Sunday, April 18, 2021

Fight Or Flight Against Fascism In Georgia (And Elsewhere)?

It says a great deal, and none of it good, that a seemingly innocent phrase like "voting reform" has become a mask for behavior that is less about voting, and even less about reform, than it is a last gasp of a political party that has morphed not just into a personality cult, but one that has no greater or even other purpose in life than white male power--and power for its own sake, and not for any greater good.  

Nevertheless, this is where we are today in the U.S..  At the mercy of politicians, and their fellow travellers in white maleness, who have concluded that their only hope to remain relevant is to take away from their opponents the power to govern by way of the ballot box.  The power for which thousands of us, over centuries, have suffered and died for, in order to create a more perfect Union.  Union, and unity, are not what gets them out of bed every morning.  Victory is.  Victory, by any means necessary.

The last time the Republican Party lost control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they conducted a postmortem that was referred to as an "autopsy," one that lend them, at least on paper, to conclude that they needed to adapt to the reality of a more diverse country, and stop the wink-and-nod form of Ku Klux Klan politics that it had been practicing since 1972.  For a few months, they went through the motions of heeding the postmortem's message.

But, when you've been living for decades on the political equivalent of crack cocaine, it's hard to go cold turkey, especially when something happens to convince you that you don't need rehab after all.  It didn't take long for the Tea Party, and its take-the-country-back anger, and Donald Trump with his "questions" about Barack Obama's birth certificate, to take control of our country's agenda, and lead us down the road that has lead to pandemic, poverty, police violence, and a planet on fire.

And how have they responded to that?  Now that the lethality of their politics has been so exposed to the American people that even voters in Arizona and Georgia gave up on them last year, how do they plan to get on the comeback trail?

Stop people they don't like from voting, that's how.  And do it, or at least try, on a massive scale.  Even as I type this, state legislatures across the county are now considering no fewer than 300 bills designed to restrict, by one means or another, the right of the people to exercise the franchise and have a say in their own governance.

The right of certain people, that is.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Georgia, where the 2020 election outcome gave Democrats control of the Senate, and made Joe Biden the first Democratic Presidential candidate in nearly 30 years to carry the state.  And, like the coward he undoubtedly is, Trump has rhetorically pushed back against this result by pretending (even after three audits of the votes) that this outcome is based on fraud.  These allegations, in fact, are the plutonium that led the Republican state legislature and governor to enact a so-called "reform" of Georgia's laws, to "protect" the right to vote in the state.

No one, absolutely no one, should take Trump's allegations of fraud seriously.  The political supplicants in Georgia who helped enact this sham of a bill are, of course, publicly relying on these allegations, because they come from Trump, who has become the personality at the center of a party that is now, operationally, a personality cult.  But there was no fraud in Georgia's election results.

Have some doubts about that?  Just listen to Georgia's governor, the one who ran for the office while he was Georgia's secretary of state, with the power to manipulate the outcome of the election, a power he didn't hesitate to use.  He's admitted it on tape.

And, if you doubt that Trump is at the root of the whole "fraud" charade, take a look at this.

And the content of the bill?  A hodgepodge of restrictions that range from the merely obvious to the outrageously arbitrary.

Most of the bill's defenders in the right-wing media corner focus on the former.  What's the big deal about making it harder for people to vote?  Stacey Abrams even advocated shortening the period for early voting, as a Georgia state legislator.  And voter ID?  Who doesn't want this?  Why isn't this related to stopping voter fraud.  Shouldn't we all want this?

Abrams' "advocacy" seems to have been governed more by short-term budgetary considerations than any philosophical aversion to limiting the number of days for early voting.  This is one of the problems with advancing the hypocrisy argument against your philosophical opponents; if you are advancing it, you'd better make sure the facts line up with your accusation.  Unless Rich Lowry has some sort of inside information showing that white voters in Georgia primarily vote during early voting--and that Abrams knew this--he would due well to take his flights of op-ed fantasy elsewhere.

In fact, early voting benefits those who have difficulty finding time off from other responsibilities to vote--those who are, disproportionally, women and people of color.  This is beyond dispute, and the so-called "reformers" know it.  Which is why they mix limits on early voting days with limits on the number of polling places, artificially lengthening lines at the polls and making it harder for those whose children or jobs will not allow them to wait.  This is also why they restrict, as the new Georgia bill does, the ability of individuals to provide water to voters waiting in line.  This is not fraud prevention; this is naked harassment.  The same can be said about the bill's restrictions on absentee ballots and drop-boxes.

As for voter ID restrictions, also a feature of the Georgia bill, despite the seeming reasonableness of such restrictions, they have a history of being used for discriminatory purposes, which the ACLU has neatly summed up here.  Perhaps the most important part of this summary, something that could be said about all of these "reforms," is the observation that they are a solution in search of a problem.  Voter fraud is rare.  The only numerous aspect of it is the accusations of it--which almost always seems to come from Republicans.

