Trump and Voter Suppression

An odd byproduct of Donald Trump being extremely stupid is that he sometimes says the quiet parts out loud. He did that the other day when he all but admitted that Republican electoral prospects depend on voter suppression.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake:

In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump referenced proposals from Democrats in the coronavirus stimulus negotiations that would have vastly increased funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. The final package included $400 million for the effort, which was far less than what Democrats had sought.

“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

No no no Mr. President, you’re supposed to say “voter fraud” or “electoral integrity project.”

This has been around at least since 1858 when South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond gave his infamous “mud sill” speech. Hammond was addressing what he saw as the superiority of Southern slavery to Northern free labor. Hammond saw free white Northern laborers as creating problems that the Southern oligarchy did not have to endure. The key deficiency of the North was in allowing its mudsills to participate in politics:

Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If 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, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.

This is the source of modern voter suppression and cries of “socialism.” If all Americans are registered to vote and cast a ballot, the oligarchy could see its “society . . . reconstructed” and its “property divided” (e.g., taxation of the rich=socialism). This is also why it is a goal of the Waltons and other right wingers like the Kochs that truly representative bodies be forsaken in favor of state supervision or takeovers of local functions. It is why Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance is in the voter suppression business.

I rarely type these words, but Donald Trump is right.

Update on yesterday’s post on the politics of coronavirus: In The Masks Roll In, The Masks Roll Out . . . I offered Pioneer Institute as a local example of a political interest taking advantage of political opportunities offered by the pandemic. Jim Stergios of Pioneer was praising Florida Virtual Schools charter chain. I noted some of the financial ties but not the education value, since that is not my domain. But it is the domain of education blogger Peter Greene writing at Curmudgucation. Greene writes that Florida Virtual Schools are a disaster. Here’s  a sample:

Started by the state in the 90s, spun into a private business (a “publicly-funded non-profit,” so a charter school), and then mired in a mess of incompetence and corruption, the entire shooting match had its board replaced by the state, which installed a bunch of politically connected board members, and a half-assed audit was ordered up. Now the Board of Trustees is the Sate (sic) Board of Education, headed by evolution-denier Andy Tuck.

We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis

[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, not education.]