Preach it!

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Bingo! Government is also good for the war on drugs, for sex policing, for censorship, for wars abroad. Voting is another thing, which explains why they do what they can to minimize it. Though, we help too much in apathy and entertainments. Krugman has a good column on this today.

~ ~ ~

It’s always good when leaders tell the truth, especially if that wasn’t their intention. So we should be grateful to Leung Chun-ying, the Beijing-backed leader of Hong Kong, for blurting out the real reason pro-democracy demonstrators can’t get what they want: With open voting, “You would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month. Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies” — policies, presumably, that would make the rich less rich and provide more aid to those with lower incomes.

[...]

Still, while the “kind of politics and policies” that responds to the bottom half of the income distribution won’t destroy the economy, it does tend to crimp the incomes and wealth of the 1 percent, at least a bit; the top 0.1 percent is paying quite a lot more in taxes right now than it would have if Mr. Romney had won. So what’s a plutocrat to do?

One answer is propaganda: tell voters, often and loudly, that taxing the rich and helping the poor will cause economic disaster, while cutting taxes on “job creators” will create prosperity for all. There’s a reason conservative faith in the magic of tax cuts persists no matter how many times such prophecies fail (as is happening right now in Kansas): There’s a lavishly funded industry of think tanks and media organizations dedicated to promoting and preserving that faith.

[...]

And now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy. And it’s by no means clear which side will win.

-- Paul Krugman at NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/opinion/paul-krugman-plutocrats-against-democracy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0)

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Everyone talks about home prices in the Bay Area. I'll never be able to afford such. Well, maybe after the faucets are dry.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Once you've stripped away all of the validating narratives behind the rainbow of voter restrictions/rolling back of increased access that Republicans are putting into place across the country, it's hard to avoid noticing a kind of fundamental comfort with the idea that some people ought to be voting, and others not. And once we've noticed that, we're expected to politely not notice that the "people who ought not to be voting" are, you know, not white, not male, not rich, etc.

I think it kind of gives away the game to give the narratives even the level of respectability we're expected to give them. By debating whether voter impersonation fraud actually exists, whether it's really a big burden to keep the polls open longer or to provide for more early voting, whether non-same-day registration, draconian requirements imposed upon registration drives, and limitations on absentee voting really are required to safeguard the sanctity of elections, we end up having these fact-based debates with people whose underlying justifications are never actually factual. Regardless of the occurrence of voter fraud, shouldn't we do our best to ensure that only people who are entitled to vote actually vote? And why not try to limit the expenses undertaken to administer elections? We're not talking about big burdens here, anyway. And even if we were, if you can't handle the burden...

Maybe your vote shouldn't count.

It's never factual. They pretend it is, but change the facts? Nothing about their arguments change. They are normative arguments, and they are fundamentally normative policy arguments whose implementation demonstrably limits the franchise. That limitation is not debatable; it's observable. Yet somehow the right-wing media machine has never supplied its gullible foot soldiers with the rhetorical tools they need to handle that limitation or its factual consequences, apart from the usual red herrings about buying alcohol or a kind of presumptuous dismissal of anyone who can't find a way to register to vote, on their own and in advance, get a state-issued ID, and show up during whatever poll hours are selected for them on a workday. Hey, it's just like flying. Which, of course, everyone does all the time.

So you always end up at these places, in these debates, where the party line breaks down and you're left with a gullible person and their fundamental prejudices. Why should we care about these people not voting? And since that's where we inevitably end up, I suggest that we stop pretending that any of the other nonsense has anything to do with their positions. There are people who think that young, non-white, working-class or poor, even female people should not be voting. They don't think they should be voting because they don't trust those people's judgment; they don't believe that those people vote for the right politicians or in favor of the right policies, or for the right reasons; they don't feel as though those people exist as part of the same political community as "the rest of us." They are stupid, lazy, incompetent, and selfish. They are "takers," not "makers." So who cares if they don't vote? Filtering them out from the process will just improve the results.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Republicans are fond of saying that we are a republic rather than a democracy, and what feels a little scary to me is the fact (?) that we do not have a right to vote in the Constitution. There are some prohibitions if you do have an election (race, age), but I am thinking it is like the old question about public pools - if you have them, you cannot segregate racially - and deciding just to close them down. Admittedly, I don’t see a practical way to cut us off from the ballot box, but it looks to me like a vulnerability - an historical oversight that could become important. Unless I am missing a safeguard.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

I am not sure there is an explicit safeguard, either for a "right to vote" generally or against more fine-tuned manipulations of voting rules to achieve political ends. I would tend to think that there is enough constitutional material to find a "right to vote," were it ever seriously challenged, and I would expect judges raised in our political culture to recognize it. But that's not the same as being able to cite an express constitutional provision.

I think the republic/democracy point is less about the "right to vote" as such than it is the relationship between what the population desires and what the government actually does. But I think it reflects a kinship with the sentiment that there are people we "want" to vote, and people we don't want to vote, insofar as it reflects a satisfaction with a status quo that tends to privilege certain structurally-favored constituencies over others.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Who isn't working for the Pharaoh?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

It's good to know that at least some people still read Marx.