24 October 21
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A vote in the United States Senate... entirely along party lines... about voting rights... where to even begin?
Images flash across my mind of the long struggle for enfranchisement in America, which stretches back to the tragic imperfections under which this country was founded. These injustices defined the society of my youth, one of state-sponsored segregated society. When I started my career as a journalist, bearing witness to voter suppression across the South was one of my first assignments. I would later see it in different forms across the rest of the country.
Fierce battles, sometimes bloody battles, over the basic freedom of fair elections has marked this nation's history, and the undercurrents remain. For all the progress we have made, we can see that these gains could prove illusory. The time for sugar coating reality has long since passed. We have large sections of our citizenry eager to undermine the most fundamental mechanism for a free, just, and accountable government. These forces have been stoked by a divisive autocrat who bent the Republican party to his whims and needs.
I believe, however, it is too easy to chalk these voter suppression efforts to mere hatred or bigotry, though those currents are certainly at play. But I don't think the lines of demarcation are as clear as they were during the Civil Rights movement. As with back then, this is about power, raw power. But it is a power based on a view of the country that is more complex than race, although race certainly plays a part. It is about a belief that we should hew to only one vision of America, a vision that those on the far right of the political spectrum define as patriotism. It is an America where old social orders largely remain intact, where a view of what society is and should be passes through the most conservative of lenses. Those who had firmly felt themselves in the majority see this America slipping away. Rather than evolve and modernize, they would rather retrench with a steel-eyed political calculus: if you can't win a majority of voters, you must construct a system that allows for minority rule.
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