Each morning when I waken I glance at the editorial pages of two major newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. I could this morning reflect/write about multiple pieces I encountered, for example, in the Times, Timothy Egan’s Lord of the Lies, which proposes instant truth checking of candidate statements even during debates, noting the incredible amount of total untruths by the presumptive Republican nominee, and the lesser but perhaps problematic pattern of the Democratic nominee. Or perhaps in The Washington Post Alyssa Rosenberg’s Opinions 47 years ago, Hillary Clinton’s practice nomination speech, which not only explores then Hillary Rodham’s 1969 words as the first student speaker at a Wellesley graduation in the context of her long public career and additional burdens of rising to high office she has faced as a woman.
Both are important, and well worth reading, and I urge you to read both.
But there is something far more basic, and this column by the Post’s deputy editorial page editor and Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary Colbert King, whose title I have borrowed for this piece, is what I focus on.
Let me jump well into the piece to quote what I think is key:
According to the American Prospect, the Brennan Center for Justice likewise found that 7 of the 11 states with the highest 2008 African American turnout subsequently made it harder to vote. Nine of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth added restrictions. And 9 of the 15 states that were specially categorized under the Voting Rights Act because of a history of race-based election discrimination passed new barriers.
We have been here before.
Yes we have. And given the tenor of the campaign of the presumptive Republican nominee, which is clearly undergirded by direct appeals to the worst instincts possible in American society, this is critical. After all, as King writes earlier in the piece
The chosen Republican candidate for president is a dishonest, egotistical, vulgar, mean-spirited bully who resorts to foul religious and racial scapegoating and insults to cover his own insecurities. Trump’s past behavior can’t be undone — even if he wanted it to be, which he doesn’t.
It clearly appeals to many of those supporting him. Which is, as King notes, their business. Which makes it our business to ensure that he does not get to the Oval Office as the next occupant. Because of what it might mean:
There’s more at stake than having a boorish egomaniac in the Oval Office. It’s all that comes with him. A Trump attorney general, a Trump defense secretary, CIA director and secretary of state: The imagination runs wild.
Understand that this election right now is about what America is and will be as a nation and a society, and it has implications for all of us.
King writes
Trump is the GOP standard-bearer because millions of voters turned to him. They want him in the White House because he is, to them, what’s needed to free them from the economic squeeze they find themselves in. They believe they need him to turn back threats in the world and to stop the browning and blackening of America and the shifting of traditional gender roles. They believe he can reestablish the social hierarchy in which groups are made to know their place — especially who’s on top.
I agree with that. I might argue a bit with King’s next paragraph:
Their Trump will “make America great again,” which is to say, he will take them back to a time when they never felt disaffected, disconnected or left behind. He will make it, once again, their world.
In fact, maybe it is not that I argue with those words, because too many working class white men perhaps did feel somehow at least superior to the “others” whether those were Black or female or anything else, even if they lived in poverty, or with economic uncertainty, lack of access to health care.
There was one way in which their lives might have been better. At least 50-60 years ago, a substantial number of men belonged to private sector labor unions, through which they got economic security, better wages, access to health care, safer working conditions, limits on the hours they could be forced to work, paid vacations and sick days, and so much more. Somehow in saying he wants to make America “great” gain the Republican nominee never seems to include reestablishing a unionized work force as an essential part of his vision for America, perhaps because he is infamous for abusing workers — think of the Polish workers he brought in illegally, and paid too little, or of the number of times his companies have been cited for paying too little.
Frederick Douglass called the 15th Amendment, which in theory meant that the former slaves could not be denied the right to vote, “our jubilee,” using the Biblical language that referred to the required manumission of anyone enslaved at a 70 year point in the progress of time. It was only through the vote that they could guarantee their other rights, as Douglass well understood.
That was also understood by those who did not want them to vote, so once the Union Army was withdrawn in the deal that gave Rutherford B Hayes the Presidency in March of 1877, restrictions on Blacks voting were reintroduced, as were restrictive laws and customs across the South, and far too often outside the South as well, in any place where minority voter participation could threaten the ongoing power structure.
That same 15th Amendment that Douglass so valued added words at the end that were critical:
Section 2.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
It was under the power granted by those words that the Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the single piece of legislation that did more to increase African-American participation in our political participation than any other single action in our history.
The restrictions about which King writes are the direct result of a Supreme Court decision rolling back part of the Voting Rights Act. There are Republicans who have made no attempt to hide their attempt to act as a result to suppress voting, as we heard in the last cycle from a Republican in Pennsylvania who said bluntly that voter identification was to guarantee the state for Mitt Romney (he was wrong), and as we have seen in the pushback by many to ensure that they do not lose their right to vote.
As King writes clearly
We have two competing visions: Trump’s cramped, inward-looking America against one of strength in the nation’s diversity, a spirit of discovery and confidence in the future.
This is what the election is all about.
It’s a message not lost on dark factions that would keep the ballot out of black, brown and elderly hands.
And the hands of students — Texas allowing a concealed carry permit as evidence of the right to vote, but not an ordinary University of Texas student ID.
And the hands of the poor — even though one can argue that the 24th Amendment’s ban on poll or other taxes as a condition of voting in FEDERAL (it did not address state or local) elections should mean that economic costs as a means of obtaining the necessary identification to vote would still be unconstitutional, that has to be litigated, and KIng gives the details of one case of a 94 year old woman and what she has undergone in the attempt to maintain her right to vote.
Regardless of whom you supported at ANY point in the Democratic primary process, understand that the future of this country — and of the right of many to participate politically — is very much up in the air. No matter what the polls may now show about the intention of people, there is no guarantee that those who would vote for the Democratic nominee will be able to do so.
And we will need their votes not only for the nation’s highest office, but for EVERY down-ballot contest as well. The Senate, the House, governor’s races, state legislatures, city councils, water commission, school boards, and more.
So now we come to the concluding words by King, which merely by quoting will not give you the full force they carry when you read them at the end of the entire column, which I urge you to read.
But here they are:
It’s not too soon for the rest of us to start increasing voter registration rates, knocking on doors, visiting shopping centers and community gatherings, and talking to family, relatives, friends, neighbors and co-workers about this presidential election.
Election Day is the thing — the only thing.
Election Day is the only thing that matters.
If we care about this country.
Indeed.