As everyone who has worked in women’s reproductive health knows, people who want to criminalize abortion regularly abort pregnancies. It’s not merely a long-term study in destructive hypocrisy, it illustrates a great truth about the people of the United States: millions of us are committed to values to impose on others that we do not accept for ourselves. Selfishness is a more paramount American value than intellectual honesty… by a long shot.
The latest Pew Research polling shows the Republican/Eugenics/Vigilante Party candidate for president up 12 percentage points among white-identifying male voters over the Democratic Party candidate. In other words, the current occupant of the White House has zero chance at reelection without a very large advantage amongst white male voters. In fact, this is the trend for R/E/V Party candidates across the country: without dominating the white man vote, they cannot win elections at all. Understanding this phenomenon is a key to understanding our national preoccupation with limiting access to voting.
The two main political parties each rely on voter suppression in very different ways and to very different degrees. For the R/E/V Party, which is most concerned with protecting the interests of the dominant caste, there is no downside to limiting access to voting with the goal of increasing the impact of white male voters and of dominant caste voters in general. As such, it is not only acceptable but desirable for the R/E/V Party to champion the undemocratic Electoral College, spread misinformation about voting and even intimidate prospective voters and strategically create fake ballot drop boxes to steal votes away from being counted by the proper authorities. As with the anti-abortion proponents who abort pregnancies, members of the party that adores ‘law and order’ also enthusiastically embrace illegal schemes to limit the votes that count.
For the Democratic Party, which is a center-right political party (in the big scheme of things), limiting access to voting is a more delicate and complex endeavor. In the General Election, there is no upside to limiting access; the Dems rely on a coalition of voters who occupy different positions in the American caste system. In other words, when the voter rolls are more representative of the population at large, the Dems’ chance of winning election against the R/E/Vs is increased significantly. However, if the voter rolls are too representative, if there are too many people other than white men voting in Primary elections, the Democratic Party will necessarily move to the Left politically, representing the interests of the dominant caste to a lesser degree and coaxing some voters of the dominant caste and especially white men to abandon Democratic Party candidates. It is understood that by expanding access to voting the Democratic Party would not be reliant on dominant caste voters and especially white men because of the substantially increased numbers of customarily underrepresented voters.
In other countries, there is more reasonable access to voting. From standardized online voting and mail-in voting, to holding a national holiday for election day or a period of multiple days for voting, to a national initiative ending disenfranchisement for people convicted of crimes, there are multiple ways to increase voter participation and representation. Implementing any of these and/or eliminating the preposturous Electoral College so that each vote and each voter has the same power would result in a Democratic win against the R/E/V Party candidate in every recent presidential election and every future one for the foreseeable. So why are these ideas hardly ever (never?) discussed openly by the Democratic leadership? If planting the rhetorical seeds would hasten the fruition of a such a result in any way? Why not?
The reason seems clear and sad: The Democratic leadership fears empowerment of the progressive forces of its left flank and ascendancy of many politicians of color. It retains power by balancing its coalition: proper voter representation would potentially alienate powerful dominant caste parts of the coalition and create imbalance. Understanding this dynamic is essential to understanding why the Party hastily coalesced around an incredibly vulnerable candidate in Joe Biden to crush the viability of a Bernie Sanders nomination rather than allow the primary process to play out: realigning itself significantly to the Left of the Obama administration is unacceptable to the Party elite even at the risk of losing the Presidential Election in 2020 and enabling overt authoritarianism. The Democratic Party can clearly succeed nationally by moving Left and becoming more representative, more democratic, more anti-caste system BUT, its leadership as currently constituted cannot lead this realignment while retaining its status and refuses to relinquish power despite popular will and the advanced ages of the actual leaders. Perhaps it might all be different in 2021 and I’ll be very glad to admit my misestimation.
It is in this milieu of selfishness as a paramount American value that we consider the white man’s vote for President of the United States. While the majority of white male voters vote to advance the interests of the dominant caste, as described earlier, many of them require that the people around them consider them as virtuous and reasoned rather than as ruthlessly committed to power at the expense of the collective good. It is with this goal in mind that certain popular political rhetoric and conceptualizing emerges: many white men are certain they pay more than their fair share in taxes (and consequently, respectfully salute and normalize tax evasion and fraud and the process of defunding the IRS) and use this projection as an excuse for voting with the motivation of having less personal and business tax liability. In this way, the selfishness of cheating the collective by shorting one’s responsibilities has become an American value and a reason to vote. Many also bemoan the badness of all politicians to excuse selfishness (it is excusable because the alternative candidate or policy is ‘so bad’). And many simply and proudly lie to their colleagues, friends and relatives because they believe that it would be wrong for them to face the judgment of others for their sociopathic agenda.
Contemporary American politics seems a story of adapting circumstances to coddle the white male voter’s fragility and to sustain and recontextualize his outsized power in a changing world.
