AS THE CROW FLIES

Last year a friend referred me to Heather Cox Richardson (below), who writes "Letters from an American," a newsletter that pops up in my inbox daily and which chronicles American current political events from her perspective as a professor of American history at Boston College.   I read her every day and find her analysis non-polemical and refreshing.  The latter I mean figuratively, as I seem to have either forgotten most of the American history I learned, or maybe that history was presented as happy talk glossing over actual events that contradicted American aspirations.

You can read Richardson’s profile in Wiki here.  She specializes in the history of the Republican Party and has written six books on this wide-ranging subject: 

The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997), which discusses Republican economic policies during the Civil War;

The Death of Reconstruction (2001), which explores the North’s abandonment of Reconstruction;

West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (2007), which looks at Reconstruction as a national event, not just a Southern one;

Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (2010), which argues that the massacre was sparked by political opportunism;

To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (2014), a survey of the party from the 1850s through George W. Bush; and

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020), which traces anti-democratic, hierarchical values that survived the Civil War.

Anyway, she knows from whence she speaks, and she has an historian's respect for the Republican Party, although she believes it has lost its way.  I mention her background to give some context to her newsletter of yesterday, which I will quote in full.  I cannot think of a better way to express the urgency and dismay I feel about the restriction of voting rights that is racing across –at last count—43 states.  I try not to get caught up in speculation these days, taking a welcome breather from the last four years, but this is an imminent (and regrettably, immanent) issue whose importance cannot be overstated.  This is how Professor Richardson sees it.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed his state’s new voter suppression law last night in a carefully staged photo op. As journalist Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, Kemp sat at a polished table, with six white men around him, under a painting of the Callaway Plantation [above] on which more than 100 Black people had been enslaved. As the men bore witness to the signing, Representative Park Cannon, a Black female lawmaker, was arrested and dragged away from the governor’s office [below].

It was a scene that conjured up a lot of history.

Voting was on the table in March 1858, too. Then, the U.S. Senate fought over how the new territory of Kansas would be admitted to the Union. The majority of voters in the territory wanted it to be free, but a minority of proslavery Democrats had taken control of the territory’s government and written a constitution that would make human enslavement the fundamental law in the state. The fight over whether this minority, or the majority that wanted the territory free, would control Kansas burned back east, to Congress.

In the Senate, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond [above], who rejected “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal,” rose to speak on the subject. He defended the rule of the proslavery minority in Kansas, and told anti-slavery northerners how the world really worked. Hammond laid out a new vision for the United States of America.

He explained to his Senate colleagues just how wealthy the South’s system of human enslavement had made the region, then explained that the “harmonious… and prosperous” system worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond explained that in the South, those workers were Black slaves, but the North had such a class, too: they were “your whole hireling class of manual laborers.” 

These distinctions had crucial political importance, he explained, “Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Hammond believed the South's system must spread to Kansas and the West regardless of what settlers there wanted because it was the only acceptable way to organize society. Two years later, Hammond would be one of those working to establish the Confederate States of America, “founded,” in the words of their vice president, Alexander Stephens, upon the “great physical, philosophical, and moral truth… that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln recognized that if Americans accepted the principle that some men were better than others, and permitted southern Democrats to spread that principle by dominating the government, they had lost democracy. "I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares ... are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” he asked.

Led by Abraham Lincoln, Republicans rejected the slaveholders’ unequal view of the world as a radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. They stood firm on the Declaration of Independence.

When southerners fought to destroy the government rather than accept the idea of human equality, Lincoln reminded Americans just how fragile our democracy is. At Gettysburg in November 1863 [above], he rededicated the nation to the principles of the Declaration and called upon his audience “to be dedicated… to the great task remaining before us… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The United States defeated the Confederacy, outlawed human enslavement except as punishment for crime, declared Black Americans citizens, and in 1867, with the Military Reconstruction Act, began to establish impartial suffrage. The Military Reconstruction Act, wrote Maine politician James G. Blaine in 1893, “changed the political history of the United States.”

Today, as I looked at the photograph of Governor Kemp signing that bill, I wondered just how much.

Richardson's perspective is enlightening and compelling; it tells us that the American attitude toward race changes only in fits and starts, two steps forward, one step back.  But I see another way of looking at what happened yesterday in Georgia.

The current attempts at the state level to suppress voting rights may have as much to do with math and psychology as they have to do with race.  As of October 26, 2020, according to Pew Research, 49% of registered voters identified as or leaned Democratic.  Forty-four percent identified as or leaned Republican.  That leaves 7% of truly Independent voters who could go either way.  These are the voters the parties fight for.  If all 7% were to vote Republican, that would give the GOP a 51% edge.  But if just 2% of them were to vote Democratic, that party would get the 51% edge.

Math doesn't lie, but if it is manipulated by fear and grievance, 44% can actually become bigger than 49%.  Here's how.

Most Americans will tell you they support the right to vote.  But a study by researchers at Yale University described in The Atlantic reveals some disturbing results:

Imagine a candidate you like. This politician has everything:  the right positions on taxes, abortion, foreign policy, immigration; sound judgment; enough personal probity to be trusted with your wallet, house keys, or email password. Now imagine that that candidate does or says something antidemocratic. For no particular reason, she shuts down polling stations.

 How do the voters react?

About 3.5 percent of voters will defect from a candidate whom they otherwise support, but who does something destructive of democratic norms. Those 3.5 percent come from the right and the left in equal proportions, but they tend to be moderates.

 Only 3.5% actually believe in democracy.  Republicans, Independents, and Democrats alike.

Savvy politicians understand this and use issue-ranking.  They know that if you persuade voters, either overtly or subtly,  that people of color, particularly Black people, are going to exact a slavery-based revenge on the White majority through the ballot box, you can get 96.5% of them to look the other way while you pass voting restrictions. These elected leaders know that by championing issues that are emotionally charged, they can get their voters to believe that the American constitutional system of checks and balances cannot adequately protect the minority under majority rule.  From there it is a small step to get them to believe that the only effective protection is to restrict the right to vote.

With apologies to crows; I mean no disrespect, but this is toxic.  It has reduced the modern Republican Party to a cadaver feeding  Jim Crow.  As the crow flies, so goes the nation.

Keep it real!  And wear your damn mask!

Marilyn