A Note on Voter Suppression:

Voting as a Privilege vs. Voting as a Right and a Duty.

Republicans vs. Democrats; Conservatives vs. Liberals;

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Views of Society, Culture, and Economics.

 

Burton Weltman

 

The title of this little essay pretty much says it all about the ideological differences that divide the United States today.  At least, that is my contention.  I am writing this on Tuesday, October 30, 2018, a week before a very important mid-term election in this country.  Democrats are busy trying to get out the vote.  Republicans are busy trying to keep down the vote.  What is that about?

(1) Voter Suppression as a Civic Duty: Who are the People?

How can it be that voter suppression is to many Republicans a civic duty, while encouraging all and sundry to vote is a goal of most Democrats?  The difference largely stems from their differing answers to the questions of who gets to be considered part of “the people” – as in “We the People” who constitute the country – and, in turn, what role do “the people” get to play in the affairs of the country.

Alexander Hamilton enunciated what has essentially been the conservative answer to these questions to the present day when he claimed that those who owned the country should get to run it.  “All communities,” he said, “divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well-born.  The other, the mass of people… The people are turbulent and changing.  They seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government.”  The role of the people is to defer to the wisest and richest among them.

In this view, the country is essentially like a joint-stock company in which the rich who own most of the stock should get the major say in running things, the middling classes who own some small shares of the stock should get some minor say, and the lower classes who own no stock at all should get no say at all.  By dint of their wealth, the richest have shown they are the wisest.  By dint of their poverty, the masses have demonstrated their incompetence.

This conservative view of the people applies to politics, economics, customs and culture.  In politics, conservatives generally consider voting to be a privilege that needs to be earned, whereas liberals consider voting as the right and duty of every adult citizen.  When the country was founded, property qualifications to vote were widespread.  Consistent with Hamilton’s view of things, people literally had to earn the privilege of voting by accumulating wealth.  This practice did not last long, however.  By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, public pressure by the lower classes, who had the greater numbers albeit not the greater wealth, forced the elimination of these restrictions and made voting a democratic right, at least for white men.

So, conservatives turned to other methods of limiting the political power of the general public and increasing the influence of wealth.  In this effort, they have repeatedly battled liberals who favored greater democracy and championed the interests of people over those of property.  The tide in these matters has ebbed and flowed ever since.

In recent years, property has been winning.  Conservatives have scored notable successes in rulings by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that money spent on political campaigns is speech protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, and that corporations are “persons” with the rights of citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment.  These ruling are legal nonsense but they are consistent with the view that the rich should have the major say-so in American politics.

Conservative ideology justifies the suppression of lower class and minority voters on the grounds that they don’t have sufficient stake in the country to vote responsibly, and that they will only use their votes to gain governmental benefits for themselves, such as welfare, medical care and so forth.  To conservatives, the lower classes are parasites on the body politic and the economy, and conservatives generally condemn subsidies to the poor favored by liberals as corrupt efforts by liberals to buy the votes of the poor.

Of course, conservatives, at the same time, laud tariffs and subsidies given to rich corporations that give big campaign contributions to conservative politicians as public-spirited efforts to bolster the country’s economy.  In the same vein, conservatives promote the organization of capital into big corporations but, at the same time, oppose the organization of workers into labor unions.  It’s one thing, and not a good thing, for workers to conglomerate for better wages; it’s another for the wealthy to conglomerate for better profits.

The underlying economic difference between conservatives and liberals is largely over the question of whether the country’s prosperity is primarily the result of increasing supply or increasing demand.  That is, should economic policy primarily favor the accumulation of wealth by the rich who will ostensibly invest it in new enterprises that will create jobs and goods for everyone?  Or should policy favor increasing the demand for goods by ordinary people which will stimulate investment and the creation of jobs in order to meet that demand?  In present-day political terms, should there be tax cuts for the rich or for the middle class?

In cultural terms, this conservative view idealizes what supposedly were the values and customs of the white, European Christians who ostensibly founded the country and made it great.  This view, in turn, denigrates the cultures of other peoples who live in the United States and even demonizes those people as undermining the American Way.  Immigrants have repeatedly been attacked in this way throughout American history, albeit with different groups bearing the brunt at different times.

Historically, the role of alien destroyer of the American Way was assigned to German immigrants in the eighteenth century, Irish immigrants during the nineteenth century, Eastern European immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.  Each of these ethnic groups was subsequently incorporated into the category of white, European Christians that defines the genuine American for most conservatives. Meanwhile, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Jews have for the most part been categorized as “Other” and have been more or less denigrated and scapegoated, a practice which continues to the present day.

(2) The Irony of Demagoguery: You can make fools of a lot of the people a lot of the time.

Ever since property qualifications for voting were abolished, conservatives have struggled with the necessity of gaining enough people to back their policies so that they can control the government.  Since their policies are geared to favor a small number of the wealthiest people, they have largely practiced a demagogic politics of fear-mongering against ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants, and other groups that can be safely scapegoated, safely scapegoated because they are, in fact, not a threat.

Southern plantation owners cultivated a fear of blacks and a feeling of superiority toward the slaves among the small white farmers who were being undermined by the slave system.  Northern capitalists imported Eastern and Southern European immigrants to undercut the wages of American-born workers, then denigrated the immigrants for political purposes as dangerous to American ways.  The method is to cultivate a sense of superiority among white, European Christians and a fear of Others who are different, even as conservatives enact policies that hurt their very supporters.

We see that method at work today as the Trumps, Mellons, Mercers, Kochs, and other right-wing billionaires stir up fears of immigrants and minorities, while encouraging a sense of superiority among white, European Christians toward these peoples.  The goal is to energize right-wing supporters to vote for conservative politicians while denigrating and denying the vote to people who do not support conservative policies.  The irony is that the Trumps, Mellons, Mercers et al. feel the same contempt toward their right-wing followers as their followers feel toward their designated enemies.  And the right-wing policies of the conservatives hurt their supporters as much or even more than their opponents.

Malleable, manipulatable and mainly middle-aged or older, most of the supporters of Trump and right-wing policies are only making fools of themselves while making the world worse for us all.  I suppose we can take some solace in Abraham Lincoln’s conclusion that you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.  Let’s hope this is that last time.

B.W.    10/30/18