Voter Suppression and Voter Helplessness

Only the willfully blind can ignore it at this point. Republicans across the republic are restricting the franchise for the unbelievers, those non-movement conservative infidels. It is undeniable and they are getting away with it. This is the big hail mary. Republicans like this clown do not even attempt to hide it anymore:

Joan Walsh at Salon has taken some flak for suggesting that the gop is the white party and rule in the name of white people only. It is less a skin tone than a state of mind and republicans today make no bones about it, they want to drag us back in time to some imagined golden age. Somehow, after four years of pushing the boundaries on open racism through signs and anonymous nooses sent through the mail, etc. you now have a candidate for the US Senate saying it is finally time to get rid of this nonsense about people being equal.

The entire reason for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was to keep southern states from disenfranchising African-Americans because they would not do it on their own. The thing is, the story of the twentieth century was largely a steady progression of expanding democracy and justice. This has been a long regression since the white backlash against this progress gained steam in the 1970s. Once reagan knocked out the pillars of the New Deal by crushing labor, cutting taxes, and deregulating the economy it was only a matter of time before the United States regressed back to a plantation.

The problem before all of us interesting in continuing the noble experiment that is a free people governing themselves for the benefit of all is, what to do about all of this? The trap put in place authoritarians, both of the right wing follower variety and the social dominator variety, has moved slowly and inexorably through control of first the economy, then the means of propaganda and thought control to embed their followers in the halls of power. Now the authoritarians have sprung the trap. A few very rich royalists are pulling the strings and we are meant to simply watch, powerlessly, as the republic dies.

Direct action, of the type Occupy attempted, is thwarted by simple force. We were all scared into accepting a militarized police force by the drug war to the point that SWAT teams and riot suppression units dominate. Their role is not to "protect and serve" public order but make the country safe for plutocracy. Voting is similarly defanged as a restraining or countervailing force, and in any case who could we vote for that has not been contaminated by the money power.

Democracy in the interests of the public has never looked more hopeless. The authoritarians hold all the cards now.