Reacting in 1957 to southern blacks’ demands for voting rights, the
National Review declared in a
Buckley-penned editorial that whites were “the advanced race,” while blacks were culturally and intellectually unfit for democracy. “The claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage,” Buckley wrote, labeling assertions to the contrary “demagoguery.” (Less than a decade later, adding an inclusively interracial overtone to his anti-poor condescension, Buckley
argued in a debate with James Baldwin, “The problem in Mississippi isn’t that too few Negroes can vote, it’s that too many whites can.”)
...
Future Supreme Court justice
William Rehnquist, for instance,
worked for Operation Eagle Eye, a 1960s-era Arizona GOP operation that challenged the legitimacy of black and Latino voters at the polls. Then, as now, Republicans couched their support for erecting voting obstacles in terms of voter integrity, with Illinois congressman Robert McClory predicting that in cities like Chicago “fraud would be multiplied many times if the illiterate is going to be given the right to vote.”
When President Jimmy Carter proposed a slate of voting reforms, including same-day registration, the Right pounced. Conservative outlets like the
Heritage Foundation and
Human Events raised the specter of mass fraud, with the former
predicting that the legislation would allow “eight million illegal aliens” to vote and the latter warning of “widespread fraud in key urban centers.”
...
Beginning in the 1960s,
Reagan used critiques of mass voting as a rhetorical ballast for his excoriations of the welfare state,
predicting that democracy would cease to exist when “voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.” Like many on the Right, Reagan took the logical next step, stridently opposing laws that made it easier for low-income Americans to cast ballots.
...
Paul Weyrich, the cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and the
American Legislative Exchange Council,
expressed a similar sentiment in 1980, saying, “I don’t want everybody to vote . . . Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
...
Throughout the
George W. Bush administration, party officials cried wolf about potential voter fraud as part of a concerted
strategy to make the public believe such chicanery was rampant, going so far as to
fire US attorneys who refused to play along and investigate nonexistent incidents.
Throughout the 2008 campaign,
John McCain, the GOP’s supposedly moderate nominee,
falsely alleged in campaign
commercials and
debates that the left-leaning grassroots group ACORN was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy” by working to steal the election for Barack Obama.
The brazen rhetoric didn’t let up in the years immediately preceding Trump’s supposedly unprecedented assault on American democracy. “Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system,” Republican National Committee chair
Reince Priebus wrote in a December 2011 op-ed for CNN that advocated voter ID laws. “[And] Democrats know they benefit from election fraud.”
...
In 2013, Republicans administered the coup de grace. The
conservative Supreme Court majority it had devoted years to winning
struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, opening the door to even more draconian voter suppression legislation.
...
The
National Review’s Kevin Williamson, sounding much like William F. Buckley,
groused in 2012, “
The sacramentalization of the act of voting represents the worst of the democratic impulse and contributes to the ongoing conversion of our republican institutions into so many tribunes of the plebs.” Longtime anti-ACORN fearmonger
Matthew Vadum echoed Buchanan and Reagan in a 2011
American Thinkerpiece titled “
Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American,”
claiming that expanding voting was really about “helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money.”
Taking the Right’s view of poor voters to its logical conclusion, conservatives like
Ann Coulter and former House speaker
Newt Gingrich,
among others, have come out in favor of
reinstituting literacy tests at the polls; right-libertarians like Jason Brennan have
proclaimed their wholesale opposition to democracy.
...
One particularly worrying development coming down the pipeline: a 1982 consent decree barring the GOP from engaging in Eagle Eye–type intimidation tactics —
such as “posing as law-enforcement officers and demanding voters’ IDs, sending out intimidating mailings to minority voters, posting misleading or intimidating signs, or standing at the polls to challenge minority voters’ rights to a ballot” — is set to expire next year, meaning that the 2018 midterms could be the first time Americans experience the full weight of conservative anti-voting efforts since the 1970s.
