James Carville to speak to PARCA in September
The Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA) is hosting an evening with Clinton-era Democratic political consultant James Carville in Birmingham on September 29. “The PARCA Speaker Series invites important, relevant voices to Alabama for an evening of conversation with our state’s thought leaders and opinion makers. Past speakers were George Will (2021) and Jon Meacham (2019). This year, we welcome James Carville,” the group announced in a statement. James “The Ragin’ Cajun” Carville is one of America’s best-known political consultants. His career has spanned five decades during which time he has represented a long list of candidates across the globe. But Carville is probably best known for his work with the campaigns of former President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack. He also was a consultant for then U.S. Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential run. Carville has a long list of electoral successes. He has most recently focused on campaigns in more than 23 countries around the globe, stretching from the continents of South America to Europe to Africa and, most recently, Asia. Most Americans recognize Carville from his many appearances on television. From 2002 to 2005, he even hosted the CNN program Crossfire. The event will be at the Red Mountain Theater at 1600 3rd Ave. South: Birmingham, Alabama 35233. The evening will begin at 5:30 p.m. with a welcome reception. Carville is scheduled to deliver his remarks at 7:00 p.m. Afterwards, there will be a question-and-answer session. Dessert and book signings will follow at 8:00 p.m. Tickets start at $125. According to their website, PARCA works to support and inform policymakers at all levels, from state-wide elected officials to Legislators, to city and county officials, to public school administrators, and to nonprofit leaders. PARCA is Alabama’s first and only nonprofit, nonpartisan, good government research center. To connect with the author of this story, or to comment, email brandonmreporter@gmail.com.
J. Pepper Bryars: Cancel culture comes to conservative country
The true crime of a censor isn’t muzzling someone’s mouth. It’s muffling everyone else’s ears. That lesson and many others on the importance of free expression and the exchange of ideas were lost recently when Samford University in Birmingham relented to the joint demands of an online petition and its Student Government Association to disinvite historian Jon Meacham from speaking about American history during inauguration ceremonies for the school’s new president. Meacham is well-known for his presidential biographies, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for writing American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. But the crime that got him canceled in conservative country? From the petition: “Jon Meacham is significantly involved with the Planned Parenthood organization. He has spoken at their fundraising events, his book is used for the Planned Parenthood fundraiser, and overall his beliefs and core values do not align with those of Samford University, as it is a Southern Baptist institution.” It’s no surprise that Meacham is liberal and pro-choice. Anyone who has ever seen him on cable news mixing his historical perspectives with his personal political preferences knows that. But it’s disheartening to see a conservative campus community adopt the Marxist tactics of the left (and of the Pharisees, by the way) by insisting that unless you share all of their beliefs, you’re unwelcome in their midst, even if only to share your views on an unrelated issue, even if only as a guest, even if only to break bread for an evening. Have we really reached the point in America, and in academia most alarmingly, where in order to gather to discuss a topic, everyone present must already agree on everything? Can we not see that this is a blueprint for ignorance? Meacham wasn’t coming to one of the most conservative campuses in the Bible Belt to advocate for abortion rights. While he is indeed pro-choice, and while he did speak at a Planned Parenthood event, abortion policy isn’t his stock-and-trade. He’s a historian, and as the university noted, his lecture was going to flow from his latest book, The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, which is, rather ironically, about how our nation has overcome periods of deep, sometimes violent, political and cultural division. But since Meacham’s also pro-choice (along with half of our country, sadly), the petitioners and SGA representatives presumably think he’s not worth hearing from, and also by extension, half of our country isn’t worth hearing from, or talking to, or treating with the same courtesy we’d want from people who hold different beliefs from our own. To place the petitioner’s argument in its best and strongest light, they’re concerned that by giving someone a platform to speak on their campus about American history, who has also been involved with events elsewhere promoting abortion rights, it significantly tarnishes the strong, Christian reputation of Samford and weakens its ability to fulfill its mission. Maybe so, in the minds of some. But if you’re okay with that logic, then you’d also have to be okay with someone who happens to be pro-life being canceled from speaking where their values “do not align” with whatever progressive institution to which they may be invited to speak on an unrelated topic. You’d also have to be okay with Brandeis University disinviting Ayaan Hirsi Ali from its campus because, as a survivor of female genital mutilation and the target of Muslim terrorists, she’s a critic of Islam. You’d also have to be okay with the City of Atlanta sacking its fire chief, Kelvin Cochran, after he wrote about his traditional beliefs on marriage and sexuality in a book for his church’s Bible study class. And you’d also have to be okay with Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceling a lecture from Dorian Abbot, a professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, simply because he supports merit-based college admissions rather than race-based standards. Canceling someone because they don’t “align” with your tribe is exactly what the far left is doing all across America — in schools, universities, workplaces, clubs, even on sports teams — and their quest for purification and uniformity is making everybody angrier, meaner, and in the end, dumber. And it has to stop. J. Pepper Bryars is a conservative opinion writer from Mobile who lives in Hunstville. Readers can find him at https://jpepper.substack.com.
