Voting rights will be the defining fight of 2021 + how did the bear cubs cross the road?
+ class on power and strategy + race, the body, and trauma + learning from winter
In today’s issue, we turn to the most important question facing Congress and the country in 2021: will the Democrats be able to pass election reform and voting rights legislation to thwart the onslaught of noxious measures of the kind enacted in Georgia and being considered around the country? Jamelle Bouie argues, rightly in our view, that “if a Democrat wins a GOP-controlled swing state in 2024 . . . there’s a very good chance the victory isn’t certified and I think at least one state legislature will try to unilaterally assign its electoral votes. . . . I think people are underestimating the extent of the anti-democratic turn among Republican lawmakers at the state and local level.” In an amazing 11-minute segment on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Jane Mayer dissects a remarkable leaked recording of a recent meeting between Grover Norquist and aides to Charles Koch and Mitch McConnell in which they strategize about how to defeat H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” reviewing polling data about its overwhelming popularity among Republicans as well as Democrats.
As of March 24, 361 bills with restrictive provisions have been introduced in 47 states. Even in a state like Michigan, led by popular Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Republicans may have found a loophole in the state’s constitution to circumvent her veto to enact voter restrictions. According to the Detroit Free Press (quoting a progressive star, Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist, who we are huge fans of)
Under the Michigan Constitution, the Legislature can adopt laws that are not subject to the veto power of the governor if a petition initiative gathers enough signatures. Michigan Republican Party chairman Ron Weiser outlined the party's plan to pursue a petition initiative during a March 24 meeting of the North Oakland Republican Club, according to a video posted on Facebook.
"I think it's anti-democratic," Gilchrist said of the petition drive during a news conference. "They want to take this really short path, this minority policy-making path." A petition would need approximately 340,000 valid signatures, according to Mark Brewer, an election law attorney at Goodman Acker and former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.
A new academic paper offers powerful historical context for the fight against voter suppression in 2021. In “Suppressing Black Votes: A Historical Case Study of Voting Restrictions in Louisiana,” Luke Keele, William Cubbison, and Ismail White use a unique data source (the only data on voting in the south spanning from Reconstruction to the modern era!) to empirically document the effect of restrictions on voting on Black political participation. You will not be surprised to see that disenfranchisement measures like literacy tests and property requirements for voter registration in the 1898 Louisiana Constitution almost completely removed Black people from voter rolls (and reduced the ability of poor whites to vote, too). Only after a Supreme Court decision striking down “white primaries” in 1944 and then the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed did Black voter registration rates rise to eventually match white registration. Then in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states in the former Confederacy and others with a history of disenfranchisement to get “preclearance” from the Justice Department to make changes in voting procedures.
A second finding from the paper has even more relevance to today’s voter suppression efforts. The so-called “Understanding Clause” allowed local election officials to selectively test voters’ knowledge of the Louisiana Constitution, and was mainly enforced in parts of the state with large numbers of Black people.
We then conduct a second analysis, which focuses on Louisiana’s use of the Understanding Clause to reduce voter registration among Blacks. We show that in parishes that used the Understanding Clause, Black registration rates dropped by nearly 30 percentage points, with little effect on white registration. The findings of this paper have important implications for understanding the potential for discrimination in the enforcement of modern, ostensibly nonracial, voter eligibility requirements, such as voter ID laws, which grant substantial discretion to local officials in determining voter eligibility.
Laws, like the one just passed in Georgia, which use “ostensibly non-racial” means to disenfranchise Black voters are a dagger pointed at the heart of democracy. (For details on Georgia’s statute, check out this in-depth annotation of the 98-page law by Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein of the New York Times.) We have been here before, in the very recent past. The Democrats’ performance with unified control of Washington will be measured on the basis of whether they eliminate the filibuster and pass H.R. 1.
Democrats appear fractured on how to proceed, and there is resistance in the Democratic caucus from white Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to doing away with the filibuster in order to pass H.R. 1. This too is part of the historical pattern. Megan Ming Francis and Deepak argue in a recent article in The Nation that“Northern white exhaustion with confronting racism” is the decisive factor in its endurance. Writing about the imposition of Jim Crow and the end of Reconstruction, they conclude, “Essentially, white moderates’ fervor for racial liberalism proved no match for white supremacists’ fervor for, well, supremacy. Today, we live with the results of that failure. We face a similar test now.”
This is an “all in” moment and fight, one that will occur within both between the parties and within the Democratic Party, as described in the New York Times report “Democrats Splinter Over Strategy for Pushing Through Voting Rights Bill.” Even if H.R. 1 is enacted, there will be a long struggle to protect multi-racial democracy for a decade or more. But if we fail, the results could be catastrophic.
