This Dis-United States

Division

We, the people of the United States — aren’t.  

That is, we aren’t United.  In fact, we live in one of the most divisive periods in American history, perhaps as polarized as the era leading to the Civil War.  Like that time, there are a variety of reasons for division.  And like the 1850’s, in the end the main issue is race.

The Civil War was about a region of the United States maintaining an economic model which required slave labor.  A minority of Americans used every political “trick” in the book to keep that model. That included long periods of time when the national legislature, Congress, literally banned discussion of the subject.  Many of our institutions, including the Electoral College and the filibuster in the Senate, were established in part, to maintain that minority power. 

The “majority” won the Civil War, but many of those political “tricks” remained.  While the “peculiar institution” of slavery ended, manipulation of the laws allowed that same minority to maintain control, and to keep the former enslaved peoples in a lesser form of citizenship.  It took almost one hundred years to pass laws implementing the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing their civil and voting rights.  Those were the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Minority Rule

And even those momentous pieces of legislation did not end the issue.  Only eight years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that large sections of the Voting Rights Act were no longer “needed”.  As Chief Justice Roberts said in his majority decision:

“Our country has changed. While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” (Shelby County v Holder), 570 U.S. 529 (2013).

Essentially, John Roberts and the other four concurring Justices declared that discrimination in voting was over, and the efforts to prevent it no longer necessary.  Or, to put it another way, they declared another procedural victory for the minority.

Like the Southern enslavers, there are various reasons that today’s “minority” wants to maintain control.  As the Civil War Era South wanted to maintain their plantation culture, so today the minority wants to recreate a culture of the 1950’s, where people of color, of differing gender identities, of non-Christian religious beliefs, are forced to hide in the darkness.  And they are “rigging” the system in the face of an overwhelming threat – they are rapidly becoming a voting minority.

Inevitable Change

Within a score of years, the “United” States will be a majority-minority country.  Whites will no longer have a voting majority in the nation.  And some white people are so threatened that they are gerrymandering districts, restricting voting, and making sure that their power is enshrined in institutions that are protected by law.  Those folks are the direct political descendants of the protectors of slavery.  They claim that they are “defending” America from majority rule, a rule that they somehow have warped to be “evil”.  

They are today’s Republican Party.

Republicans today are attacking the sanctity of the vote, oddly enough, in the name of “voting security”. Here in Ohio they are reneging on promises to make the voting districts representative and less manipulated. When Democrats called them on the promise, they literally said, “That’s how the cookie crumbles”.

In other states they are doing everything they can to make voting more difficult – knowing that by making it harder, they make it less likely that people will vote. The ideal of “every citizen participating in democracy” is the very thing they want to prevent.

They isn’t a Trumpian issue.  The Republican Party has been working on de-democratizing the nation for two decades. And the Democratic Party, as often as it has cried out against these actions, has done little to stop it.

Higher Ground

It’s not that the Republicans are “smarter” than the Democrats.  Current Democrats hope to claim “higher moral ground”; so they won’t take similar actions to the Republicans.  Essentially, Democrats have been fighting a battle without accessing the same weapons that Republicans use, because they think it’s somehow “wrong”.

What’s wrong is not using every weapon to defend democracy.  What’s wrong is allowing the ideologic descendants of the slaveholders to use every “trick in the book” without responding in kind.   The mid-20th century conservative hero Barry Goldwater said it best:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice… and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. (1964 Republican convention).”  

He set the tone for today’s Republicans.  Democrats need to do the same, now.

Step one: end the filibuster in the United States Senate.  

Step two:  “unpack” the Supreme Court by changing the number of Justices to thirteen. 

And Step three:  pass the For the People Voting Rights Act.

It’s time to take the gloves off.  It’s time for the Democrats, including the President I voted for in November and still support today, to stop talking about “the moral high ground”.  We need to just take that ground, moral or not.  It’s the only way to defend Abraham Lincoln’s vision:

“…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.”