Donald Trump, Joe Biden prepare to debate at a time of mounting crises
The Tuesday night debate will offer a massive platform for Trump and Biden to outline their starkly different visions for a country facing multiple crises.
Donald Trump embraces legacy of Andrew Jackson
It was an ugly, highly personal presidential election. An unvarnished celebrity outsider who pledged to represent the forgotten laborer took on an intellectual member of the Washington establishment looking to extend a political dynasty in the White House. Andrew Jackson‘s triumph in 1828 over President John Quincy Adams bears striking similarities to Donald Trump‘s victory over Hillary Clinton last year, and some of those most eager to point that out are in the Trump White House. Trump’s team has seized upon the parallels between the current president and the long-dead Tennessee war hero. Trump has hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office and Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who has pushed the comparison, told reporters after Trump’s inaugural address that “I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House.” Trump himself mused during his first days in Washington that “there hasn’t been anything like this since Andrew Jackson.” It’s a remarkable moment of rehabilitation for a figure whose populist credentials and anti-establishment streak has been tempered by harsher elements of his legacy, chiefly his forced removal of Native Americans that caused disease and the death of thousands. “Both were elected presidents as a national celebrity; Jackson due to prowess on battlefield and Trump from making billions in his business empire,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University. “And it’s a conscious move for Trump to embrace Jackson. In American political lore, Jackson represents the forgotten rural America while Trump won by bringing out that rural vote and the blue collar vote.” The seventh president, known as “Old Hickory” for his toughness on the battlefield, gained fame when he led American forces to a victory in the Battle of New Orleans in the final throes of the War of 1812. He did serve a term representing Tennessee in the Senate, but he has long been imagined as a rough and tumble American folk hero, an anti-intellectual who believed in settling scores against political opponents and even killed a man in a duel for insulting the honor of Jackson’s wife. Jackson also raged against what he deemed “a corrupt bargain” that prevented him from winning the 1824 election against Adams when the race was thrown to the House of Representatives after no candidate received a majority in the Electoral College. Even before the vote in November, Trump railed against a “rigged” election and has repeatedly asserted, without evidence, widespread voter fraud prevented his own popular vote triumph. Jackson’s ascension came at a time when the right to vote was expanded to all white men — and not just property-owners — and he fashioned himself into a populist, bringing new groups of voters into the electoral system. Remarkably, the popular vote tripled between Jackson’s loss in 1824 and his victory four years later, and he used the nation’s growing newspaper industry — like Trump on social media — to spread his message. Many of those new voters descended on Washington for Jackson’s 1829 inauguration and the crowd of thousands that mobbed the Capitol and the White House forced Jackson to spend his first night as president in a hotel. Once in office, he continued his crusade as a champion for the common man by opposing the Second Bank of the United States, which he declared to be a symptom of a political system that favored the rich and ignored “the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics, and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves.” Jackson, as Trump hopes to do, expanded the powers of the presidency, and a new political party, the new Democratic party, coalesced around him in the 1820s. He was the first non-Virginia wealthy farmer or member of the Adams dynasty in Massachusetts to be elected president. “The American public wanted a different kind of president. And there’s no question Donald Trump is a different kind of president,” Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said this past week. “He’s now comparing himself to Andrew Jackson. I think it’s a pretty good, a pretty good comparison. That’s how big a change Jackson was from the Virginia and Massachusetts gentlemen who had been president of the United States for the first 40 years.” But there are also limits to the comparison, historians say. Unlike Jackson, who won in 1828 in a landslide, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. Jon Meacham, who wrote a 2008 biography of Jackson, “American Lion,” said Jackson was “an outsider in style but not in substance” and his outlandish public pronouncements would often be followed by hours of deep conversations and letter-writing hashing out political calculations. “He was a wild man during the day but a careful diplomat at night,” said Meacham, who said it was too early to know whether Trump, like Jackson, “had a strategy behind his theatrics,” and whether Trump had the ability to harness the wave of populism that has swept the globe as it did in the 1820s. “The moment is Jacksoninan but do we have a Jackson in the Oval Office?” Meacham asked. Trump’s appropriation of Jackson came after his victory. Trump never mentioned Jackson during the campaign or discussed Jackson during a series of conversations with Meacham last spring But it is hardly unique for a president to adopt a previous one as a historical role model. Barack Obama frequently invoked Abraham Lincoln. Dwight Eisenhower venerated George Washington. Jackson himself had been claimed by Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, both of whom — unlike Trump — interpreted Jackson’s populism as a call for expanded government, in part to help the working class. There could be other comparisons for Trump. A favorable one would be Eisenhower, also a nonpolitician who governed like a hands-off CEO. A less favorable one would be Andrew Johnson, a tool of his party whose erratic behavior helped bring about his impeachment. Trump’s embrace could signal an
