A Craven Calculation: Why The Republican Party Destroyed Elections

The story Tuesday night was Joe Biden’s comeback victory that was aided by round-the-clock media coverage and the Democratic Party’s burning need to unseat Bernie Sanders as the presumptive nominee, but, beyond the headlines and horserace sensationalism, a quieter and disturbing narrative was taking shape. All around the country voters were waiting in line for hours to participate in the primary.

For regular election viewers, this is nothing new, but it is getting worse by design. The story is depressingly familiar. A polling place with not enough staff, too few polling machines, one mishap or malfunction after another. The camera falls upon droves of people, often braving the elements, often visibly frustrated, as they wait an unreasonably amount of time to simply cast their vote, the most basic of their civil liberties.

It is not a mistake that we find ourselves in this place. It didn’t just happen. It has been a political strategy by the Republican Party for decades to impede citizens from voting, particularly citizens who are poor, of a minority population, or who live in a Democratic stronghold. When not gerrymandering districts to protect themselves, Republicans have undermined all efforts to make voting quicker, easier, and more accessible to these populations, all of it by design to tilt elections in their favor. The pursuit is ghastly and it works. A voter who either sees a line like the ones we saw last night or who stands in one for hours before having to walk away, whether to return to a child in need of care or to clock in for a shift, doesn’t just pass on the election at hand, they often give up on politics altogether.

If all of this sounds craven, it’s only because it is. This is an expressly anti-democratic strategy that flies in the face of every espoused principle in American tradition. It is an assault on representative government and the expression of sovereignty through the ballot box, and it is as dangerous as it is shameful.

What we see here is an expressly fascistic effort that has been repeated throughout history. In every case, in every disturbing, heartbreaking case, what we see with the rise of authoritarianism is a power group, in this case conservative whites, who recognize their power is endangered by changing demographics and shifting economics. Aware that electoral losses are inevitable as the changes take place, they begin to chip away at the democratic process itself. This tilts the game in their favor and curbs the growing momentum of challenging populations. We’ve been watching this take place for years.

But it gets worse. With an eye toward the past, we can compare this current trend with how the American South treated African-Americans following emancipation and stunted Reconstruction, with how Jim Crow systematically took the vote from minorities and ensured the power group of Southern whites would not be troubled by a rival population. Often it begins with the vote and progresses from there.

Here, with the rise of Donald Trump, Americans have been shocked by Republicans embracing anti-democratic assaults and their discarding of democratic institutions and checks on power, including the president’s rampant corruption of our system. The vote is the beginning and the chipping away is only a first act. What fascist movements do is evolve from simply impeding the vote to discarding the institutions of representative government until there’s nothing left. It is a reckoning we are unfortunately observing and, with almost certainty, it will continue as long as Trump is in power.

When the calculation is made that rights and civil liberties are negotiable, society travels down a slippery slope until the society simply ceases to exist, or at least becomes an unrecognizable facsimile of itself. We’ve been trending toward this nightmare for decades now and every long line and every manipulated election is further proof that something malevolent is festering just under surface. This is about discouragement and always has been. It’s about maintaining of power, even to the detriment of democracy itself.

Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. His most recent book American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People is available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. He is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast and currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University.