The Real Reason for the War on Voting
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
16 February 14
he invaluable Rick Hasen has noticed something about the conservative reaction to the report of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Among its other recommendations, the commission suggested expanding the opportunities for early voting, and Hasen notes that the reaction to this suggestion on the right is based in something more profound than a simple fight for partisan advantage.But conservative critics of early voting runs don't just mistrust early voters; they mistrust voters in general. As I explained here, there is a fundamental divide between liberals and conservatives about what voting is for: Conservatives see voting as about choosing the "best" candidate or "best" policies (meaning limits on who can vote, when, and how might make the most sense), and liberals see it as about the allocation of power among political equals. Cutting back on early voting fits with the conservative idea of choosing the "best" candidate by restraining voters from making supposed rash decisions, rather than relying on them to make choices consistent with their interests.
Right on cue, Jonah Goldberg thunders in with his contribution to the debate, and there is nothing I would like more in the world than to have Jonah stuck in an elevator with, say, John Lewis so he could explain to Lewis his theories on limiting the franchise. Either that, or I hope he runs out of gas sometime on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Consider how Jonah Goldberg put it in a 2005 Los Angeles Times column: "Voting should be harder, not easier-for everybody. ... If you are having an intelligent conversation with somebody, is it enriched if a mob of uninformed louts, never mind ex-cons and rapists, barges in? People who want to make voting easier are in effect saying that those who previously didn't care or know enough about the country to vote are exactly the kind of voters this country needs now."
File that one away for the next time he writes something stupid about liberal elites. "Uninformed louts." Like these people, I guess.
Comments
'Uninformed louts' are those who haven't lost their critical thinking ability.
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What you and others here don't get is that their perception of "their own best interests" is not your or my definition. They don't vote in purely economic terms. Their "interests" are not your or my "interests".
To that end I disagree with the thesis that some on the left have that these are "downtrodden ignorant, hapless voters who are being misled". They are not "being misled". They are making a willful choice to support the GOP because issues like guns, stopping gay marriage, preventing abortion, and so forth are more important to them than universal healthcare and protecting the safety net. It's not that anyone is "brainwashing" them. They willingly support those polices.
And I disagree with the "they're voting against their own interests" message because it's counterproducti ve. Calling people stupid and telling them that they are too dumb to figure out what's best for them is not going to get them to reconsider their viewpoints. If the goal is to feel morally superior it works. If the goal is to change minds it fails miserably.
The problem is witnessed by a PEW Research poll last year that found that 9% of eligible voters did not know who was President. In the same poll, 17% could not name the President or the VP.
By not restricting who can vote we end up with the mess we now have in Washington. Politicians can lie and say different things to different people with no repercussions.
If you want responsible government, it should be more difficult to vote. If you like having a President who acts totally different than he campaigns, and a House Leader who is apparently only responsible to his big money backers, keep those idiots voting at all costs.
And you are ABSOLUTELY WRONG when you say they are not being misled. They ARE being misled 24/7 by rightwing mouthpiece outlets like Fox News. They believe Obama is a Kenyan-born-Mus lim fascist-commie, Death Panels will kill their mothers, Obamacare will cost jobs, the government is interfering with their Medicare, gay marriage will destroy civilization, global warming is a hoax, unions are bad for workers and Democrats want to do take all their guns away. They believe these things because they've been MISLED to believe them, and for you to say otherwise undermines any credibility for which we may have at one time afforded you any benefit of doubt.
They are making the willful decision to support the GOP because they disagree with you and me about what their "interests" should be. To them economic issues don't matter as much as opposing abortion, gay marriage, and gun control do. They just don't share your or my viewpoints on the issues.
My view is that most of those voters are lost causes. They are part of that other 40% who will always vote Republican.
Isn't it pathetic that the only way your side thinks it can win an election is by manipulating the rules and preventing people from voting?
That's the question that no one has asked in the entire debate. That is the question they should be asking and hammering in the discussions. I would keep saying that "it's pretty sad that they think they can't win when more people vote".
Conservative working class voters would do anything, I think, to avoid identifying with groups they perceive as freeloading, lazy, waiting-for-my- Obama-phone-han dout moochers. That's the bottom line. And yes, there's a lot of racism in that, too, but I believe it's the (perceived) pride of work that gets conservative voters on the side of the rich, every time.
If there's a more anti-democratic , morally repugnant and unethical group in America I don't know who they are.
