A

fter the tide turned against 
his conquest of continental 
Europe, 
Napoleon 
was 

decisively defeated by a coalition of 
European powers in the spring of 
1814. The French emperor was then 
exiled by the victors to the small 
island of Elba, off the western coast 
of Italy. As the coalition powers met 
to determine the postwar balance 
of power in Europe, Napoleon, 
conscious of his popularity in 
France, 
slipped 
out 
of 
exile, 

returned to Paris and, until his final 
defeat at Waterloo, resumed the 
imperial throne.

When the royalist government 

that replaced Napoleon caught 
wind of the former emperor’s 
landing in southern France, it 
deployed the military to stop his 
march towards Paris. Near the city 
of Grenoble, some of the royalist 
soldiers encountered Napoleon’s 
forces. Napoleon walked up to 
them and ripped open his coat. “If 
there is one among you who wishes 
to kill his emperor,” Napoleon 
supposedly said, “here I am.” None 
of the soldiers fired upon him. In 
fact, they defected, and joined with 
their emperor’s forces on his march 
towards Paris.

206 years later and one Atlantic 

Ocean away, Americans contended 
with their own emperor. The people 

have spoken, and King Donald I has 
been dethroned. Now that President 
Donald Trump will not occupy the 
Oval Office come Jan. 20, 2021, a 
civil war is coming. Not that kind 
of civil war, thank God — a civil war 
within the Republican Party.

Where does the GOP leadership 

go from here? Do they try to smother 
the Trumpian populist movement, 
drop the lame duck president like a 
hot orange potato, slowly distancing 
themselves 
from 
a 
disgraced 

Trump, in favor of a return to 
establishment normalcy? Or do they 
still champion Trumpism, allowing 
the outgoing president’s movement 
to continue to define the party?

“You 
know 
how 
to 
make 

America great again?” asked Sen. 
Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in 2015. 
“Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.” 
Sounding like a Democrat, Graham 
continued by calling then-candidate 
Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, 
religious 
bigot,” 
and 
defiantly 

pronounced that Trump “doesn’t 
represent my party.”

Graham, being the spineless 

shill that he is, later became one of 
Trump’s most vocal supporters in 
the Senate. But will he, and others in 
his position, now turn their backs on 
the president again? With Trump 
now trumped, what’s the expedient 
move?

It’s hard to predict the behavior 

of hypocrites like Graham, because 
hypocrites, 
being 
hypocrites, 

are unpredictable by nature. In 
the coming weeks, however, the 
rhetoric of these folks will be telling 
as to the direction of the Republican 
Party. But what will the two sides 
of the Republicans’ civil war be? 
And more importantly, who will 
ultimately win the soul of the GOP?

My best guess is the Old Guard 

— the Mitch McConnell, Lindsey 
Graham and Kevin McCarthy types 
— will slowly and surely distance 
themselves from Trump. Not an 
outright rejection, but a cautious, 
wakeless troll in the direction 
of normalcy. The problem — the 
futility, really — with this approach 
is that the party’s base, its soul and 
core, is so hopelessly anchored 
to Trump that to shed the naked 
emperor would be to shed its 
identity. Once Trump became the 
Republican Party nominee in 2016 
and the likes of Graham decided to 
become his loyal minions, the GOP 
became married to Trump. Trump’s 
loss in 2020 will not mean a clean 
divorce. In fact, it won’t even mean 
a separation.

The New York Times’s David 

Brooks said it well in August 
2020. Even in the event of a failed 
re-election, Trump will “still be the 

center of everything Republican. 
Ambitious Republicans will have 
to lash themselves to the husk of 
the dying czar if they want to have 

any future in the party. The whole 

party will go Trump-crazed and 
brain dead for another four years.”

With the exception of a few (and far 

between) principled stands against 

Trump’s lunacy (courtesy of John 

McCain, Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake), 
the GOP sold out to a bombastic 
charlatan who peddled lie upon lie 
upon lie for 48 straight months, and 
made “the greatest country on Earth” 
the dumpster-fire laughing stock of 
the world. Miraculously, Trump still 
remains highly popular amongst 
Republicans. Republican leadership 
— like everyone in their profession — 
are nothing if not self-preservational. 
So long as Trump remains popular 
with the Republican base, he’ll 
remain popular with the Old Guard 
that ultimately embraced him.

The toothpaste is out of the tube; 

Trumpism will triumph.

Biden restored the professionalism 

and dignity befitting of a presidential 
administration.

