From White Jewish Supremacy to White Supremacy: David Brooks and Yuval Levin Should Not Be Lecturing Democrats on Voting Rights
David Shasha
From White Jewish Supremacy to White Supremacy: David Brooks and Yuval Levin Should Not Be Lecturing Democrats on Voting Rights
In the pre-Trump era, if there was ever such a thing, whenever I saw the names Yuval Levin and David Brooks together, I would break out in hives.
But things today are not as they were, and I am on record as trying to find common ground with American Enterprise Institute Neo-Con house intellectual Levin:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rd6S4F7_LR3pvOGkaiXl6QydbUq8V8XRnrLLaLdaFWU/edit
Unlike many other Neo-Con Straussians, Levin has not caved in to Trumpism, and sees in it a danger to our national institutions.
But this week was a step too far, as both men decided to attack the Democrats’ push to block Voter Suppression Laws, and in doing so attacked them and not the Republicans for the problem!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/voting-rights-democrats.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/opinion/democrats-fail-defending-democracy.html
We are talking about the continuing attempt to undermine the Reconstruction Amendments; as well as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which should never have had to be put forward, since those rights were given freely a century earlier, only to be taken away by the former Confederate states.
And they are trying to do it again.
As a corrective to the obnoxious AEI Neo-Con PILPUL, rooted in Straussian elitism, I provide Elie Mystal’s excellent piece in The Nation from last July:
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/republicans-vote-suppression/
Levin and Brooks should have written something about the Big Lie and the 1/6 Insurrection, rather than act as if they are Traitor Joe and his faux “moderation.”
We do not need them lecturing us about Voting Rights; rather, they should support all necessary measures that would allow all Americans full access to the franchise.
I am not interested in looking up their surveys and studies to see whether they come from reputable sources.
There should be no debate over Voting Rights, and it is shameful that, at a time when – pace Levin’s book – our democratic institutions are being ground into Trumpdust, we have to be insulted in such a way.
David Shasha
Democrats, Voting Rights Are Not the Problem
By: Yuval Levin
With their legislative agenda stymied for now, Democrats reportedly are hoping to take another crack at election reform. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and President Biden have both identified voting rights legislation as a top priority.
But the approach that Democrats are contemplating is largely misdirected and risks further undermining public confidence in elections without achieving much of practical significance.
There is a narrower set of reforms that could actually solve some of the very real problems with elections in this country — and attract support from both parties.
It would begin from the fact that the most intense concerns about election administration on both the left and the right increasingly involve not voting itself but what happens after the voting is done.
Some Republicans insist that the process of counting and certifying the vote in some states was corrupt in 2020. There is no evidence — none — to support any specific claims on this front. But greater care and transparency about postelection administration would serve us well regardless and could render such claims easier to test and refute in ways that would build public confidence.
Some Democrats insist that Republicans are preparing to manipulate the certification process in elections in some states. So far, this mostly looks like Trump supporters running for offices with authority over election administration, which is no crime in a democracy. But requiring accountability and transparency and setting some boundaries on what can happen after an election would help ease these concerns and avert the dangers that Democrats have warned about.
And all of us saw just a year ago that Congress’s role in certifying presidential elections could be clarified and rid of opportunities for confusion and mischief.
Reforms focused on these themes would be a more productive path than what we’ve seen so far, which are efforts focused mostly on voting itself — on who can cast a ballot, when and by what means.
Democrats want fewer constraints and more time for more people to vote in more ways. They say that broader participation is essential to a stronger democracy and that restrictions on some modes of voting amount to suppression. They also assume that higher turnout will help the left win more elections, and some of the practices they want to enshrine (like ballot harvesting, in which other people collect ballots for delivery to polling places), frankly, reek of the corrupt practices that political machines have long employed.
Republicans want more safeguards and boundaries around voting. They say that greater security is essential to making sure only eligible people vote and that long voting periods and different methods to cast ballots risk enabling fraud and distorting the meaning of elections. They also assume that lower turnout will help the right win more elections, and some of the restrictions they want to impose (like limiting Sunday voting), frankly, reek of the racist practices long used to deny the vote to Black Americans and other minorities.
If we take both parties’ most high-minded arguments at face value, they are worried about problems that barely exist. It is easier than ever to vote: Registration has gotten simpler in recent decades, and most Americans have more time to vote and more ways to do so. Voter turnout is at historic highs, and Black and white voting rates now rise and fall together. These trends long predate the pandemic, and efforts to roll back some state Covid-era accommodations seem unlikely to meaningfully affect turnout.
Meanwhile, voter fraud is vanishingly rare. The most thorough database of cases, maintained by one of the staunchest conservative defenders of election integrity, suggests a rate of fraud so low, it could not meaningfully affect outcomes.
