The Other Movements of American History
Barring some unforeseen catastrophe for the Clinton campaign, November 8 will mark the sixth presidential election in seven where the Democratic nominee carries the popular vote. Some of this is simple politics. The Democratic Party’s ideas are more popular than the Republican Party’s ideas (or lack thereof, when it comes to healthcare plans). More importantly, the composition of American voters has changed. Minority voters have become less, well, of a minority, and they vote Democratic.
Demographic change is an existential problem for the GOP. After getting beaten handily in 2012, the GOP released an autopsy report that prescribed reaching out to more minority voters and especially softening its rhetoric on immigration. Its leadership knew that minorities vote Democratic because the Democratic Party’s policies are better for them, so the GOP would need to change its approach in order to stay relevant. I don’t think that’s gone too well.
Instead, the GOP doubled down on its identity as the party of White grievance voters. Their cries of rigged elections aren’t really about a crooked media or voter fraud, but about a lack of control. The White coalition of voters no longer gets to choose who wins; the boogeyman “they” do. Since the GOP cannot win a Federal election in an increasingly multi-cultural America, its tactics are two-fold: assert that an election where its White voters lose is illegitimate and disenfranchise those voters who so favor the Democratic Party.
This is the strategy of our current Republican Party. It is also the story of America.
In the triumphalist history of America, political representation is our country’s raison d’etre, “no taxation without representation” the rallying cry of the aggrieved colonists. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights as documents to explicitly outline the rights granted to the state and those to the people. John Locke was right: the government derived its power to rule from the will of the governed. America would be a grand experiment in democracy, the land of the free and the home of the brave.
This has always been the fundamental paradox of America. A land built on African slavery and the systematic destruction of its indigenous people is also a country founded on the principle of political freedom. And despite their florid talk of equality, the Founding Fathers kept power in the hands of white men with money. All men are created equal, but some are more equal than others.
You could plausibly read all of American history as a grudging, agonizingly slow fight toward full enfranchisement. It has not always moved linearly, but the centuries-long subtext of American politics has been expanding who gets to be called American. That we are still fighting this battle speaks to the full-throated opposition this movement has faced all along.
The Constitution itself is telling. The Three-Fifths Compromise secured Southern state buy-in to a burgeoning nation by letting Southerners count “assets” with no political rights as partial people for the sake of representation in the House. Even decoupling Senate apportionment from population was a means of assuaging Southern fears that the North would someday amass the votes to declare slavery illegal. Real oppression in the name of political rights is written into this country’s DNA.
Every compromise in the early 1800s about state admission sought to maintain this tenuous status quo. When it became clear that the North had a mandate to ultimately end slavery — even though Lincoln promised not to do so immediately — we fought the deadliest war in our history over political rights. Yet, after the North emerged victorious and the re-formed United States passed the fifteenth amendment guaranteeing all male adult citizens the right to vote, states North and South found new ways to keep White people in power. They created poll taxes and literacy tests that effectively disenfranchised minorities. The South turned to Jim Crow segregation.
Political rights have always been the catalyst for change in America. In the progressive era, the people stood up to political machines and big industry that crowded out their voices with early forms of campaign finance reform. They stood up to the political class and agitated for direct election of Senators. Ultimately, white women won full suffrage with the 19th Amendment. The powers that be fought these movements the entire way.
The Civil Rights Movement faced even more opposition. (A Gallup poll in 1966 put Martin Luther King’s popularity at 63% negative to 32% positive, if you’d like some perspective on the movement’s support.) Ultimately, the signature victories were the Civil Rights Act, which reaffirmed the 14th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act, which created a special standard for Southern states to meet in passing new voting restrictions, lest they act as they always had. States could no longer bar minority political participation.
Even our commitment to rebuilding Europe as we emerged a superpower after World War II was in the name of building democratic principles. Our proxy wars in locales as far as Vietnam and Iraq were nominally about bringing political rights (and capitalism) to everyone.
At home and abroad, these have always been battles because those in power rarely cede that power without a fight. Voter ID bills, anti-immigrant animus, cries of rigged elections — this is simply our generation’s version of a movement that defines America just as much as abolition or women’s suffrage or Civil Rights. as Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The optimist in me is glad that this revanchist movement no longer has the votes. The pessimist in me isn’t sure it will ultimately matter.
Long ago, we started with the ideal that “All men are created equal.” Living up to that has always, always been our peculiarly American struggle.
That so many more Americans internalize the “shining city on a hill” vision of America, but not the other side of our history, is a failure of American education. We learn the positive parts of our history as if they are indelibly American and the negative parts as if they are ancient, disconnected threads. This is wrong. Institutions and countries don’t have a history; they are their history.
One of the dangers of this moment is to see Trump as out of line with his party and out of line with America. Certainly when it comes to the things he is willing to say publicly, the ways he is willing to say them, and his popularity, Trump has no American precedent.
But the grievances of Trump and his voters are the history of America writ large. It is a fight to restrict who gets to be one of them.
