In my post right after Trump's election, I made a comment that we should expect two things right up front, one of which was a continuing attack on "voting rights?" I use "voting rights" in a generic sense to mean that all citizens should be able to vote without overt or covert attempts to impede their ability to do so. Race should not be a factor. Ethnicity should not be a factor. Religion should not be a factor. Only two factors should impede a person's ability to vote -- citizenship and having reached the legal age. Any other marker that places individuals in one group or another, to include prior convictions for having committed a felony, should not be a factor. It stands to reason, of course, that the minority party would want to suppress voting rights, more so than the majority party, and it would want to do so among those voting blocks that help create the majority. In the current political landscape, the republican party remains a minority party in sheer numbers. Despite her considerable flaws as a candidate, Clinton nevertheless won the popular vote. Due to quirks in the electoral process, however, the minority candidate won the election. Assuming we have another election, it still stands to reason that they would want to suppress voting rights among those who are expected to vote for the opposition. Now, they want to retain power, and because they are in power, they have greater opportunity to rig the process in their favor. I should say, "further rig the process in their favor," because in someways the process has already been "rigged" to favor the minority party. David Daley outlines the history and effect of gerrymandering in his book Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy. Although I took hope in Obama's re-election, the current election has drained me of any real hope in this regard. The majority of state governments, the House, the Senate, and now the executive branch are controlled by republicans. Increasingly, we are living in a single-party country -- the republican party. It remains a minority party, unreflective of the majority of Americans, but it has, admittedly, been much more successful at seizing and retaining power.
The Times today published an op-ed piece by Ari Berman that suggests something similar. He points out that "In June 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that states with a long history of racial discrimination no longer needed to approve any proposed changes to their voting procedures with the federal government, as had long been required under the Voting Rights Act." As Berman points out, "fourteen states had new voting restrictions in effect in 2016, including strict voter ID laws, fewer opportunities for early voting and reductions in the number of polling places. These restrictions depressed turnout in key states like Wisconsin, particularly among black voters." This, of course, was a republican victory, and it will likely be replicated. If as expected, a conservative justice is placed on the court to replace Scalia, and it could happen shortly after Trump's coronation, "there could be five votes to further gut the Voting Rights Act. Conservatives will target Section 2 of the law, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race or color." The change will likely be subtle, a change in standard not statute. As Berman again points out, "When the current chief justice of the Supreme Court, John G. Roberts Jr., was a lawyer in the Justice Department in the early 1980s, he led a charge against Section 2. He argued in a 1981 memo that the provision should block only those voting laws that were found to be intentionally discriminatory." Intention, of course, is notoriously difficult to prove, and mis-direct. Trumps repeated claims that the election was rigged, for example, pointed away from the gerrymandering that actually rigs the elections, to the potential for machine era voter fraud, like ballot stuffing. Of course, the dangers of "voter fraud" are themselves fraudulent, but it's easy enough to put in place measures INTENDED to reduce "voter fraud," whose RESULT is "voter suppression" of particular voting blocks. To adopt Roberts position, and to confirm it with the 5th vote, would effectively kill he most important civil rights legislation.
As an aside, two electoral reforms would effectively end such efforts and make the one person-one vote more a reality. Both are difficult to argue against from a "justice for all" perspective, but given the above, one could expect considerable opposition, and not just from the red side of the aisle. The first reform would be "mandatory voting." To vote, or not to vote, should no more be a question than to serve jury duty, though I appreciate the irony in my saying as much. If citizen of legal age were REQUIRED to vote, and fined if they did not, the focus would change immediately from who we can get to or keep from the polls to creating systems that made it easy for EVERYONE to do their civic duty. A blank ballot is fine, and shouldn't cause the consternation that it did for Saramago's burghers in Seeing, so long as it is cast. I don't vote for each and every point on the ballot because I simply don't know enough to make an informed decision. Although there are technical details to consider -- literally and figuratively -- nevertheless mandatory voting comes closer to insuring that ALL voices are heard. It would effectively end the sort of hand wringing that David Leonhardt brought to the table in today's NY Times.
The second reform would be proportional voting, particularly in the electoral college. It is, perhaps too difficult to imagine a "stateless" United States, instead of the "winner-take-all" the electoral votes could be proportionate. Using my own state as an example, the meager four electoral votes went to Trump, but if the vote had been proportional, Trump would have received 2.3 electoral votes, Clinton would have received 1.0 electoral votes, the remainder "at large" among the independent candidates. In Texas, the 38 electoral votes went to Trump, but if the vote had been proportional, Trump would have received 19.9 votes, Clinton 16.4, with the remainder likewise at large. Finally, just to be fair, in California, the 55 electoral votes went to Clinton, but had they been proportionate Trump would have received 17.9, Clinton 33.4, and the remainder at large. It would end the "illegitimacy" of the election going to the minority candidate. Also, as one might imagine, in an election as distasteful as the last, the small percentages that went "at large" might have grown, in part because it would take away the onus of having used one's vote into the outhouse. If neither of the principle candidates received a majority, how the "at large" votes are ultimate cast would make a suspenseful difference.
