If you think the recent epidemic of state vote-suppression laws represent something new, I think you need to get out more.
In America, it goes back to the Founding Fathers' debate over who would get to vote, when John Jay apparently quipped that "Those who own the country ought to govern it."
Don't let that damned riffraff close to a voting booth! Of course, the debate continues over who actually IS the riffraff.
Leung Chun-ying, Beijing's chief administrator for Hong Kong, said his government would never consent to democracy in Hong Kong because "you would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month … Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies."
That's more direct than U.S. politicians, but it's true: If you want democracy, everybody votes; if you don't want democracy, you make sure only the powerful get to exercise power.
The story of a 1964 shoving match at a polling place in one of Phoenix's poorer neighborhoods shows how little progress we've made in 50 years.
Shove your way past the orange whatchamacallit.
The shoving involved a hardscrabble Latino state legislator known as "Lito" and a lawyer named Bill whose main claim to fame at that point was opposing the integration of public schools while he was a clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court.
You remember 1964 -- right-winger Arizonan Barry Goldwater was the GOP presidential nominee, and it was an election that could fit very well in 2016.
When Lito arrived at the polling place, he related later, the line of largely black voters was four wide and a block long, with people already giving up and heading for home. That's because Bill -- a GOP election "observer" -- was sitting inside quizzing potential voters to determine whether they were worthy of a ballot.
"He was holding up minority voters because he knew they were going to vote Democratic," Lito said in explaining the cause of the fracas.
In those days, if a voter seemed to speak halting English, it was common for someone to read aloud a passage from the Constitution and demand that the voter explain the passage in order to prove worthiness to cast a vote.
Fisticuffs were avoided that time at that polling place, but allegedly only after Bill drew back his fist as if to throw a punch and Lito told him to leave or he'd be escorted out, and Bill left.
As longtime Arizonans know, Lito was Manuel "Lito" Pena, who started an insurance agency in his carport and was paid by his laborer and farmworker clients with bags of beans and boxes of fruit and vegetables.
His political philosophy formed as a result of attending one of those "separate-but-equal" schools for "Mexican" kids while his white neighbors attended a serious school.
He is credited with organizing, back in 1946, the first voter-registration drive in the town of Tolleson (now a thriving Phoenix suburb).
His crew hauled people in from the fields and orchards by the pickup load, and when the dust settled, a town that had 150 registered voters suddenly found itself with 750.
Bill, of course, was appointed a U.S. Supreme Court justice only eight years after the shoving match at Bethune School, and eventually became known to history as Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
During his Supreme Court confirmation, Rehnquist denied being at the school that day or ever harassing voters, but several people spoke up and said they witnessed the shoving match -- and pointed out that earlier news reports had described it.
Instead of being shaped by an education in a "separate-but-equal" school, Rehnquist was molded by Stanford and Harvard universities. (As an undergrad, he briefly attended Kenyon College, but apparently nothing about Kenyon rubbed off.)
Rehnquist helped craft the court's first decision in 30 years to affirm the rights of states over the federal government, thus setting off yet another electoral feud that endures today.
As chief justice, he also joined a 1996 dissent (written by the now-famous Justice Antonin Scalia) in a decision in which the court majority ruled that Colorado could not prevent local jurisdictions from protecting the rights of gay citizens.
My purpose in relating this story has nothing to do with how much money of us have. My concern is that the racists and elitists seem about to re-establish their stranglehold on this country. Most of us thought we were past that.
If it happens, let's hope we're strong enough to survive it, and then start over again after 2016.