4/7/21
The Republican Party and the white right are escalating their war on voting and democracy. As the Brennan Center for Justice summarizes, Republican state legislators across the country "have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions [on voting] in 47 states," a 43% increase from the 253 "restrictive bills" in process in mid-February: The Jim Crow Republican Party's attempt to keep Black people in Georgia from voting is a preview of a national plan to turn the United States into a type of authoritarian state. On paper, "Republicanistan" will be a democracy — but one where one party has rigged the elections so it almost always wins, and the "opposition" must meet almost impossible standards to even be on the ballot. In public statements, leading Republicans have basically admitted that their efforts to nullify multiracial democracy are not driven by concerns about "voter fraud" or "voter security" but rather by the desire for power and control. The mainstream media largely insists on [covering the Republican war on democracy as a partisan battle rather than as an attack on democracy itself by one of the country's two institutional political parties. This has fueled an inevitable counter-narrative from the right wing and its enablers, in which the American people are being told, to borrow from Trump's command, not to believe their lying eyes.
Other defenses of the Jim Crow Republican attacks on Black and brown voters include such arguments that the recently-enacted Georgia law does not explicitly mention race or party affiliation and thus cannot be "racist." In fact, Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries rarely, if ever, made explicit references to prohibiting Black people from voting. Contrary to popular belief, there were no flashing neon signs proclaiming that Black people could not vote. Instead, Jim Crow was enforced through apparently race-neutral laws that in practice were explicitly designed to keep Black people from voting: poll taxes, literacy tests, property tests, the "grandfather clause" and all-white primaries In total, Jim Crow was a society-wide system and culture in which violence and other threats of punishment made it clear that Black people were not allowed to participate as equal members of the polity. Some on the right and elsewhere have tried to defend the Jim Crow Republican Party's attacks on Black and brown people's voting rights in Georgia by admitting that these laws may have a disparate impact on communities of color but do not have racist "intent." While the Jim Crow era may feel like centuries ago to many younger Americans, that regime was only defeated some 60 years ago.
www.salon.com
