Never listen to anyone tell you to put aside politics in a time of crisis. The politics of coronavirus provides another battleground in the American contest between oligarchy and democracy, a fight oligarchs have been winning for decades.
This is on my mind today having just finished reading Heather Cox Richardson’s How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. (Order it from your local independent bookseller and not the great Satan, which is endangering its employees and firing pro-union workers).
But it is more on my mind because of Professor Richardson’s Letter from an American of April 4, 2020. It discusses how President Trump and the Republican Party suppress votes, a topic I wrote about on Friday in Trump and Voter Suppression. Let me share some of what she had to say:
On Wednesday, the Georgia House Speaker, Republican David Ralston, echoed Trump. He opposed sending absentee ballots to the state’s registered voters because the effort would lead to higher voter participation. That would “be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”
They are saying out loud what scholars of politics have known for a long time: the Republicans are a minority party. They win by keeping their opponents from voting, or by making sure their votes are undercounted.
A democracy is in crisis if the majority of its people do not support the party in power. We can manage a glitch or two, but a systemic perversion of the government through manipulation by one group or another will destroy our faith that our government truly represents us.
Richardson then traces modern Republican voter suppression to a Reagan era plot to suppress the votes of African Americans. The GOP developed what it called a “voter integrity” program. But documents that a federal judge ordered to be disclosed showed that the Republicans were not trying to protect voter integrity but to protect Republican candidates hobbled by unpopular policies. Moving on from Reagan, in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that led to the purge of African American voters, which almost surely played a role in George W. Bush’s 537 vote win in Florida in 2000 that gave him the presidency. (Remember that George W. Bush’s brother Jeb was the governor of Florida at the time). When President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Republican efforts to gain advantage by gerrymandering congressional and legislative seats went into overdrive. Then in 2013 came the Supreme Court’s decision vacating a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, and Republican legislatures began passing voter suppression schemes under the guise of voter ID laws and restrictions on registration.
Btw, when the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance tried its voter suppression scheme to try and get its founder Rick Green elected to Congress, what did it call it? Why The Voter Integrity Initiative, of course.
Now to the the Politics of Coronavirus: Trump and the Republicans have begun a multi-millionaire dollar legal fight to keep Democrats from changing voting rules to favor vote by mail for people under 65. They know people fear being in public now and they are okay with folks over 65 voting by mail, since they do well with that vote. Back to Professor Richardson:
The attempt to suppress the majority in order to stay in power is more than partisanship. It is an illustration that the leaders of today’s Republican Party feel entitled to govern even though they are not popular, entitled to enforce policies they know voters would reject if they could. It also means that Republicans increasingly do not have to answer to the people; their seats are secure.
Oligarchs fear democracy. They did in 1860 and in 1932. They have the upper hand now and they’ll use it to cement their power through the politics of coronavirus. But democracy can defeat them.
This is why I write about dark money. If you think the Waltons, Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Mercer, and Charles Koch have a sincere interest in the education of children, then by all means join Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, Educators for Excellence, or whichever front crops up next. If you’re in the media then by all means never reveal to your readers, listeners, or viewers who is funding those upbeat sounding operations.
Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America may be the best book subtitle ever.
Dark money is a tool of oligarchy. Follow the money.
“The world of 2018 looked a lot like that of 1860.”—Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about oligarchy and democracy.]