Columnist Jon Huer’s stuck-in-the-60s cynicism regarding voting rights hardly meets the needs of this hour [Aug. 28, “‘Half democracy’ is no democracy”]. Where does Mr. Huer think economic equality is going to come from — imperial decree? (That may well be where some 2016 Trump voters thought it would come from, but they were wrong.)
Franklin Roosevelt gave people increased economic freedom, and he was elected four times, so we know voting can get us where we need to go, but, unfortunately, comparatively few of FDR’s voters were Black because Southern Blacks were blocked from voting at that time.
After the Voting Rights Act (1965) guaranteed Black participation in the electoral process, Republicans saw an opportunity to wean White Americans away from the party that would shore them up economically by suggesting that all the goodies the government wanted to give them would go to Black folks and insisting that they, the White folks, would be taxed to death in the process. It wasn’t true, but it launched the Reagan Revolution, the worst economic inequality in the developed world, and the corporation-friendly governments we have had from both Democrats and Republicans ever since.
Biden is trying to change that, but he doesn’t really have the votes in Congress to do it, and new voter suppression laws across the country are attempting to guarantee he never will.
So don’t tell me voting and voting rights don’t matter.
It is not by accident that Blacks are leading the charge to overturn these voter suppression laws. After hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the fight first for freedom and then for voting rights, they know that voting matters.
If we have half a democracy, it is because of the Electoral College, the makeup (two senators for every state regardless of population) and rules of the Senate, gerrymandering, and Citizens United (the free flow of corporate money into elections). These make some voters more equal than others.
The only way we will get rid of these choke holds on democracy, if we ever get rid of them, is through the ballot box. We can also lose democracy through the ballot box, so voting is nothing to be cynical about.
The far left gave us Donald Trump (thank you, Jill Stein) as surely as the far right did; I can’t be complacent about either.
Kathe Geist lives in Charlemont.