members. By contrast, the Democratic Party has a far more diverse composition of members. It needs to speak to a much wider array of identities.
In practice, this means that Republicans have, in a sense, an easier job of messaging. They can appeal directly to the base, knowing that their base comprises a clear majority of those inclined to vote Republican. In one poll that Klein cites, when asked what direction they want the Republican Party to move, the greatest support was clearly for it becoming more conservative.
By contrast, Democrats have a more challenging task. They need to develop a message that can reach their widely varied constituents, mobilizing as many as possible while alienating as few as possible. Given how strong the Republican base is, and how effectively gerrymandered some states are, Democrats even need to snag some votes from moderate conservatives if they hope to win close national elections. In the same poll, the greatest support among Democrats was for the party to become more moderate.
For Republicans, the incentives lie in going hard to the right. For Democrats, there’s a greater need to be more moderate, even in the face of a growing movement to the left.
All of which is to say, from Klein’s perspective, the Biden surge makes all kinds of sense.