Opinion

M

issaukee 
County, 
a 

secluded 
community 

in the northern Lower 

Peninsula with a population just 
edging 15,000, is a long way from 
Detroit. According to Google Maps, 
Missaukee County sits over 200 
miles from Motor City, a distance 
that can be covered in about 3 hours 
by car. 

At first glance, there’s nothing 

extraordinary 
about 
Missaukee 

County. It’s just another rural 
community barely noticeable on 
a map. But dig a little deeper, and 
there’s something about Missaukee 
that stands out: It is one of the most 
conservative counties in the state 
of Michigan. According to 2020 
election results, Missaukee voted 
75.9% for President Donald Trump; 
75.8% for Republican U.S. Senate 
candidate John James; and 78.6% 
for U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, 
R-Mich. By contrast, Detroit — 
the largest city in Michigan and 
a solid blue community — voted 
93.5% for former Vice President Joe 
Biden; 90.9% for Sen. Gary Peters, 
D-Mich.; and 92.3% for Rep. Brenda 
Lawrence, D-Mich.

This 
vast 
political 
divide 

between communities like Detroit 
and Missaukee is a phenomenon 
becoming more common across the 
country. As urbanization continues 
and 
cities 
and 
suburbs 
grow 

rapidly, rural areas continue to lose 
both population and power. It is 
becoming increasingly normal for 
one or two concentrated urban areas 
— which usually are predominantly 
Democratic — to wield control 
over an entire state. While urban 
areas continue to expand, taking 
representation away from sparsely 
populated areas, our country is 
forgetting and neglecting rural 
America.

In Michigan, this trend has 

been 
prominent 
for 
decades. 

Metro Detroit, according to the 
land 
boundaries 
delineated 
by 

the 
Detroit-Warren-Dearborn 

Statistical Area, has a population 
of 4.32 million people. This means 
that the greater Detroit region, 
which covers less than 7% of 
Michigan’s land area, accounts for 
over 43% of its population. In the 
November general election, the two 
largest counties in Metro Detroit 
(as well as Michigan), Wayne and 
Oakland, voted 68.0% and 56.2% 
for Biden respectively. Votes for the 
Democratic presidential candidate 
from vastly urban areas are arguably 
what put Biden over the top in our 
state, securing him Michigan’s 16 
electoral votes; the same is true for 
Peters, who also secured Michigan 
by narrow margins.

There is significant evidence 

for this phenomenon in other 
Midwestern 
states, 
too. 
Take 

Illinois, for instance. Illinois has a 
population of roughly 12.7 million, 
but the Chicago metropolitan area 
accounts for a staggering 75% of 
that tally, even though it takes up a 
miniscule 13% of Illinois’ land area. 
In the presidential election, Illinois 
voted 55.1% for Biden, even though 
Trump neared 80% of the vote in 
many of the state’s rural counties. In 
Wisconsin, which borders Illinois to 
the north, the state’s urban areas like 

Milwaukee and Madison carried 
Democrats to victory too, with Biden 
edging Trump by a margin of 20,000 
votes. Minnesota, which voted 
52.5% for Biden, tells a similar story.

Outside of the Midwest, the 

same trend is even more apparent. 
Biden easily won New York’s 29 
electoral votes with nearly 60% of 
the vote, even though the map of the 
Empire State has vast swaths of red. 
Pennsylvania, which was seen as a 
battleground for this presidential 
election, narrowly handed its 20 
electoral votes over to Biden. The 
former vice president unsurprisingly 
ran the table in Philadelphia and 
Pittsburgh, while nearly all of the 
rural areas in Pennsylvania turned 
out in massive numbers for Trump.

Finally, as this trend continues 

in the Midwest and Northeast, it 
has picked up steam in recent years 
in Southern and Western states, 
making it increasingly difficult 
for Republican politicians to gain 
traction. One of the most obvious 
examples of this is the state of 
Virginia. According to UVAToday, 
“Virginia in 2000 was a solid red 
state,” and this year, “its metro 
areas turned it blue for the fourth 
consecutive 
election.” 
While 

President George W. Bush picked up 
a comfortable 52.5% of the vote in 
2000 against Democratic candidate 
Al Gore, Biden had a commanding 
lead in the same state, winning it by 
54%.

Now, political scientists theorize 

that Georgia is the next Virginia. 
Like Virginia, Georgia used to be a 
solidly red state. But the growth of 
the Atlanta metropolitan area has 
moved the state from a Republican 
stronghold to a tossup. While 
Trump won Georgia by comfortable 
margins in 2016, Biden just barely 
prevailed over Trump in 2020, 
garnering 49.5% of the vote. In the 
future, it is quite plausible that like 
Virginia, Georgia will be a solidly 
Democratic state as the population 
continues to shift to urban and 
suburban areas.

