If we trust our neighbor to pack a weapon, then we should also trust
him/her the right to vote.
carl Jarvis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2021 05:43:30 +0000
Subject: April 7, 2021
To: carjar82@xxxxxxxxx
View this post on the web at
https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJxtkMtuhSAQhp_msDuGiyAsWHTT1zBcRqVVMIBtffvicdWkyTBDmBv_50yFOeVT76lUdLmxnjvoCN9lhVoho6NAHoPXigpJuERe957IdgllnDLAZsKqaz4A7YddgzM1pHg1UMwZQ4uWbHBW4mYTIdIz450QXpiJO9lb7-615vABogMNX5DPFAGteql1Lw_29qDvzRYwdYHs0k8ObjHZlxS7cthSjfvsXNpazd6O2XNYn8OTYkpQ0FfAPZbtN5KTjnTSezVQISiblBXKEqacMtPAKWHUKPvo8TbTP5NR1s7kD5Mlbdn5kvx6borHFrcjhnqOEI1dwd8w6o30hWecIUJuqP1oqiaCDFJgQfCA-1t8o8V6qbjkHLW9PrWuqP8T_Au3CpFf
Last night, commentator Kevin Williamson published a piece in National
Review justifying voter suppression by suggesting that “the republic
would be better served by having fewer—but better—voters.”
Representatives, he says, “are people who act in other people’s
interests,” which is different from doing what voters want.
This is the same argument elite slaveholder James Henry Hammond made
before the Senate in 1858, when he defended the idea that Congress
should recognize the spread of human enslavement into Kansas despite
the fact that the people living in that territory wanted to abolish
slavery. Our Constitution, Hammond said, did not dictate that people
should “be annoyed with the cares of Government,” but rather directed
that they should elect leaders who would take those cares upon
themselves.
It is the same argument wealthy men made in the 1890s when they
illustrated that laws calling for “better” voters meant that white
registrars would hand-pick the nation’s voting population. In the
South and the North both, legislators wrote new state constitutions to
keep Black men, immigrants, and poor workers from the polls. Leading
Americans argued that such men “corrupted” the vote by electing
lawmakers who provided public infrastructure like schools and
hospitals, paid for with the tax dollars of hardworking white men. To
keep poor voters and men of color from the ballot, new state laws
called for literacy tests, in which white registrars personally judged
a man’s ability to read; poll taxes for which one had to keep the
receipts; grandfather clauses, in which a man could vote if his
grandfather had, and so on.
Williamson’s is the same argument Arizona Senator Barry’s Goldwater’s
ghostwriter made in 1960 in The Conscience of a Conservative, when he
wrote in frustration about the New Deal government that was wildly
popular despite businessmen’s hatred for it. The framers had
absolutely not created a democracy, he wrote, but rather had worried
about “a tyranny of the masses” who would vote for laws that
redistributed tax dollars into projects that would benefit themselves.
The theory of government that lies behind the argument for limiting
the vote to “better” voters was also articulated by Senator Hammond in
his 1858 speech. He explained that the South had figured out the best
government in the world. It had put a few wealthy, educated,
well-connected men in power over everyone else: those he called
“mudsills,” workers who produced the capital that supported society
but had little direction or ambition and had to be controlled by their
superiors. In the South, Hammond explained to his northern colleagues,
the mudsills were Black, but in the North they were wage workers. It
was imperative such men be kept from political power, for “[i]f they
knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an
army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your
society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your
property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box….”
In 1859, Abraham Lincoln rejected this vision of government by wealthy
elites and replaced it with one of his own. Government worked best not
when it protected the property and thus the power of a few wealthy
elites, said this poor man’s son, but when it protected equality of
access to resources and equality before the law for everyone. Rather
than concentrating wealth upward, society should protect the rights of
all men to the fruits of their own labor.
Throughout our history, adherents of these two different visions of
what constitutes the best government for the U.S. have struggled. On
the one hand are those who say that the country operates best when the
government is controlled by a few wealthy, educated, well-connected,
and usually white and male leaders. The argument goes that they are
the only ones with the skills, the insight, and the experience to make
good decisions about national policy, particularly economic policy.
