Tracking the chaos...
The Republican strategists have known for decades that demographics are against them. As society becomes more racially diverse and urban, it tends to become more liberal. This is the case in most places, including Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and the like.
On one hand, the policies of the party are primarily protective of wealthier white males and on the other, the New Deal and Great Society structures such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are very popular, so strategies to attract GOP voters have to be a little different.
For Nixon, it was the 'Southern Strategy', where carefully-coded terms such as 'urban', rather than racial epithets, were used to bring the racist Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) into the GOP fold.
For Reagan, it was the embrace of the Moral Majority, who were formed to maintain segregation in the leadership of the Southern Baptist churches, and pivoted to get attention focused on things such as abortion and gay rights.
For George W. Bush, the tactic was purging the voter rolls, especially in Florida, where a quarter-million voters were thrown off shortly before the election of 2000. Most were minorities, and many were actually eligible. It is arguable that this move alone won that election for the GOP.
Another idea has been to claim voter fraud, which has not been detected in any appreciable amount in half a century, and use that as a reason to restrict voting. Senator Lindsey Graham said in 2020 that Republicans would never win another election unless they 'do something' about mail-in voting. It is worth noting that at least four states use this system exclusively, with no problems.
'I don’t want everybody to vote,' the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. 'As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'
In places such as Ohio, the congressional and legislative maps are so gerrymandered that, despite the actual voting numbers being about 54% GOP and 46% Democrat, the former hold about 80% of the relevant offices. While the people changed the state constitution to make the districts more fair, the GOP-dominated election committee has presented three sets of maps giving them an 80% advantage. Each set has been thrown out by the GOP-led Ohio Supreme Court. Their answer this week was to present yet another, similar, one.
So, with that in mind, GOP-led legislatures in at least 11 states have taken massive steps to ensure their victories, requiring voter IDs that target minority voters, putting fewer voting machines in minority districts, forbidding people from giving food or water to those in line, restricting hours for early voting, restricting mail ballots, dissolving the autonomous election boards and replacing them by ones controlled by the GOP and many other measures, all in the name of 'preventing fraud'. In states with Democratic governors but GOP legislatures, such as Wisconsin and Virginia, they have stripped the governors of much of their power.
Yesterday, Judge Mark E. Walker, of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down most of the new election law passed in that state.
We will see what happens at the appeals level.
4 comments:
"As society becomes more racially diverse and urban, it tends to become more liberal. "
I disagree. That was the case when 'liberal' meant 'was for labour against capital', was socially conservative (or at least had a role for some social conservatism within its party spectrum of views) and was still in favour of the nation state and patriotism.
Nowadays 'liberal' means 'believes 100% in whatever woke nonsense comes out of Universities next'. Which means incredible social liberalism that trumps all other considerations, including the economic rights and interests of the working man or woman. Increasingly liberalism is not a mass movement across classes, its a middle class affection, that looks upon the working classes as irredeemably non-woke, and thus of no interest to them. The immigrant classes are pretty socially conservative. Staunch Catholic Hispanics for example are not going to be very pleased by their children being told about the 57 varieties of gender, neither are Hindus, Muslims don't even go along with gay rights let alone the rest of the alphabet soup that passes for the liberal canon today. Asian families are finding that their children are being discriminated against in education in favour of Africans. Immigrants who have integrated and done well for themselves are no more in favour of opening the borders than anyone else, they have as much to lose as whites.
Non-white Americans voted for Trump in greater numbers than they have for decades. In the UK the conservatives have attracted large numbers of working class voters (the 'Red Wall' seats they won in 2019), precisely because the Left have move away from them socially. Equally significant immigrant communities are moving towards the right - Hindus for example are doing very well for themselves and increasingly voting Conservative, as evidenced by the number of people of Indian descent in the Conservative Party these days, indeed in the Cabinet. Its entirely possible we could have a Hindu or Muslim PM in the UK within a few years.
Ironically the liberal classes are far more hideously white that the right are nowadays. You only have to look at the XR or BLM protestors. They are white, by and large, and middle class, because that's who have the time and money to mess around playing student politics. The immigrants are hidden away, grafting. And as such have increasingly less time for those who would tax them more, and try to indoctrinate their children.
@Sobers - I disagree that that is what liberal means, and the general trend still holds. While I find the SJW's very tiresome and rather thoughtless, they actually have very little power. The real current danger in the US is the GOP.
As for who would tax them more, have you seen the 11-point proposal from the GOP to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and simultaneously drastically increase the taxes on the lowest incomes?
" While I find the SJW's very tiresome and rather thoughtless, they actually have very little power. "
Really? Have you not noticed how woke Wall Street has become? How vast swathes of public life (and increasingly life in private sector Big Business) have become no-go areas for anyone who dares to espouse non-woke political ideas? Try being a professor who stands up for the rights of biological women and see how far that gets you, you'll be hounded out of your job so fast your feet won't touch the ground. How many people have Google fired for having Left wing views vs right wing ones? The Left aren't being excluded from public life, but the right are. But yeah, the SJWs have no power........
@Sobers - "Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing". Yes, there is a ton of stupidity in higher education, mostly in humanities, education, and the social sciences.
Ultimately, companies will go where the money is, and enough stupid ideas will make them turn away. As for right wingers being suppressed, look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorne, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan and many others. They are thriving in their bile and stupidity.
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