Why should anyone be surprised at GOP voter suppression?
In poll after poll, we know that the vast majority of Americans side with the left on virtually every public policy issue. We also know that in presidential elections, the GOP candidate seldom wins the popular vote, in recent decades. So, why should anyone be surprised when we hear of the GOP committing voter suppression where they are tossing out the ballots of colored people who are likely to vote against them? After all, since the majority of Americans are opposed to the GOP's policies, the GOP has to take a stand against democracy to maintain power. Yet, I have never heard a single mainstream news network connect these dots. Instead, when reporting on voter suppression, they focus on the suppression of likely democratic votes within a specific county or state region, as opposed to recognizing that the problem with the GOP is nation-wide.
Comments (61)
Really? I’ve seen it lots of times. Here's some just from today:
If the Republicans Win Tuesday, the Reason Will Be Simple: They Cheated
'Crisis for American Democracy': It's 2018, in the Richest Nation on Earth, and Voting Machines Still Distorting Elections
An Appalling Abuse of Power
That's possible, but we'd need evidence of it other than circumstantial evidence from which we're jumping to conclusions.
And "colored"? Where's praxis?
I'm still not sure what's wrong with "colored people." If I use "non-white people," why should that make a difference. It's not as if Trump is just against Hispanics, and likes Blacks, and Indians from India. As far as I can tell, he dislikes all of these people, precisely because they do not have light skin, and are people of color.
Let's hope that @Hanover's vote for Abrams wasn't discarded.
Really, if the above doesn't suffice then the only thing that would likely satisfy you is an open admission of guilt on the part of Kemp and the GOP, which is absurd.
And I think you'd be incredibly naive to assume things that you don't have evidence for.
The Dems lost the presidency, so they blame the electoral college. The Dems don't like the President, so they talk about impeachment. The Dems can't control Congress, so they blame gerrymandering. The Dems don't like the Supreme Court nominee, so they engage in a character attack. The Dems can't control the Senate, so they argue against equal state representation in the Senate. And now in fear of continued Republican control, they claim they're being cheated of votes. The continued effort of the Dems is to win in litigation or by rule change that which they can't otherwise win through the existing process. Their strategy is the continued effort of delegitimization of Republican control.
It's all about their attempt to obtain power at all costs. It has nothing to do with righteousness. To think otherwise is incredibly naive.
An appeal to motive isn't a good rebuttal. Republicans share the same desire to obtain power at all costs.
What matters is whether or not there really is voter suppression and gerrymandering, whether or not the electoral college really is the best way to select a President, and so on.
The Democrats might very well be kicking up a fuss just because they don't have power, but do the Republicans have power because they actually are cheating?
Yes. It's frustrating. Maybe they'll change it to popular vote sometime, although my history reading tells me that the US will change into a tyranny eventually and it won't make any difference.
Quoting LD Saunders
I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's just a little antiquated, like when somebody says "Gosh!"
I think part of the problem is that in order to remove the electoral college, then we would have to admit that the people who founded our nation did not trust people with the right to vote directly for president, and that calls into question the myths we have erected on their behalf. I think it's entirely antiquated and offensive to the idea of a liberal democracy.
We certainly seem headed towards a tyranny. I'm shocked at how bad things have gotten over the past several years in the USA. I never thought I would be witnessing what I am seeing in my country.
Suit yourself. I agree that it's a quirk of our language that "people of color" is somehow acceptable, but "colored people" is antiquated; I'm just saying that using such a bygone phrase might distract from your more substantive points, and also make you sound as if you stepped out of a time machine from 1965.
I'm still really puzzled over why anyone would think my use of the words "colored people" was improper. It's not like I personally give a damn about the color of someone's skin. I don't. That's one reason I am so disgusted with Trump and his supporters who definitely do think such things are important.
Plenty of other people seem to think such things are important, including those on the Left, who are seemingly obsessed with identity politics-related issues. Checking one box rather than another in the "Race/Ethnicity" section of a college application (a trait which tracks with skin color) could mean the difference between going to Harvard and going to a lesser school.
While I likewise deplore Trump's and the GOP's race-baiting rhetoric (I can't even properly call them "dog whistles" because they're so blatant), let's not pretend that the Right is the only political demographic which attends to race and ethnicity.
It's also easy to dredge up a bloody era of American history with those words. That's why that black guy was staring at you. He was trying to figure out what your intentions were.
I don't even consider races to be real, from a biological standpoint, so anyone trying to paint me as a racist is going to have a huge difficulty in doing so. I'm also middle aged, and not familiar with the latest in political correctness, and I really couldn't care less what words people find offensive, when the words themselves carry no such content and no such intent was meant. People are far too obsessed with mere trivia instead of sticking with the larger picture.
Yes, for a party which proclaims to "love this country," the GOP is surely fond of shitting on its democratic institutions. The incident with the Native American voter ID kerfuffle is the just the latest in a line of targeted voter suppression the GOP engages in to keep certain minority groups from voting.
