Monday, February 13, 2012

Political Commentary: Voter Disenfranchisement and "Severe Conservatism"



In other political news today: at New York Times, Alexander Keyssar offers a valuable survey of the ongoing attempt of elites in the U.S. over the course of American history to suppress one group of voters or another at various moments for various reasons.  The one constant in this sordid history, Keyssar notes, is the following: 


The targets of exclusionary laws have tended to be similar for more than two centuries: the poor, immigrants, African-Americans, people perceived to be something other than “mainstream” Americans. No state has ever attempted to disenfranchise upper-middle-class or wealthy white male citizens.

And isn't that interesting?  White men of substantial social status have never been the targets of the attempts to suppress voters.  While the poor, immigrants, African Americans, people regarded as "other," and women (Keyssar discusses women's disfranchisement at other points in his survey) have been the targets of attempts to turn people from the polls.

There's a parallel here to the recent discussion of contraceptive coverage in the American Catholic context, if one cares to see it.  The parallel turns around who counts and who doesn't.  Around who always counts and always wields power and determines who'll be in the conversation and who'll be outside it.  And whom those who count decide at various moments to make non-exist and not-significant for one reason or another.

And as a complement to Keyssar's article, don't miss the equally good article by Brentin Mock at Alternet about the attempt going on right now in Minnesota to suppress votes of minorities, young people, immigrants, etc.  Mock notes that Minnesota has become a swing state in recent years, and wealthy elites in the state are now working overtime to see that demographics that often vote Democratic will not have easy access to the polls in the coming elections.

When one thinks about the fact that, for Minnesota, the religious and political right have also engineered a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the same election, it's difficult not to see the following plot line developing in this swing state as the 2012 elections approach: the 1% search for red-meat issues to appeal to right-leaning "values" voters to assure they'll go to the polls and vote right in an election; at the same time, the same economic elites work to suppress the votes of minorities.

And the "values" voters who imagine they're voting to assure that strong values prevail in their community effectively let themselves be herded to the polls by economic elites who have no concern at all for the issues that energize values voters, but want to see candidates elected who will assure the continued dominance of these wealthy elites in the socioeconomic structures of our society.  As Thomas Frank has long noted, the 1% have become very adroit about getting voters of marginal social and economic status to cut off their noses to spite their faces, when they imagine they're voting for values--but when they're actually voting to keep the rich rich.

And another great read today: Paul Krugman at New York Times on the "severe conservative syndrome."  Krugman analyzes the increasingly high price that the economic elites running the Republican show are paying precisely for the shenanigans they are staging in states like Minnesota.  As he notes, that price is an out-of-control "severe conservatism" that tears the party to shreds and causes the economic elites who have engineered it by playing to atavistic tribal instincts and fears among their base to lose any effective leadership of their party.

No comments: