The Conscience of a Liberal

confronting questions about immigration reform.

Block the Vote

One last, unavoidable question is the issue of fraud. To what extent does the political strategy of movement conservatism rely on winning elections by cheating? We can dismiss objections of the form “How can you suggest such a thing?” Voting fraud is an old American tradition, as I explained when describing Gilded Age politics. And movement conservatism is and always has been profoundly undemocratic. In 1957 the National Review praised Francisco Franco, who overthrew Spain’s elected government and instituted a reign of terror, as a “national hero.” In 2007 the Conservative Political Action Committee was addressed by all the major Republican presidential candidates except John McCain. After former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney spoke to the gathering, he gave a warm welcome to the next speaker, the columnist Ann Coulter,[27] who has declared that we need to “physically intimidate liberals.” Given this history there’s no reason to believe that leading figures in the movement would balk on principle at stealing elections.

In fact there’s no question that vote suppression—the use of any means available to prevent likely Democratic voters, usually African Americans, from casting legitimate ballots—has been a consistent Republican tactic since the party was taken over by movement conservatives. In 2000 Florida’s Republican Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, conducted what the New York Times called a “massive purge of eligible voters,” disproportionately black, who were misidentified as felons. Without that purge George W. Bush would not have made it to the White House.[28] In Georgia the Republican legislature passed a voter identification law in 2005 that a team of lawyers and analysts at the Justice Department recommended rejecting because it was likely to discriminate against black voters—but the team was overruled the next day by political appointees.[29] And this was part of a broader strategy that—characteristically for movement conservatism—involved the collaboration of political appointees within the government and private-sector operations with funding from the usual sources, in this case the “American Center for Voting Rights,” which was founded by the general counsel for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and suddenly disappeared in 2007 when the firing of U.S. attorneys who refused to go along with bogus voter-fraud charges became a major scandal. Here’s how McClatchy Newspapers described the strategy:

McClatchy Newspapers has found that this election strategy was active on at least three fronts:

Tax-exempt groups such as the American Center and the Lawyers Association were deployed in battleground states to press for restrictive ID laws and oversee balloting.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division turned traditional voting rights enforcement upside down with legal policies that narrowed rather than protected the rights of minorities.

The White House and the Justice Department encouraged selected U.S. attorneys to bring voter fraud prosecutions, despite studies showing that election fraud isn’t a widespread problem.[30]

So vote suppression is a part of the movement conservative political strategy. It can be decisive in close elections, which means that as a quantitative matter vote suppression is in the same class as the mobilization of the religious right—but not in the same class as the exploitation of white racial backlash, which remains at the heart of movement conservatism’s ability to achieve electoral success.

The truly frightening question is whether electoral cheating has gone or will go beyond vote suppression to corruption of the vote count itself. The biggest concern involves touch-screen electronic voting machines. In August 2007 the state of California sharply restricted the use of touch-screen machines after an audit by University of California researchers confirmed voting activists’ worst fears: Machines from Diebold, Sequoia, and other major suppliers are, indeed, extremely vulnerable to hacking that alters election results. This raises the question—which I won’t even try to answer—of whether there was in fact electronic fraud in 2002 and 2004, and possibly even in 2006. More important, there is the disturbing possibility that the favorable political trends I’ll discuss in the next chapter might be offset by increased fraud. And given the history of movement conservatism, such worries can’t simply be dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories. If large-scale vote stealing does take place, all bets are off—and America will be in much worse shape than even pessimists imagine.

The Limits of Distraction

So what’s the matter with America? Why have politicians who advocate policies that hurt most people been able to win elections? The view that movement conservatives have found sure-fire ways to distract the public and get people to vote against their own interests isn’t completely false, but it’s been greatly overstated. Instead the ability of conservatives to win in spite of antipopulist policies has mainly rested on the exploitation of racial division. Religion and invocations of moral values have had some effect, but have been far less important; national security was decisive in 2002 and 2004, but not before. And there are indications that most of the ways movement conservatism has found to distract voters are losing their effectiveness. Racism and social intolerance are on the decline, and the Iraq debacle has gone a long way toward discrediting the GOP on national security. Meanwhile concerns about inequality and economic insecurity are on the rise. This is, in short, a time of political opportunity for those who think we’ve been going in the wrong direction. The remainder of this book lays out the dimensions of that opportunity, and what we should do with it.

10 THE NEW POLITICS OF EQUALITY

The Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm election came as a shock to many, even though it had been telegraphed by polls well in advance. Many analysts had invested themselves emotionally and professionally in the idea of over whelming Republican political superiority. I have a whole shelf of books from 2005 and 2006 explaining, in sorrow, triumph, or simply awe, how the superior organization of the GOP, the enthusiasm of its supporters, its advantage in money, its ownership of the national security issue, and—by some accounts—its ability to rig elections made it invincible. Believing that Republicans had a lock on power, some couldn’t believe what the polls were saying—namely, that the American people had had enough.

Even after the election results were in, there was a visible reluctance to acknowledge fully what had happened. For months after the vote many news analyses asserted one of two things: that it was only a narrow victory for the Democrats, and/or that the Democrats who won did so by being conservative. The first claim was just false, the second mostly so.

The new Democratic margin in the House of Representatives wasn’t narrow. In fact, it was wider than any Republican majority during the GOP’s twelve-year reign. The new Democratic majority in the Senate was paper thin, but achieving even that starting from a five-seat deficit was something of a miracle, because only a third of the Senate is elected at a time. As it was, Democrats and independents allied with the Democrats won twenty-four of the thirty-three Senate seats at stake. The Democrats also took six governorships, and gained control of eight state legislative chambers.

The claim that Democrats won by becoming conservative is only slightly less false. Some of the new faces in Congress were Democrats who won in relatively conservative districts, and were themselves a bit more conservative than the average Democrat. But it remained true that every Democrat was to the left of every Republican, so that the shift in control drastically tilted the political balance to the left.[1] And the truly relevant comparison is between the Democratic majority now and the Democratic majority in 1993–94, the last time the party was in control. By any measure the new majority, which doesn’t depend on a wing of conservative Southern Democrats, is far more liberal. Nancy Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, made headlines by becoming the first woman to hold the position—but she is also the most progressive Speaker ever.

But what did the Democratic victory and the leftward shift in Congress mean? Was it an aberrational event, a consequence of the special ineptitude of the Bush administration? Or was it a sign of fundamental political realignment?

Nobody can be completely sure. In this chapter, however, I’ll make the case for believing that the 2006 election wasn’t an aberration, that the U.S. public is actually ready for something different—a new politics of equality. But the emergence of this new politics isn’t a foregone conclusion. It will happen only if liberal politicians