Even judged by the parties’ more cynical motives, their reform priorities don’t make sense. It is just not true that higher turnout helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. In their 2020 book “The Turnout Myth,” the political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik review half a century of evidence decisively refuting that common misperception. That’s not to say that turnout doesn’t shape particular election outcomes, but it doesn’t systematically benefit one party or the other.
The parties’ emphasis on voting itself also isn’t conducive to bipartisan action, which is essential to public trust. Democrats in Washington should see that using one of the narrowest congressional majorities in American history to nationalize election rules in ways opposed by every Republican official — even if it’s well intentioned — would undermine public confidence in elections. Republicans should recognize that state laws restricting the times and methods of voting over the objections of every elected Democrat will be perceived as an attack on the voting rights of Democrats, even if they aren’t.
Each party is telling its supporters not to trust our elections unless its favored bills are passed while implicitly persuading its opponents that those bills are illegitimate and dangerous. The result amounts to an assault on public trust that’s worse than any actual problem with American elections.
That is why Democrats and Republicans should turn to narrowly tailored legislation focused on postelection administration. Such a bill could, for instance, limit the ability of state officials to remove local election administrators without cause, and prohibit the harassment of election workers (as happened, for example, in Georgia after the 2020 election). It could mandate a mechanism for postelection audits while requiring a clear standard for rendering election results final.
It could provide for uniform transparency procedures and codify the role of election monitors. It could prescribe an oath for all election administrators committing to transparently and impartially obey the law. And it could modernize and simplify the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which still governs Congress’s and the vice president’s roles in certifying presidential elections.
Some of these ideas are already included in the Freedom to Vote Act, sponsored by Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin. But that bill also includes extraneous measures (like changes in voter registration and eligibility, campaign finance and redistricting) that render it unacceptable to Republicans. A less sweeping bill focused on addressing some shared concerns about what happens after the people vote would stand a better chance of attracting bipartisan champions.
Our debates about election reform this past year have been misdirected in ways that have rendered them more divisive than they have to be. By beginning from shared concerns and real dangers and from a proper understanding of the strengths of our system and not just its weaknesses, Congress can do better in the year to come.
Yuval Levin is a contributing Opinion writer and is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”
From The New York Times, January 3, 2022
Democrats Are Failing to Defend Democracy
By: David Brooks
When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government.
The problem is that Democrats live within their own insular echo chamber. Within that bubble convenient falsehoods spread, go unchallenged and make it harder to focus on the real crisis. So let’s clear away some of these myths that are distorting Democratic behavior:
The whole electoral system is in crisis. Elections have three phases: registering and casting votes, counting votes and certifying results. When it comes to the first two phases, the American system has its flaws but is not in crisis. As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout. The votes were counted with essentially zero fraud.
The emergency is in the third phase — Republican efforts to overturn votes that have been counted. But Democratic voting bills — the For the People Act and its update, the Freedom to Vote Act — were not overhauled to address the threats that have been blindingly obvious since Jan. 6 last year. They are sprawling measures covering everything from mail-in ballots to campaign finance. They basically include every idea that’s been on activist agendas for years.
These bills are hard to explain and hard to pass. By catering to D.C. interest groups, Democrats have spent a year distracting themselves from the emergency right in front of us.
Voter suppression efforts are a major threat to democracy. Given the racial history of this country, efforts to limit voting, as some states have been implementing, are heinous. I get why Democrats want to repel them. But this, too, is not the major crisis facing us. That’s because tighter voting laws often don’t actually restrict voting all that much. Academics have studied this extensively. A recent well-researched study suggested that voter ID laws do not reduce turnout. States tighten or loosen their voting laws, often seemingly without a big effect on turnout. The general rule is that people who want to vote end up voting.
Just as many efforts to limit the electorate don’t have much of an effect, the Democratic bills to make it easier to vote might not have much impact on turnout or on which party wins. As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote last April, “Expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn’t seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes. That’s the finding of decades of political science research on advance, early and absentee voting.”
Higher turnout helps Democrats. This popular assumption is also false. Political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik, authors of “The Turnout Myth,” looked at 70 years of election data and found “no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.”
The best way to address the crisis is top down. Democrats have focused their energies in Washington, trying to pass these big bills. The bills would override state laws and dictate a lot of election procedures from the national level.
Given how local Republicans are behaving, I understand why Democrats want to centralize things. But it’s a little weird to be arguing that in order to save democracy we have to take power away from local elected officials. Plus, if you tell local people they’re not fit to govern themselves, you’re going to further inflame the populist backlash.
But the real problem is that Democrats are not focusing on crucial state and local arenas. The Times’s Charles Homans had a fascinating report from Pennsylvania, where Trump backers were running for local office, including judge of elections, while Democrats struggled to even find candidates. “I’m not sure what the Democratic Party was worried about, but it didn’t feel like they were worried about school board and judge of elections races — all of these little positions,” a failed Democratic candidate said.
Democrats do not seem to be fighting hard in key local races. They do not seem to be rallying the masses so that state legislators pay a price if they support democracy-weakening legislation.
