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The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy - Hardcover

Roth, Zachary

 
9781101905760: The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 110190576X ISBN 13: 9781101905760
Verlag: Crown, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

In the wake of Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, a deeply reported look inside the conservative movement working to undermine American democracy.

Donald Trump is the second Republican this century to triumph in the Electoral College without winning the popular vote. As Zachary Roth reveals in The Great Suppression, this is no coincidence. Over the last decade, Republicans have been rigging the game in their favor. Twenty-two states have passed restrictions on voting. Ruthless gerrymandering has given the GOP a long-term grip on Congress. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, boosting candidates backed by big money.

It would be worrying enough if these were just schemes for partisan advantage. But the reality is even more disturbing: a growing number of Republicans distrust the very idea of democracy—and they’re doing everything they can to limit it. 

In The Great Suppression, Roth unearths the deep historical roots of this anti-egalitarian worldview, and introduces us to its modern-day proponents: The GOP officials pushing to make it harder to cast a ballot; the lawyers looking to scrap all limits on money in politics; the libertarian scholars reclaiming judicial activism to roll back the New Deal; and the corporate lobbyists working to ban local action on everything from the minimum wage to the environment. And he travels from Rust Belt cities to southern towns to show us how these efforts are hurting the most vulnerable Americans and preventing progress on pressing issues.

A sharp, searing polemic in the tradition of Rachel Maddow and Matt Taibbi, The Great Suppression is an urgent wake-up call about a threat to our most cherished values, and a rousing argument for why we need democracy now more than ever.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zachary Roth is a national reporter for MSNBC. He was born and raised in London and lives with his family in Brooklyn.

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Introduction

THE GREAT OBAMA FREAKOUT

During his 2012 campaign for Congress, Ted Yoho appeared before a friendly Tea Party group at a church in northern Florida. A licensed veterinarian and conservative Republican, Yoho hit all the high notes of the modern right. He warned that the United States was approaching a “European--style socialism, or worse—maybe a fascism.” He fulminated against foreign aid and said the United Nations “needs to go.” He complained that his taxes went to support people like the young men he’d recently seen using food stamps to buy chips and Arizona Iced Tea.

Then, as things were winding down, a man at the back spoke up to lament the state’s recent trend toward absentee and early voting, which, he warned, raised the threat of fraud and stolen elections. Yoho, standing at the pulpit, a large American flag pinned to the wall behind him, agreed. But the real problem with making voting easier, he ventured, wasn’t the opportunity for fraud. It was something more pernicious: ignorant voters. “I can’t remember which Founding Father said it,” Yoho mused, “but he said the ability to vote, but vote uninformed, is as tragic or as dangerous as having a loaded gun and not knowing how to use it.” He praised Republican governor Rick Scott for shortening the state’s early voting period from two weeks to one and added that it should be cut further.

“It’s a privilege to vote,” Yoho went on, warming to his theme. “Yeah, it may be inconvenient, but you know, it’s like I told people when I was growing up: to be successful is inconvenient. If not, everybody would be successful.”

“I’ve had some radical ideas about voting, and it’s probably not a good time to tell you about them,” Yoho added a few moments later. “But you used to have to be a property owner to vote.” The crowd applauded loudly.

Voting was certainly inconvenient for many Floridians that year, just as Yoho had hoped. With those cuts to early voting causing longer lines at the polls, some waited as long as seven hours to cast a ballot, and an estimated 200,000 gave up in frustration. Twelve years after the Florida recount fiasco, the state was again the poster child for electoral chaos.*

Of course, Yoho’s overwhelmingly white, middle--class supporters didn’t seem to have trouble getting to the polls. And his nostalgia for a time when those without means were blocked from voting didn’t hurt him in his conservative district. He beat a twelve--term incumbent in the Republican primary, then easily won the general election. He now sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and in 2015 he briefly put himself forward as a challenger to then–House Speaker John Boehner.

FEW IN POSITIONS of real power are quite as candid as Yoho was that day. But the notion that certain groups of Americans should be discouraged or even barred from voting—an idea thought to have long been consigned to the trash heap of history—has quietly been making a comeback. Everywhere you turn, conservatives from Republican politicians to Fox News hosts to respected newspaper columnists are lamenting the consequences of universal suffrage, and in some cases suggesting ways around it.

Yoho’s notion that uninformed voters pose a mortal danger to the republic has been an article of faith on the right at least since Barack Obama’s election in 2008. Just a few weeks after that contest, the conservative journalist John Ziegler posted a video on YouTube titled “How Obama Got Elected.” It featured interviews with a handful of Obama voters, in which they admitted they didn’t know who people like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barney Frank were. It’s been viewed more than three million times.

A 2012 Howard Stern segment that went viral on the right played on a similar idea. Obama voters were asked if they approved of the president’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, or whether they expected the United States to succeed in getting Osama bin Laden—who in fact had been killed the previous year. Then the hosts chuckled over voters’ ignorance in not correcting them. Both productions reflected a sentiment that’s become widespread among conservatives: that Obama’s backers aren’t informed enough to make wise choices. When I typed “Obama voters” into Google, the third autofill suggestion it provided was “Obama voters are ignorant,” a search that produced more than 1.8 million results.

But beneath the sneering tone, the videos, like Yoho’s remarks, concealed a kind of panic that the Obama era has instilled among many on the right. Conservatives had always believed that elections work—or at least should work—a certain way: people make a sober analysis of which candidate can best govern, then vote accordingly. The masses who had turned out for Obama, though, didn’t seem to act that way. In the eyes of many conservatives, we were witnessing the rise of the stupid voter. “The low--information voters are now the new kings,” the radio host Rush Limbaugh fretted to his millions of listeners not long after Obama was reelected. “The morons, the people that don’t pay attention.”

To many on the right, the problem went further: people were voting not just out of ignorance, but with only their own narrow interests, not the country’s, in mind. When Mitt Romney complained about the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, it was his dismissal of nearly half the country as lazy and unmotivated that did the political damage. But Romney’s central point was slightly different—it was about how, in his view, many Democrats approach voting.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said, singling out those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you--name‑it—that that’s an entitlement, and the government should give it to them.” Then he repeated his key point: “And they will vote for this president no matter what.” To Romney, the biggest problem wasn’t simply that these freeloaders were forcing the rest of us to support them. It was that Obama and his backers saw politics as transactional: give me stuff, and I’ll vote for you in return. Romney was expressing the fear that the votes of almost half the country had been bought.

His formulation may have been artless, but Romney’s larger claim remains a central strand of the story the right tells about American politics. Rather than considering what’s best for the country as a whole, the idea goes, Democratic voters—meaning primarily the poor, minorities, many young people, and, perhaps, unmarried women who are sexually active—are allowing themselves to be bribed by promises of free health care, lavish unemployment benefits, college aid, and other goodies. In short, the game is rigged. A few months earlier Romney himself bragged to supporters about how he’d told an NAACP audience that if they wanted more “free stuff” like Obamacare, they should “vote for the other guy.” In a postmortem after his election defeat, he explained that he’d lost because Obama had been “very generous” toward “loyal Democratic constituencies,” mentioning “free contraceptives” and “amnesty.” The idea endures: asked on the campaign trail in 2015 how he’d attract black...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
110190576X
ISBN 13 
9781101905760
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
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