In “The Most Important Thing Democrats Can Do with Their Power is Protect the Vote,” Osita Nwanevu discusses the role of corporate-backed groups that have come out to back Manchin and Sinema in thwarting the filibuster:
Obviously, the Club for Growth and the rest of the Republican political machine will be working to cancel Manchin and Sinema next time they’re on the ballot, whether they do the right thing on the filibuster or not. But absent the right pitch from Democrats, both will do exactly what the Club for Growth and their conservative constituents want them to do. Democrats don’t seem much closer to finding that pitch. But they are inching toward a moment of truth, and everyone—left and right—seems to know it.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber hosted a fascinating conversation on March 9th with Democratic strategist Chai Komanduri and former Governor Howard Dean, who argued that the strategy Manchin and Sinema are pursuing is profoundly misguided even if their only concern is their own political survival. As Melber says, “Recent history shows that one of the keys for a member of Congress’s reelection is their party president’s overall popularity, not just whether they themselves differentiate from the president in their party in their state.” He cites the examples of Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln — all of whom lost elections after breaking with President Obama to appease Republicans in their states. Melber concludes that “the lesson for Democrats like Manchin [and, we’d add, Sinema] is that repeatedly criticizing and breaking with the president of your own party, when it weakens the president, may be literally a worse political strategy than trying to have a party and a president so successful that few can argue with the results.”
The battle against the filibuster and in defense of voting rights will be tough – but so were the Georgia Senate races and the 2020 Presidential election, and we won those. Strategically, what are the levers available to us?
We can support the grassroots organizations in West Virginia and Arizona that will make a difference in pushing squishy Democrats because they have deep roots and can use people power. There are two fine organizations that you might donate to: LUCHA in Arizona and WV Can’t Wait. Those of us outside those states won’t be persuasive to Manchin and Sinema, but we can back the organizers and leaders who will be. We can also back the play of the groups in Georgia like the New Georgia Project, who are leading the fight against Georgia’s repressive law.
National Democrats do have leverage over their wayward members. Constituents and donors can press our own Senators to use the combination of carrots and sticks needed to bring Manchin and Sinema over the line. Doing this will be comparable to the challenges this mama bear faced when wrangling her (extremely cute!) cubs to cross the street. We can make it clear to Sen. Schumer, for example, that he can’t come back home to NY without having delivered voting rights. He is worried about a primary challenge from the left in 2022, so we should never lose the chance to remind him that his own political future is on the line.
We can pressure corporations, on whose support both Democrats and Republicans depend, for example taking the lead of activists in Georgia whose months of pressure on companies like Coca-Cola and Delta forced them to reverse their positions on the Georgia law. If titans of business come to believe that degraded democracy is bad for business, they will use their power – as some of them did in the post-election period to oppose Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.
Reading Recommendations
This article in The Guardian, “US Democracy on the Brink: Republicans wage ‘coordinated onslaught’ on voting rights,” provides a good overview of the issues, with perspective from leaders like LaTosha Brown, Stacey Abrams, and Lauren Groh-Wargo who rightly calls the Georgia bill “Jim Crow 2.0.”
In his New York Review of Books article “Can the Senate Restore Majority Rule?,” Michael Tomasky outlines the significance of the filibuster:
Adam Jentleson’s Kill Switch is the most exquisitely timed book I’ve encountered in years. Jentleson’s explanation of the filibuster’s ignominious roots, and of the mendacious arguments made today by its defenders, is careful and thorough and exacting. Every senator should be forced to read it and then reread it.
If they did, they would know that the notion of “unlimited debate”—the claim that the Senate is a special institution because it accommodates endless discussion of legislation—is a lie. They would know that the idea that the Senate was somehow designed to defend the rights of the minority is also a lie, and a particularly pernicious one, as the filibuster was invented by John C. Calhoun to uphold slavery and white supremacy. They would know how the Senate, sometimes by unhappy accident and sometimes by the malevolent design of those who exploited its rules, has become the graveyard of progressive legislation . . .
Biden’s success may well depend on it. If the administration brings us out of the pandemic successfully, it will generate enormous goodwill. But then there’s the rest of the agenda: climate, jobs, infrastructure, immigration, the minimum wage—and most important of all, protecting voting rights and democracy. If the Democrats can’t stop the Republican assault on voting, which the GOP has taken up with increased ferocity this year, they will lose future elections to the party that represents a minority in this country and that will then further change the rules to solidify its power.
It looks like Calhoun and Russell all over again. Still today, the struggle comes back to race, and to the same debate we’ve been having since the beginning of the republic: whether to establish the simple democratic principle of majority rule and crush the pernicious lie that majority rule leads to tyranny, when our history amply shows that the opposite is the case.