Georgia isn’t the only state that 

is demonstrating these population 
shifts. For example, as Arizona’s sole 
urban center of Phoenix continues 
to enlarge, the state has moved 
from the Republican column in 
most elections to an apparent toss 
up. Trump also took Arizona easily 
in 2016 but lost to Biden by slim 
margins in 2020. Nevada, with the 
growing Las Vegas metro area, and 
North Carolina, with the Raleigh 
and Charlotte metropolitan areas, 
are additional clear examples of this 
accelerating trend. While Trump 
won North Carolina in 2016 with 
little trouble, the state was so close in 
2020 that it took days to call. 

As the 2020 presidential election 

becomes a distant memory and 
time goes by, this trend will not 
only continue where it has already 
started, but it will also likely become 
more common in areas where it has 
not. While increased urbanization 
and suburbanization may be seen 
as very favorable to the Democratic 
Party, since America’s cities vote 
reliably Democratic, the deepening 
urban-rural divide creates problems 
on the national scale. For one, rural 
America continues to deal with 

staggering poverty rates, which 
advocacy group Save the Children 
has called an “emergency.” In 2016, 
according to NPR, almost a quarter 
of American children growing up in 
rural areas were poor; meanwhile, 
rural areas have been plagued by a 
lack of quality health care options 
for years, a crisis exacerbated by 
the pandemic. Rural areas continue 
to be increasingly forgotten, and 
these regions aren’t getting the 
representation they deserve.

More and more, conservative 

areas of our country are voicing 
their opposition to liberal power 
centers far away; rural Americans 
are tired of being left behind. In 
left-leaning Oregon, which voted 
overwhelmingly for Biden, a group 
of red counties successfully passed 
a ballot initiative to set in motion 
a process by which they may leave 
Oregon and join Idaho. In Illinois, 
a proposal has been discussed by 
conservative areas to break off 
from liberal Chicago. While these 
conversations are nothing new, 
they have gotten renewed attention 
over the course of the COVID-19 
crisis, as Democratic governors set 
regulations for entire states, which 
includes red areas, to curb the 
spread of the coronavirus.

There is no easy solution to 

solve this problem. It clearly sets 
a bad precedent to allow several 
counties in one state like Illinois or 
Oregon to secede. If that were the 
case, it would only be a matter of 
time before state boundaries in the 
continental U.S. looked radically 
different. Meanwhile, such a trend 
would have drastic logistical and 
political consequences. 

As 
the 
urban-rural 
divide 

continues to exert its influence 
more and more, some people are 
expressing interest in Nebraska 
and Maine’s congressional district 
method to allocate electoral votes 
in presidential elections. While 
most states, including Michigan, 
are 
winner-take-all, 
different 

presidential candidates can win 
different congressional districts 
in Nebraska and Maine. If the 
Electoral College were reformed to 
operate on the basis of congressional 
districts instead of entire states, 
it would take away much of the 
influence of predominantly urban 
areas, since rural districts in blue 
states would typically be won by 
Republican candidates. Such a 
change could hurt the Democratic 
Party in some regions, but it 
would help both Republicans and 
Democrats in obvious ways. For 
example, Texas, Florida and Ohio 
all awarded their electoral votes 
to Trump in the 2020 presidential 
election, but all three of these states 
have significant blue territory 
in urban areas. In a reformed 
Electoral College, while Democrats 
would be harmed in blue states like 
New York and Illinois, they would 
be able to acquire more electoral 
votes from urban centers that aren’t 
represented in red states.

The forgotten segment of society: rural America

EVAN STERN | COLUMN

L

iving in a hyper-divided 
post-election nation, it’s 
easy to forget the feeling of 

unity that existed at the beginning 
of the pandemic. Whether it was 
rallying 
around 
our 
essential 

workers or sharing our desperate 
search for toilet paper, a common 
enemy seemed to unite us, if only 
for a moment. Perhaps my favorite 
example of this is the strangest. 
Throughout the spring and early 
summer, in Denver, where I am 
spending my semester, people let 
out their inner wolf for a minute 
each evening. 

