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This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people…. If voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic, and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? And call for the multiracial democracy we need? And illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet?
Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights, and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of US democracy, for many years now. He’s national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We’ll talk about that with him today.
Transcript: ‘Our Most Important Democratic Document Was Intended to Make the Country Less Democratic’
Yes, this is true–it’s well documented. The Rs are profoundly undemocratic. But that doesn’t transmute the elitist D party into a bastion of democracy.
Sure, they want us folks covered by letters like BIPOC and LGBTQ (I’m in both sets) to be able to register and vote since we’re way, way more likely to vote D.
But let’s look closer. The D party has no problem with race, religion, gender or sexual identity…as long as you’re the product of an Ivy education or the equivalent. As long as you believe you’re part of their superior “meritocracy.” Whatever separates you from the unimportant, inferior masses; you know, that “basket of deplorables.”
The D party represents the 10-20% admin and professional class. People who don’t suffer from mass layoffs and deaths of despair. Who are fine with neolib trickle up. Who also seem to be ignoring that the Biden Dept of State is being run by neocons trained by Dick Cheney–types who value control above all else. And are exempt from the effects of endless wars and de facto empire they cause.
Decades ago allegedly centrists but actually neolibs staged a leveraged buyout of the D party. They dumped the New Deal, abandoned labor, and purged the remnants of rank and file party democracy. As a former local D campaign mgr and blue collar union member activist, I know this through the long, bitter experience of doing my best to fight them.
Ari has a very superficial understanding of democracy. Elections are not what the Greeks had in mind for democracy. They used sortition and citizens assemblies. Government positions were appointed by lot, like a trial jury is, they weren’t voted into office. The founding fathers turned democracy on its head, redefining the term to mean voting for some aristocrat to make all the decisions. Read Against Elections by David Van Reybrouck for more.