by Nathan Kroms Davis April 5, 2022, The Free Press

I’ve been thinking lately about the strategic side of politics. Partially, this is because I recently read Master of the Senate, the third volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and it’s a lot (1,167 numbered pages!) to chew on. Partially, it’s because I’m considering whether or not to run for a second term on the Rockland City Council.

Master of the Senate covers Johnson’s time in the U.S. Senate, with a particular focus on his role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This relatively weak legislation strengthened the right to vote but also hobbled federal enforcement of this right by effectively allowing all-White juries in the South to decide relevant cases, and has been mostly overshadowed by the much more powerful civil rights and voting bills of the 1960s, in which Johnson also played a decisive role.

These days, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 is perhaps best remembered for Strom Thurmond’s filibuster of 24 hours and 18 minutes, the longest in the Senate’s history. But still, it was the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and though it was a weakened product of backroom legislative maneuvering, it was also a landmark in the civil rights battles of that era. Johnson’s attitude towards civil rights up until that time had been mixed (to put it charitably), but he deserves much of the credit for getting the bill passed.

But why and how did he get it passed? Caro convincingly argues that, though he could be sympathetic and compassionate, Johnson was motivated mostly by personal ambition, and as Senate majority leader, he needed to pass a civil rights bill that was sufficiently palatable to both liberals and conservatives so as not to destroy his chances of becoming president. He accomplished this through unparalleled dealmaking, arm-twisting, and procedural wrangling. In a particularly striking passage, Caro describes Johnson’s creation of a middle ground in one of the many skirmishes leading to passage of the bill as an act of political genius. In Caro’s telling, Johnson’s achievement here was not simply the recognition or even discovery of an existing middle ground, but an actual act of creation.

There’s plenty to be disgusted about here — how dare Lyndon Johnson subordinate civil rights to his own ambitions? — but also something I find alluring in Johnson’s skill, strategy, and ruthlessness in achieving a political victory that would, with courageous and tireless activism by millions of Black Americans and others, lead to greater victories in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

This story has also inspired my thinking about and approach to legislation over the past few months. In particular, how can I and others create middle ground? Not just recognize, but actually create. And not something mushy and insubstantial, but solid ground on which can be built improvements for real people in the real world.

Consider Rockland’s increasingly archaic land use and zoning code, which impedes the construction of both new housing and new commercial development, in many cases for no good reasons, or for reasons that I think
have receded in comparative importance to other factors like our current housing crisis. The need to modernize and relax (and perhaps, in areas like environmental sustainability, strengthen) this code seems to be increasingly recognized by, among other parties, housing advocates, developers, employers, people who can’t afford to live here, and property owners who are simply concerned about broadening the tax base.

But the range of public opinion on these issues doesn’t exist along a linear spectrum, and so there is no “middle” to be found. Rather, there are sets of weighted concerns: sprawl, fairness, sustainability, taxes, quality of life, economic vitality, and others, that exist and jostle in a multidimensional space. And so the
relevant task of public life is not simply an attempt to find a middle ground along a line, but rather creative exploration in this multidimensional space.

Depending on your position within that space, some of these concerns are prominent and some are obscure, and navigating among them can be an act of creative exploration.

Thinking of public policy as an open multidimensional space allows for the discovery (or even creation) of regions of thought and action that are inaccessible from a linear political spectrum. This type of thinking is hard to do, as it requires reconsidering and sometimes rejecting some of the premises that bound public life. In that sense, it is radical, for “radical” derives from the Latin “radix,” meaning “root”: change at the root. In the case of zoning, I believe this should ultimately mean scrapping our current system and starting fresh from a set of goals and physical constraints, and I believe that one of those goals should be a radical egalitarianism that eschews the economic discrimination currently codified in our zoning.

“Middle ground” suggests a space between two known points rather than some undiscovered country, which I think is a more worthwhile goal of political creation. And like Lyndon Johnson, I’m trying to be both ruthless and creative.

Nathan Kroms Davis is a Rockland City Councilor, but as always, the thoughts expressed here are his own.