In this Ezra Klein interview with a top Republican pollster, Kristen Soltis Anderson reports that when asked whether the goal of politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the country’s survival as we know it,” only 25% of them say the purpose is good public policy. Put this together with research we featured earlier:
A recent study by political scientist Larry M. Bartels found that Republicans who score high in what he calls “ethnic antagonism”—who are worried about a perceived loss of political and cultural power for white people in the United States—are much more likely to espouse antidemocratic, authoritarian ideas such as “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” and “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules to get things done.” Three out of four Republicans agreed that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,” a stunning opinion reflecting the way that decades of anti-immigrant, anti-poor, anti-Black, and anti-government political messaging can tip over into an antipathy toward democracy itself at a time of demographic change. (Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us, pp. 140-141)
In The New Yorker, Peter Slevin reveals “The Power of Political Disinformation in Iowa,” providing some bracing texture on the Republicans’ right-wing turn, which produced sweeping victories for the Republicans in the state in 2020. Disinformation and the failure of Democrats to campaign in person clearly played a big role. But,
After the November debacle, more than one Iowa Democrat told me that they no longer recognize their state as a place that voted twice for Obama and elected a Democrat, Tom Harkin, to the Senate five times. Douglas Burns, a longtime newsman and political independent who co-owns the Carroll Times Herald, is similarly pessimistic. As a reporter, he watched any number of Iowa Democrats run what he considered solid, mainstream campaigns, attentive to voters and their local concerns, only to lose. “Unless you live here, I don’t think you can appreciate the level of rural white grievance,” he told me. “We think that you can win people over with the issues. I’m not sure that you can.”
We’re lifting this piece in The Nation, “After Innocence: Racial Reckoning is Needed to Save Democracy,” by Megan Ming Francis and Deepak that argues that:
A crucial mistake recurs in American history: trying to move forward without reckoning honestly with injustice. We have an opportunity to break this pattern of forgetting. Remembrance and repair are not just morally necessary—they are the keys to saving our fragile multiracial democracy. Here we offer a plan to undertake that vital work.
On the topic of last week’s Platypus, Cecilia Muñoz has a good piece in The Atlantic about the border crisis: “Realism About the Border is in Short Supply.”
The current border infrastructure, including the buildings where the Border Patrol carries out its work, was designed for a time when the main challenge was individual adults coming from Mexico who were trying to evade U.S. authorities. The people approaching the border now are much different; they are families with children coming from Central America. A shockingly large number are unaccompanied children—that is, children who are traveling with smugglers or are utterly unsupervised. When I served in government, I met some unaccompanied children as young as 7. I will never fail to be shocked at those who would have the United States of America turn away a child who arrives alone; surely the past four years have not depleted our souls that much. But the Border Patrol has neither the training nor the facilities suitable for children.
Savvy Corner
Stephanie Luce and Deepak are teaching a class on “Power and Strategy” for experienced community, labor, racial justice, and environmental organizers and campaigners. You can learn more and apply here. From the course description:
How do groups in society achieve the changes they seek? This course will explore how elites, labor unions, community organizations, political parties and social movements organize, develop strategies and deploy resources to advance their interests and win major changes in society. To provide a shared framework, we’ll begin with an overview of classical and contemporary theories of power and cause and effect. We’ll look at elite strategies to wield power developed in the military, Silicon Valley, business, and politics. We’ll also consider five “strategies from below,” including building mass organization, disruptive movements, efforts to capture governing power, “inside-outside” strategies.
In the eternal battle between David and Goliath, how and why does David sometimes win? We’ll examine a variety of case studies from the right and left, including the orchestrated rise of neoliberalism, and cutting-edge campaigns from contemporary racial justice and labor and other movements. The class will focus heavily on introducing applied tools for strategy development from a variety of traditions. We’ll review tools commonly used in campaigns like power analysis and strategy charts, but also introduce frameworks like “lean start up,” reverse engineering, OODA loops, emergent strategy, scenario planning, policy feedback loops, time shifting and methods to harness and work with strong emotions. The class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced social change organizers and campaigners, as well as for graduate students. The class will feature guest faculty and practitioners with extensive experience building winning campaigns.
Delights and Provocations
This week, the podcast “Wintering,” Wisdom and weathering life’s darkest times” featuring Katherine May moved us.
This podcast Race and Healing: A Body Practice featuring therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem is a revelation, taking us into the way racism encodes in the body itself, and exploring epigenetics – how trauma transmits across time.
Oh, and did we mention the bear and the bear cubs trying to cross the road? Oh, we did? But you didn’t click the link? Here they are again.