When Trump went after the votes in places like Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit, many on the anti-Trump side decried the racist intent: Trump was trying to disenfranchise voters of color.
When the Republicans pass measures to suppress the vote, the condemnations we hear emphasize that it is minority voters whose voices they are attempting to silence.
All that is true, but it does not capture the main truth: the main truth is that Trump wanted to win, no matter what it took, and the Republicans want to grab power, by any means necessary, and one big way to do that is to silence the voices of those who vote for their opponents.
In other words, the attempts at disenfranchisements are directed at African-Americans and other people of color more because they vote disproportionately for the Democrats than because of the racial factor.
Sure, the Republicans use white racism as a fuel for their grabbing for power. But “use” is the key word there: the real engine behind the Republican Party is not racism, but rather greed and the lust for power.
If we look at the conduct of the Republicans over the past generation, it is always about power, and only sometimes about racism:
- the Citizens United decision, for example, was a naked transfer of power from the American people generally to the plutocracy;
- the Republican theft of a Supreme Court seat — denying President Obama of his rightful constitutional role to name the successor to the seat vacated by the death of Scalia — that was not about race but about stacking the deck in favor of the corporate system, again against the people generally;
- when Republican Presidents of the past generation — W first, then even more so Trump — arrogated to themselves powers not granted by the Constitution, that, too was reflective not of racism but of the unrestrained drive for power, so strong that even being the most powerful person in the world does not satisfy the power-lust.
- when Republicans lost elections in states like North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and then set about trying to strip the offices they lost of the powers the people had voted to confer on the Democrats, it wasn’t about race but simply about the unceasing and relentless priority today’s Republican Party places on gathering all power onto itself.
Likewise with Voter Suppression: of course a power-obsessed political party will attempt to prevent African-Americans from voting, when 90+% of those votes will attempt to give power to the Republicans’ rivals. But when we look at the big picture of how today’s Republican Party operates, we should understand that they attempt to silence those voters not because they are black but because they vote Democratic.
(It’s like Willie Sutton’s reason for robbing banks: that’s where the money is.)
It is certainly understandable that African-Americans — who have generations and centuries of experience of the white power-structure working to keep them down — will interpret the attacks on their voting rights primarily in terms of white racism. Which, of course, is an ugly element of this extremely ugly picture.
And it may be political smart for the Democrats to emphasize the racism, rather than the more general sociopathic power-grabbing, though I doubt it.
I doubt that the racism angle is the politically most advantageous way of condemning the Republicans’ voter suppression because the real picture of the Republican Party — a political force that cares only about power and is willing to do anything to get it— is just as ugly, and its ugliness should repel Americans of all stripes.
The suppression-as-racism angle will stoke the anger only of the victims of racism, plus those others who care about racial justice. Showing how the suppression is part of a larger picture of a plutocratic power working relentlessly to rob all Americans of our birthright could rouse a much wider swath of the American electorate to recognize today’s Republican Party as “the enemy of the people.”
(Voter Suppression is part of the same picture of a Republican assault on Democracy as the insurrectionary attack on the Capitol to overturn a legitimate election that took power from the Republican Party.)