At 8 p.m., as the sun would 

begin to set, a series of scattered 
howls would slowly rise into a 
cacophony that echoed through 
the entire city. Originally intended 
as a sign of support for essential 
workers, it slowly grew to become 
a community-bonding event. As 
we all felt the grueling effects 
of social isolation, calling out to 
each other, especially in such an 
unconventional way, felt like the 
perfect way to express frustration 
and solidarity during a pandemic. 
While this habit has since ended, 
the howling effect may have had a 
lasting effect on some Coloradans 
as they were casting their ballots 
this election. 

On Nov. 3, Colorado citizens 

voted for the reintroduction of gray 
wolves into their state. Proposition 
114, which requires the Colorado 
government to reintroduce wolves 
into the Western Rockies by 2024, 
was the first successful voter-based 
initiative to reintroduce wolves into 
any U.S. state. Colorado will join the 
rest of the Northern Rockies states, 
as well as Wisconsin, Minnesota, 
Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, 
the Carolinas and Michigan to be 
one of the few remaining states 
with wolf populations. 

Before European colonization, 

wolves lived in every U.S. state 
except 
Hawaii. 
Centuries 
of 

deforestation and the carrying 
out of programs aimed at their 
total elimination pushed wolves 
out of every region but two 
slivers of northern Minnesota 
and Michigan by the 1930s. After 
being declared an endangered 
species in 1978, gray wolves 
slowly began to repopulate the 
Northern Great Lakes. Wolves 
immigrating from Canada or 
introduced through conservation 
projects expanded the gray wolf 
population to include the Upper 
Peninsula 
of 
Michigan 
and 

northern Wisconsin.

With an estimated population 

of 4,400, about two-thirds of the 
U.S’s wolves now live in these three 
states. Nearly 700 wolves in 143
packs currently roam the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan. They have 
so far remained in this sparsely
populated section of the state, yet
to resettle the Lower Peninsula.
Even so, wolves have been found
in the Lower Peninsula in two
incidences in the past few decades 
— the most recent in 2015. With
studies indicating that the Upper
Peninsula has nearly reached the
maximum number of wolves that
it can sustain, the likelihood that
these rare examples may one day
result in the recolonization of the
Lower Peninsula is increasing. 

If wolves were to reestablish 

themselves 
on 
the 
Lower 

Peninsula, researchers guess that 
they might end up in one of the 
various state parks that line the 
tip of the mitten. Already home 
to red foxes, whitetail deer and 
black bears, the area contains 
vast forested territories that the 
wolves would need to survive. In 
their absence, much of the nation 

has experienced an overexpansion 
of deer populations and the 
dominance of the invasive coyote 
as a primary predator. Here, they 
would once again fulfill their role 
as the ecosystem’s top predators, 
keeping both populations in check. 
Despite these benefits, spending 
centuries teaching people to hate 
wolves 
has 
made 
convincing 

them to welcome wolves into 
their communities an expectedly 
daunting task. 

Even 
in 
Colorado, 
where 

Republicans were heavily outvoted 
by Democrats, Proposition 114 
passed by 1.2 percentage points. 
Proponents 
of 
the 
initiative 

were 
surprised 
by 
the 
slim 

margins, expecting Denver and 
its liberal suburbs to push it to an 
overwhelming victory. It reflects 
people’s widespread suspicions 
toward an animal many of us are 
first introduced to as “big” and 
“bad.” 
Republican 
politicians 

have long played into these 
misconceived notions in order 
to persecute the canines. When 
they were briefly stripped of their 
endangered species classification, 
and the federal protection that 
comes with it, in 2012, Wisconsin 
Gov. Scott Walker seized the 
opportunity to drastically reduce 
his state’s wolf population and there 
was even an anti-wolf committee 
in the Dep. of Natural Resources. 
During the three hunting seasons 
the state carried out before a 
federal judge redesignated their 
endangered status in 2014, more 
than half of the state’s wolves 
were killed. 

Evan Stern can be reached at 

erstern@umich.edu.

RILEY DEHR | COLUMN

Oh, howl no!

Wednesday, November 18, 2020 
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Design courtesy of Erin Shi

MAX STEINBAUM | COLUMN

We haven’t seen the last of Donald

Riley Dehr can be reached at 

rdehr@umich.edu.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Max Steinbaum can be reached at 

maxst@umich.edu.

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Online Event: Thursday, November 19, 2020 | 4:00 p.m.

 An online lecture. For more information, visit 
events.umich.edu/event/75456 or call 734.615.6667.

Anti-Jewish 
Pogroms and 
the Origins of 
Multiculturalism

JEFFREY 
 VEIDLINGER

Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of 
History and Judaic Studies
Director, Frankel Center for Judaic Studies