And it is important that wealth concentrate in their hands, since they
will act as its stewards, using it wisely in lump sums, while if the
workers who produce wealth get control of it they will fritter it
away.
On the other hand are those like Lincoln, who believe that government
should reflect the will of the majority, not simply on principle, but
because a wide range of voices means the government has a better
chance of getting things right than when only a few people rule.
In today’s world, Americans appear to be siding with the popular
measures of the Democrats. A Morning Consult/Politico poll today says
that 65% of Americans support higher corporate taxes to pay for
infrastructure and that 82% want infrastructure in any case. To make
matters worse for the Republicans, counties that voted for Biden
provide 70% of the nation’s gross domestic product, the value of goods
and services in the nation. The large corporations Republicans used to
be able to count on for money and support are now eager to court these
young, liberal producers.
So, to combat the nation’s drift toward popular government, it appears
the current-day Republican Party has taken up the cause of elite rule.
Williamson is not the only Republican to muse about how getting rid of
voters might be good for the nation. Arizona state representative John
Kavanagh has said of voting that “[q]uantity is important, but we need
to look at the quality of votes as well.”
Today, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted to a story about rising crime
rates during the pandemic by tweeting that “[w]e have a major
under-incarceration problem in America.” He appears to think that we
need more people in jail despite the fact that we already imprison our
people at a rate more than 5 times higher than that of the rest of the
world. We imprison nearly 2.3 million people, with another 3.6 million
on probation and another 840,000 on parole. More important for the
current struggle over government, though, his statement is that of an
authoritarian rather than a democratic leader, and fits nicely with
the idea of a strong-handed elite rule.
In Florida, Republican lawmakers appear ready to silence their
opponents with a law that would, according to the Miami Herald,
“require public colleges and universities to survey students, faculty
and staff about their beliefs and viewpoints.” It would also permit
students to record their professors without their consent for a civil
or criminal case against their school. A lobbyist for the measure,
Barney Bishop, told journalist Ana Ceballos that “the cards are
stacked in the education system… toward the left and toward the
liberal ideology and also secularism — and those were not the values
that our country was founded on…. [T]hose are the values that we need
to get our country back to.” “The truth of the matter,” he said, “is
that kids are being indoctrinated from an early age.”
Also today, a member of the Boogaloo Bois who attended a “Stop the
Steal” rally at the state capitol in Minnesota as part of the attempt
to overturn the results of the 2020 election was arrested and charged
with illegal possession of a machine gun. He had used a 3D printer to
alter a semi-automatic weapon to make it shoot automatically.
The Republican attack on democracy is not playing well at home
(although a number of our adversaries like it well enough). A new
Gallup poll shows that an average of 49% of Americans consider
themselves Democratic or Democratic-leaning Independents while only
40% identify as Republicans or as Republican-leaning Independents.
This is the highest split since 2012.
Still, in the end, if Republicans manage to rewrite the voting laws to
silence their opponents, how their actions play with the majority of
American voters won’t matter in the least.
—-
Notes:
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[https://email.mg2.substack.com/c/eJwlkMmOhCAURb-m2JVhVFiw6E3_hmF4Kt0WGMCy_fvGMiE88qbLPc5UmFM-9ZZKRdc11nMDHeEoK9QKGe0F8hi8VrSXREjkNfdEtkco45QBXiasuuYd0LbbNThTQ4rXAMWCMbRoSo1l1gkvnJuknKzkijtCGbdkIGy4Zc3uA0QHGt6QzxQBrXqpdSsP9vWg3-0cx9HFz3azZngHODqXXq1AMSUtYH41Leczpvqc4ID8fKfmoLQ0CvrqwhzL9ispSEc66b0aaN9TNinbK0uYcspMg6CEUaPsg-PXTLuy21KN-73EUNbO5B-TJW3V-bL-STfnY4uvPYZ6jhCNXcHfUOqN9oNpnCFCbsj9aKomPRlkj3uCB8xvCI0a41IJKQRquj61qagXMHWB7NJfDm4x2ZcU_wHw0ZLP]
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I believe that we should trust the right to vote, to every person we
trust to carry a weapon.