Isn't it pathetic that the only way your side thinks it can win an election is by manipulating the rules and preventing people from voting?
I would keep hammering that point. I would keep asking them why they think they can't win a fair election and why, if people do vote, they reject their agenda over and over again. I would make that the centerpiece of the argument. It's simple and makes the point clearly.
What pucky!!
The POWERFUL among them set the overall negative agenda with money, (un)think
tanks and propaganda. They invest to insulate, protect and expand their exemption from regulation. This allows them to exploit capital resources and human capital to monopolize wealth and insulate their power. They seek to minimize government to two basic functions under their control. First, to control creation and enforcement of laws to define and restrict public activity and, second, to insure an unlimited source of finance through taxing powers coupled with outsourcing as the transfer mechanism of public monies to private interests.
The LESS POWERFUL are the draftee patriots whose resentment and fear are mobilized to augment the goals of the POWERFUL. These self anointed "patriots" wish to return to an imaginary past that existed, selectively, to pre-Civil War, pre-Trust busting, pre-New Deal, pre-Great Society, pre-Voting Rights, pre-Equal Opportunity ... or ANY calendar point when progressive changes and the implementation of American founding principles challenged their advantages and extended rights and privileged to "inferior" neighbors over whom they LESS POWERFUL had enjoyed a sense of superiority. Their sense of power LOSS is promoted by the POWERFUL through fear of more change.
So, they define their self-interests as a return to an imaginary Valhalla or Garden of Eden, rather than equality in a pie of general and universal opportunity and societal improvement. Being average in an improving society cannot, for them, be judged favorably against a hierarchical society in which the LESS POWERFUL think they have a chance to 'beat the house' in a gamble for the self satisfaction of being superior ... can we learn nothing from Trump, Vegas and Powerball?
Meanwhile, Obama kept the jobs-failure Wall St bankers in his Admin instead of firing them & bringing Reich & Krugman & a fiery jobs program instead.
Result: the right wing picked up the symbol of the Tea Party, turned it in an anti-govt instead of anti-corporate direction. Some right-wing eruption might have happened anyway, with Koch $$ behind it, but it would have had far less legitimacy.
Upshot: we must speak from the old symbols into the new reality: In the churches, the Jesus of the poor against the Roman Empire; in Judaism, the Isaiah of Yom Kippur vs. AIPAC and the Sabbatical year (Lev 25) vs, the Carbon Pharaohs; etc etc
Shalom,-- Rabbi Arthur Waskow, https://www.theshalomcenter.org
Here we have 14 entries fighting with each other over how the RIGHT WING think. What should be happening is a consensus on how to "win over" or how to "defeat" the opposition.
From that perspective I call fully understand why they take the stance that they do. It certainly seems to be very effective from the divide and conquer stance.
It would appear that this representative segment of the voting populace seems to reflect Washington DC and the prevailing attitudes.
I'm not sure how it can come about, but I am hoping for a major change to come about in the next few years that would extend rights to the environment as well as to humans and remove the concept that a corporation is entitled to the protections of the bill of rights. These protections are intended for humans, and not to be used to revoke the rights of humans in favor of the rights of corporations to make obscenely huge profits at the expense of human rights and of the environment in which we live and on which we depend.
Choosing Wall Street/Corporat e candidate Tweedledumb or Wall Street/Corporat e candidate Tweedledumber means little in reality to the unemployed, the homeless, the victims of U.S. imperialist policies, and the overheating planet.
JUSTICEPARTYUSA.ORG............IT'S TIME FOR A REAL THIRD PART NOW!!!!!
Then there's the increasing noise which reflects what Charles says about "those people" voting.
What really is sad is that they are absolutely calling for taking away one of the most fundamental rights of a citizen of a free country - the right to vote - which is basic in the constitution, and amplified by the several amendments which added rights, first to the freed slaves, and then to women. Amendments to the constitution.
But don't mess with any test of the second amendment! Oh, no, taking away that right would give the government power over free people - as compared to taking the power of free people to elect their government. The cognitive dissonance, or denial, or whatever it is to take two opposite positions on the rights of citizens - I can't imagine.
Not to send folks away from here, ProPublica on the hundreds of millions of Kock money - a different part of this very connected attack - and something close to Mr. Pierce's observations: http://www.propublica.org/article/the-dark-money-man-how-sean-noble-moved-the-kochs-cash-into-politics-and-ma
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