And the problems with the bill's provisions don't end there.  Its cutbacks on mail voting and dropboxes force a reliance on electronic voting databases which, as we've already seen, are vulnerable to hacking even under the best of circumstances.  And note the fact that the voting period for special elections has bet reduced by more than half.  This is particularly relevant in understanding the basic motivation behind the bill, because the original length of this period was dictated by the desire to make sure that as many white people as possible got to the polls.  The Senate special elections last fall showed them how badly that strategy can backfire on them with a more racially diversified electorate.  The strategy is now being changed, because the underlying racism behind it hasn't changed.  

Ultimately, the best evidence for that proposition is also the single worst feature of the new Georgia law:  the fact that it takes ultimate control of the administration of state elections out of the hands of non-partisan local boards of elections, and gives it to the highly partisan state legislature and governor.  If the current governor and legislature thought that there was any chance, even a microscopic one, that they would be replaced by Democrats at some point, this provision would never see the light of day.  They know, and will nevertheless not tell you, that this is being done because it gives the Republican Party in Georgia not only the power to manipulate election results in any manner that suits them, but the power to conceal that manipulation as well.

This illustrates why, in the hands of Republicans, the word "reform" can only be viewed as Orwellian in nature.  Their "reforms" are not for the purpose of creating a better world for everyone; they exist soley as tools to perpetuate their own power, and solely for the purpose of ensuring that anyone they don't like, for any reason, has absolutely no power at all.  They can talk about so-called "cancel culture" until they are green-eggs-and-ham in the face.  But they are its greatest proponents, and the greatest practitioners of using political power to advance it.

So, what to do in opposition to it?  Fight or flight?  Boycott, or stand our ground?

On a personal level, I have very mixed feelings about boycotts, because they can, if not properly targeted at the people whose actions are being protested, end up creating a lot of collateral damage.  Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, historically speaking, probably conducted the most effective boycotts in no small part because the targets of their boycotts, primarily government officials, were the people they wanted to challenge.  In contrast, the economic boycotts that are currently being urged against Georgia-based corporations, such as Coca-Cola and Delta, have the potential to harm the day-to-day well being of the people whose political interests are supposed to benefit from the boycott in the first place.  Abrams herself, whose activism and organizing was the key to the Democrats' recent success in Georgia, has made it clear that she is no fan of boycotts, and for precisely the reason that I just cited.

On the other hand, these corporations, and others, like Major League Baseball, have consumer bases that are not merely local, but national and international as well, and it's clearly in their capitalistic self-interest to consistently act in ways that reflects the value of consumers.  It's easy to lose sight of the fact that contemporary marketing is not, strictly speaking, a matter of making a lawyerly case for product or service benefits ("So-and-so cleans better than Brand X") as it is about making more personal associations between what is being sold and the people doing the buying.

And large corporations, in part by virtue of their size and global reach, have multiple constituencies to respect and accommodate.  In the case of Major League Baseball, and its decision to move this year's All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, I suspect that it was motivated as much as anything by a desire to protect its players from constantly being bombarded with questions about whether or not they would participate in a boycott of the game, as well as protecting itself from the scenario where the game itself might be boycotted by both players and sponsors, decisions that they could do little if anything to prevent.  In the end, its decision was made to remove itself from the ongoing debate, as much as it was to reflect the values the sport is supposed to emulate.

What this reinforces is a simple reality about contemporary America, and a harsh one for those who celebrate white supremacy, and white male supremacy in particular, as the basis for the nation's existence and greatness.  Manipulating the machinery of elections, whether by voting restrictions, gerrymandering, unlimited corporate fundraising, or any other means, as a last resort for maintaining the political power of a minority, is a doomed strategy, and will become even more so in the coming years as the minority in question--uneducated white men--continues to shrink in size.

If nothing else, this should serve as a well-earned comeuppance for Mitch McCONnell, whose longtime advocacy of treating corporations and people equally when it comes to allowing unlimited campaign contributions from both sources.  This embodies the pernicious combination of two lies:  that corporations are people, and that money can be considered political speech that merits the First Amendment's protection (whether or not in the form of a bribe).  In response to the relocation of the All-Star Game, and other corporate criticisms of the new Georgia voting law, McCONnell once again illustrated his willingness to speak profusely, if not effectively, out of both sides of his mouth.  In the view of the minority leader of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, money is speech, but speech is not speech.  Once again, we need Orwell to come back from the dead and say, "Hold my beer."

Someone needs to step in and tell Mitch that it's not working.  Boy, is it not working.  If anything, it looks like it's going to cost his party money.  Which means its going to cost it votes.  Too bad (not really).

In the end, if Georgia Democrats and their political allies can find the right mix of boycotting and direct action via organizing--and they'll need our help with both--the efforts of Republicans in the state and in other states will produce the political outcome that they, and their opponents deserve.  Fight or flight?  It's a false choice.  We need to do both.  And, for those of you who haven't started already, you need to get started right now.

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