Maybe some of the energy that has been spent over the past year analyzing and berating Joe Manchin could have been better spent grooming and supporting good state and local candidates. Maybe the best way to repulse a populist uprising is not by firing up all your allies in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.
The crisis of democracy is right in front of us. We have a massive populist mob that thinks the country is now controlled by a coastal progressive oligarchy that looks down on them. We’re caught in cycles of polarization that threaten to turn America into Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We have Republican hacks taking power away from the brave state officials who stood up to Trumpian bullying after the 2020 election.
Democrats have spent too much time on measures that they mistakenly think would give them an advantage. The right response would be: Do the unsexy work at the local level, where things are in flux. Pass the parts of the Freedom to Vote Act that are germane, like the protections for elections officials against partisan removal, and measures to limit purging voter rolls. Reform the Electoral Count Act to prevent Congress from derailing election certifications.
When your house is on fire, drop what you were doing, and put it out. Maybe finally Democrats will do that.
From The New York Times, January 6, 2022
Republicans Hate Voting Rights Because They Threaten White Power
By: Elie Mystal
Utah Senator Mike Lee, a raving hypocrite who abandoned his stated principles to play lackey to Donald Trump, is fond of saying, “We’re not a democracy.” Lee thinks that’s a good thing. He’s written: “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” When Lee says these things, he’s not merely playing the role of an overzealous high school social studies teacher trying to use “cool facts” to deflect the hail of spitballs. He’s also channeling the deepest fears of the slavers and colonists who wrote the Constitution. Those guys understood, as Lee does, that a true democracy, in which everybody gets to vote and participate in self-government, would be a threat to white male hegemony in the New World.
They’re not wrong. The founders and Lee and Jefferson Davis and Ron DeSantis—and all the other white guys who have stood against the right to vote throughout American history—are correct in their assessment that universal suffrage and equal representation are the surest ways to end white male political supremacy.
That is why the “right to vote” is not spelled out in the Constitution, and why voting rights are under near-constant attack by conservative forces. It’s almost certainly why Lee thought that HR 1, the bill designed to restore and secure voting rights, was “written in hell by the devil himself.”
It’s no accident that the current assault on voting rights started not with the failed reelection of Donald Trump but with the successful election of Barack Obama. After the 2010 midterm elections and the new US census that followed, Republicans promptly used the gains they’d made to go on a gerrymandering rampage. Their allies on the Supreme Court then used two cases—Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021)—to effectively neuter the Voting Rights Act.
Those moves set the stage for the legislative attacks on democracy that white conservatives have launched this year. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 17 states have enacted 28 new laws to restrict voting access. A total of 48 states have proposed a staggering 389 voter restriction bills, which run the gamut from obtuse (requiring notaries to sign absentee ballots), to cruel (denying water to voters waiting in line), to downright racist (excluding from early voting the times Black people get out of church).
The GOP’s current eruption of voter suppression is unrelenting and ferocious, but it’s not a new phenomenon and should not have been unexpected. Everybody knows that voting rights were initially restricted to wealthy white males and only grudgingly doled out to additional humans after war, outrage, or mass grassroots movements.
The solution to these cyclical outbursts has never been incremental change. Radical legislative interventions (the Voting Rights Act), new constitutional protections (the 15th and 19th amendments), and a judiciary willing to uphold them (Earl Warren protected the voting rights John Roberts is now destroying) have been some of the ways people have fought to limit the antidemocratic instincts of the white men in power.
But the current Democratic Party can’t take such bold action. Even though the mass of the party’s Congress members are willing to do whatever it takes, including nuking the filibuster, to ensure that Jim Crow–style voter restrictions never come back, they are all too easily hamstrung by a few timid white senators who seem to think that full and equal access to the rights of citizenship is just one option among many and that basic democratic rights should be put on the bargaining block in the name of bipartisanship.
There are too many people who seem to be willing to give the Biden administration and the national Democratic party a pass if it can’t convince Joe Manchin (and the cabal of spineless Democratic Senators he speaks for) to do the right thing. Given the stakes—the existence of democratic self-government—I don’t think the president can just throw up his hands and say “Welp, I tried.” Nobody looks back on Rutherford B. Hayes, who presided over the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow, and says “good effort.” Texas Democrats are fleeing their state in an ultimately futile effort to stop new voter suppression laws; I think it’s fair to expect more than a speech (not even in prime time from the Oval Office but on a random afternoon) from President Biden.
In this speech, Biden was reduced to making a moral appeal to the bigots in the minority. “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote,” Biden said, adding: “Have you no shame?”
If that’s all he’s got, we’re going to lose. Because conservative white people have no shame. They’ve never had any. Throughout American history, they have shamelessly regarded the right to vote as the ultimate white privilege.
We are not a democracy. The question has always been whether enough white people even want one.
From The Nation, July 22, 2021