In one of their brave bursts of rage at the police state they live in, Democrats are now up in arms about voter suppression. They compare it to the days before the Civil Rights Acts and the civil rights movement.
Nonwhites in the South were kept from the ballot by heavy poll taxes, tests laden with arcane bits of knowledge, or the threat or reality of actual violence. Those were cases of people who were longing to vote, but deprived of the franchise by malice aforethought.
Today, things are about as different as you can imagine. Today, the supposed problem is people in the state of Ohio, who have been on the rolls but failed to vote once in a span of six years and three cycles. Having failed to respond to a series of notifications and having failed to confirm they still live in the address at which they were registered, they may now be removed from the rolls.
One does not have to approve of this act in itself to notice two things that make it unique in the long train of acts that fall under the heading of things called suppression. First, if we insist on calling it “punishment” to be removed from the rolls because you probably moved to another state, voters are “punished” not for trying to vote, but for not voting. People who value the vote show it by voting, since when they do that, no action can be taken against them. People who don’t vote show by their acts they don’t think it important. They voted to silence themselves.
Second, registration purges like this are always described as “helping Republicans,” as Democrats tend to “lose” their own voters at rates twice as high. Logic insists that this shouldn’t happen. Since the New Deal and the Civil Rights Acts of 1965, Democrats have presented themselves as the party of the nonrich and nonwhite, their bulwark against the vicissitudes of the market and the bastions of bigotry.They have campaigned on the promise to be their protectors in a uncertain and perilous world. Given the state of the world, one would expect their voters to be more intense, more loyal, and more intent upon voting in every election. But the opposite seems to have happened.
Democrats thus claim that these voters must be more hampered by the lack of identity cards, transportation, and time and travel constraints than are others.
And this claim may have merit, but another reason might be that these voters really don’t care. They are unimpressed by the programs and candidates that Democrats offer and consider it a false premise that it does them much or any good to elect Democrats.
Ask yourself what the struggling marginal voter, who once found a voice in the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, can find to adhere to in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is worth hundreds of millions thanks to Goldman Sachs shakedowns. She ran on a platform of identity politics, full-term abortions, safe houses for students afraid of discussions, and transsexual rights and bathrooms. She supported the bankrupting of evangelical bakers and attempts to put Chik-fil-A out of business because of perceived viewpoint disagreements.
That’s not all she said, but that was the gist and the core, and that’s what came over. That’s where the drive and the zeal in her party now are.
As to the people who really are struggling, she had little to offer them. In fact, she has bragged about running against them: “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product,” she recently said in a speech made in India. “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse.” As for those who weren’t rich, she said, they voted against her because they were “moving backward.”
For the prime agent of voter suppression, look no further than Clinton, the insult machine without peer.
