Minoritarianism and the fear of a free vote

I don't know if Donald Trump has lost whatever filters he had left, but he's been saying the quiet things out loud for quite some time now.

Yesterday, it was this doozy:

President Trump on Monday morning became the latest in a procession of Republicans to say making it easier for more people to vote would hurt his party politically.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump referenced proposals from Democrats in the coronavirus stimulus negotiations that would have vastly increased funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. The final package included $400 million for the effort, which was far less than what Democrats had sought.

“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

I mean, we all knew this was the Republican position. One just has to look at all the voter suppression efforts into which they put so much work to keep the blahs and the Messicans out of the voting booth.

However, it's gratifying to see that they recognize why they have to do this.

If every state in the Union had vote-by-mail, with no onerous burdens, not only would Republicans never win the White House again; some ruby-red states might, in fact, go Democratic blue in short order. (Looking at you, Florida and Texas.)

Let's look at the Pacific Coast states which make it easy for their citizens to vote. California, Oregon, and Washington aren't Democratic merely because of demography. They vote Democratic because they place no restrictions on the franchise, save for what's in the Constitution. The only requirement in the document drafted in 1787 is that voters must be US citizens. And they also don't hamper their citizens from exercising the vote by closing polling stations in the "wrong" kinds of precincts. When people are allowed and encouraged to vote, they do so, and lo and behold they tend to not vote for people who want to limit them. Republicans have very little future along the West Coast not just because of demographic change, but because that change is married to a culture of electoral participation.

Regimes like those promulgated by Republicans survive by choosing the people who can vote for them. Corrupt, autocratic politicians love it when they can pick their electors. There is no great run of voter fraud anywhere in this country. But there is a great run of people fed up with their right-wing governments, who would vote out the bums if given half a chance. Thus come the restrictions. A minority can take and maintain power only as long as it prevents that coalescing majority from forming and striking against it.

And don't think this is limited to the right. We've seen for the past year Bernie Sanders running on a strategy of winning the Democratic presidential nomination with his base of 30% of the primary voters. And it very nearly worked, until South Carolina, and the speaking up of the real base of the party, and moderates uniting to deny a soi disant "social democrat" the nomination, something which would have ensured a second Trump term. Sanders met "the Establishment", and the Establishment was us.

People with unpopular ideas can get those ideas enacted if they divide the opposition enough, or find some way to suppress it. Democrats, fortunately, weren't going to follow the Vermont Pied Piper. The party did something which the GOP was unable to do in 2016: Stop a thoroughly unfit candidate from traipsing away with the nomination. Imagine if the candidates had dropped out and united behind a Jeb Bush or a Marco Rubio, as Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Mike Bloomberg did around Joe Biden? That would have been no guarantee that Hillary Clinton would have won; but even if a Republican other than Donald Trump had won the presidency, we'd be in much better straits than we are now. I know, that's a low bar; however, when one looks at the possibility of hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID-19 as the best case scenario, one takes comfort where one can.

Of course, Trump took the nomination due to a variety of factors. His opponents couldn't see the forest for the trees, and allowed their egos to override their common sense, possibly expecting that the presumptive Democratic nominee would wipe the floor with him. But, most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough: GOP voters were ready for Trump. They were tired of maintaining even the thin veneer of rhetorical allegiance to democratic values which society demanded of them. They wanted someone who would hurt the "right people", as a Trump supporter said a few years ago when she was aghast that, in fact, she was being hurt by his policies. When you allow a movement based on a minority into power, don't be surprised if that movement then comes back to bite you in the rear. The cruelty is the point, and if you tick off a box which they have on their list, even if you supported them, well, Bob's your uncle.

People leading political movements based on mobilizing a devoted base consisting of a minority of the electorate can't afford to have the majority unite against it. They can't conceive that this majority will, in fact, combine and fight it. Bernie Sanders bought his own propaganda that establishment Democrats were too corrupt to put aside any differences and deny him the nomination. Republicans move heaven and earth to prevent the new majority from linking up taking away their power. A free vote is what revolutionary and reactionary vanguards fear the most, and what they will strive to stifle.

We have many peaceful weapons in this country to resist those who would destroy it. But the greatest of them is the vote. Without it, all other rights are dead letters. Turn that weapon against those who fear it, and remind them why they do so.