You may think Donald Trump channeling his inner Hitler is the greatest threat to American democracy.
If you do, you’d be wrong.
Oh, Trump is pretty bad. Imagine Der Fuehrer gluttonous and obese, constantly whining about his own victimhood.
Horrible, but not the worst.
Worse than Trump, actually the worst of all, is the way the Republican Party has been working unashamedly to dismantle the right to vote.
The efforts have been particularly egregious in the Southern states, where prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Jim Crow laws made it very difficult for African-Americans to vote.
The Voting Rights Act helped a lot, but conservative white Republicans in the South never stopped trying and they never stopped resenting having to prove they weren’t discriminating. Then Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and the racists started shouting that see, there’s no racism anymore.
So in 2013, a conservative Supreme Court said hey, it’s not fair to keep singling out racists in the South, and Shelby County v Holder gutted the enforcement provisions and racism was back in full force.
All of a sudden it became much more difficult for black voters to prove their eligibility to vote and it became much more complicated and difficult to find their polling places. They made it much worse by gerrymandering districts to give Republicans legislative majorities in states where they didn’t get a majority of the votes.
One horrible example came in Georgia in 2018, when the Secretary of State purged 400,000 black votoes from the rolls just in time for that same Secretary of State to defeat a black Democrat by 50,000 votes and become Governor Brian Kemp.
North Carolina is a state that has done a horrible job of gerrymandering and has also worked hard to make it more difficult for African-Americans to vote. One GOP election official was quoted as saying something truthful that he should never have said.
“If we let everyone vote, we would never win another election.”
I believe there is only one appropriate resonse to that.
“Well, duh.”
The problem is that the country is changing. For about 200 years, the U.S. was a white man’s country. White men made the rules and women and minorities had to be happy with what they were given.
Civil rights and the women’s movement started changing that, and too often when white men said jump, women and minorities stopped asking how high and basically just said no.
By 2050 this will be a majority-minority country, with more than 50 percent of Americans being something other than white/non-Latino. Republicans will be able to extend their power probably 20 years longer than they otherwise would because of all the election games and the two Supreme Court seats Mitch McConnell stole from Democratic presidents.
Ultimately, right wingers can’t stop the change.
All they can do is decide whether it will be peaceful or violent.