Of course, both reforms would be met with considerable opposition, if not dismissed outright, because the current gerrymandering and the electoral college actually favor the minority party. It is worth noting that the last two "illegitimate" elections, where there was a disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college, it went to the conservative party. Then too, though like many I would have liked to believe that we had come a long way toward overcoming outright racism, that the disputes were "technical" disputes over how best to eliminate "institutional" racism and remove "bias" from policing, this election cycle disabused me of such hopeful notions. Altogether too many believe that blacks should simply NOT be allowed to vote, period, that their franchise was illegitimate from the outset. Laws to suppress black votes are mere half measures toward an outright prohibition. Many of the same people would also believe that muslims, among others, should simply not be allowed to vote because to BE an American is to BE first and foremost white and christian. Trump may look in the camera and say "stop it," but there are any number of reasons to question the sincerity of his appeal to end the gloating of the white supremacists, not least his appointment of Steve Bannon as his chief strategist and Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General. Both have a long been associated with racism. One could take a "wait and see" attitude toward both picks, but me-thinks anyone who has to say "I am not a racist," protests too much and should perhaps examine their attitudes. Even setting the appointments aside, clearly, we do not live in a post-racial America, far from it, and those who harbor racial and gender attitudes that I do find deplorable have come out of the closet, perhaps to make room for the gays once again. Thus we have the NY Times reporting that white nationalists "have lurked in the web’s dark corners, masking themselves with cartoon images and writing screeds about the demise of white culture under ominous pseudonyms. But on Saturday, in the wake of Donald J. Trump’s surprising election victory, hundreds of his extremist supporters converged on the capital to herald a moment of political ascendance that many had thought to be far away."
So, again, both electoral reforms would be met with considerable opposition, in part at least because "mandatory" voting would insure black turnout at the polls and many, of course, simply don't want to see blacks at the polls, period. They certainly don't want to give their voice weight, not even a proportionate weight. I say all of this, in part because I cannot help but agree with Mark Lilla's recent editorial where he writes "One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end." Before I agree too strongly, however, a word or two of caution, one of which is captured by Lilla's remark that "Liberals should bear in mind that the first identity movement in American politics was the Ku Klux Klan, which still exists." At the extremes, the deplorable irrationality of identity politics becomes readily apparent, and indeed, as Lilla suggests, the best response to blind bigotry is to assert the common humanity of their targets, their victims. In the middle, however, the irrationality of identity politics becomes less apparent, more fraught. The move to suppress the voting rights of minorities is not, or not necessarily, a "racist" move. Insofar as black voters tend to vote reliably democratic -- that is, when they vote -- the move to suppress their votes can be seen as a purely pragmatic, purely rational "political calculation." As such, it has nothing to do with race, per se. If more and more of the black community were to slip into the conservative camp, the "political calculation" would lose its force and dissipate. Not all, perhaps not even most, conservatives are "racist," and would be happy to welcome black votes into the party. Their own "political calculations," however, make that eventuality unlikely, in part because he move to suppress the voting rights of minorities does have an racist result, and it is this result that the white nationalists applaud and the liberals deplore. I really would prefer NOT to have one more conversation about race, but there it is, in our face, and how do we even begin to talk about the "racist result" of a "political calculation" without some measure of "identity politics?"
I am not sure how to answer that question, but it does seem clear enough that Lilla has a point when he writes that liberals, to some extent, doom themselves in thinking that "Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis." The "whitelash" theory is convenient on a number of scores, not least in that the omnipresent rhetoric of minority victimization has "encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored." Indeed, and to confess, as a middle-aged white male, there have been times when I have felt the sting of discriminatory practice only to be informed that I was not a member of a "protected class." At such moments, I don't resent the gains of minorities, but I have asked that ubiquitous, human question, "what about me?" My neighbors are asking that question, and Lilla is correct when he writes that "such people are not actually reacting against the reality of our diverse America," or not necessarily reacting against the reality of our diverse America. For them, the "reality" of our diverse America is mostly a fiction, and I mean that literally -- their representation and, yes, their self-presentation in popular culture, to include Fox News -- and it is a fiction that might as well be set in a foreign land. New York, Chicago, LA are foreign lands to most of my neighbors. They do "tend, after all, to live in homogeneous areas of the country," Mountain Home being no exception, and many of those areas have declined significantly and have done so in the living memories of many residents, Mountain Home again being no exception. The "whitelash" theory is "convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority," not to mention a whole series of sanctimonious talking points, and it allows liberals to ignore the inconvenient truth of what "those voters said were their overriding concerns."
Lilla suggests, a post-identity liberalism would
refocus attention on the main political responsibility in a democracy: to form committed citizens aware of their system of government and the major forces and events in our history. A post-identity liberalism would also emphasize that democracy is not only about rights; it also confers duties on its citizens, such as the duties to keep informed and vote. A post-identity liberal press would begin educating itself about parts of the country that have been ignored, and about what matters there, especially religion. And it would take seriously its responsibility to educate Americans about the major forces shaping world politics, especially their historical dimension.
My hardly original suggestion of mandatory voting would emphasize that "democracy is not only about rights," but that those same rights carry a reciprocal obligation "to keep informed and vote." Of course, there is a bit of "if only" wishful thinking implicit in this: mandatory voting would do little to insure that citizens "keep informed" -- the forces of ignorance and apathy are tough to battle in a land of social media lotus eaters -- but it helps highlight the goal, committed citizens -- and that is something, at least on paper, that transcends personal identity -- something, at least on paper, that we all share in common.
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