The fact is that in-person voter fraud is a virtually non-existent problem, and yet GOP-led legislatures are falling over themselves to enact voter ID laws in order to solve this "problem." They can't win people over on the basis of ideas, and so they try to keep them from the polls. Win at any cost, democracy be damned. Pathetic.
I wish their opposition would be more ruthless. Unfortunately maintaining decorum against an opponent who doesn't and won't is a terrible strategy.
I think that getting down in the muck with the GOP only makes both of you dirty, and will do even more lasting damage to the country's institutions.
This imagined future with pristine preserved institutions would also have no voter presence aside from the lobbyists, who already get mostly what they want. The only message this sends is that the decorum of the political process must be preserved even if it goes against the interests of those it governs.
Maybe we should play chess some time. Let's have a rule where your pieces behave like queens and can put you in check, don't worry decorum insists that it's always your turn to move first. You want to play by this rule too? Pah, do you really want to stoop to my level? Ok, no you don't. Then get used to losing.
Unfortunately, everyone who matters has already gotten used to losing so much they're completely alienated from the process. The meek will inherit the earth and so on, simply because they have their principles.
If the only way to salvage American democracy is to abandon it, then the fight is already lost, and further struggle will avail us nothing. We may as well act like some post-colonial African nation or banana republic and just engage in outright warfare to see who ascends to power.
Oh. Arkady just said that.
I agree. The thing is, people don't seem to mind when it benefits them, American institutions be damned. Perhaps were the roles reversed, Democrats would be equally blase (or even approving) of voter suppression tactics like those promulgated by the GOP, but the fact is, that the GOP is currently the overwhelming beneficiary of "voter ID" laws, gerrymandering, and the like. They can't win clean, so they cheat. So sad.
(BTW, you may to start linking to people's comments when you respond to them so that the indicator appears.)
Giving up when challenged with a dirty trick is exactly what will bring this scenario you fear about quicker. Retaliating to restore decorum is only passive when it's done terribly; IE when it's not done at all. The opponent is motivated, reasonably unified on their goals, and plays dirty. No wonder they're winning. What I'm surprised with is that lying down and rotting is seen as the height of virtue; no, the only moral response to this.
Perhaps I misunderstood you, but you implored the opposition to be more "ruthless" and to abandon decorum. If your definition of "decorum" is merely something like "failing to stridently condemn GOP voter suppression and fight it by all legal means," then, yes, I agree that "decorum" should be abandoned.
However, if you are calling on the opposition to likewise in engage in such dirty tricks, then I would vehemently disagree for the reasons I've already stated.
Whether the dirty tricks are legal or not, what matters is that they'll get away with it. No one in the GOP will go to jail for what they've done. If there are no effective legal means of combatting vote repression, then I'm sure rules can be bent or new rules can be made. There's a reason why America is founded on amendments. It's not so that all principle can be sacrificed on the altar of an idealised representation of political process.
What the GOP's actions reveal (and they've been at it for a long time) is that the supposedly pure process by which justice is administered to America is pretty easy to subvert for horrible ends. It should be subverted for noble ones.
For once I agree with @Hanover, the dems are a being a bunch of lunatic whiners.
Having it controlled by the very people that stand to benefit by misuse of the power is a recipe for disaster, and that's what happens.
Apparently Democrats do gerrymander as well when they can - the 3rd district of Maryland being the most bizarre example. But most suppression of democracy seems to come from the Republican side.
Is there any prospect of the US parties ever agreeing to set up an independent electoral commission, to prevent either side doing this? Or is that yet another problem the poor country is stuck with via its 200+ year old constitution that seems almost impossible to change these days.
Of course the fact that such laws were implemented almost immediately after the Voting Rights Act (which prevented such laws for obvious and historical reasons) was repealed is apparently lost on you. Again, you are being ridiculous if your expectation is for politicians to be up front about nefarious deeds. Indeed, Trump must be innocent of any nefarious connection to Russia because Trump hasn't conformed it.
I'm being rational and evidence based, of course. That Kemp is both the man in charge of determining if the upheld voters are denied whilst also being the one running for governor likewise must be irrelevant evidence because Kemp has not admitted to doing this to benefit his own bid for governor.
I don't think this has any bearing on the fact about what the GOP is doing, particularly in the Georgia case. The Dems being self-interested tells me Precisely nothing about the validity of the GOP denying or stalling more than 50,000 from voting in Georgia and 80% of them are non-whites who tend to vote Dem.
I don't fear dictatorship. I don't think the species is quite ready for real democracy, in part because of the sentiment you expressed.
But the gerrymandering is being addressed. It just takes a long time because Republicans send new maps up for court approval, they get struck down as unconstitutional, new ones are sent up, they get struck down too, and it goes on and on until Republicans find out exactly how much gerrymandering the court will accept.
Go tell that to the NAACP.
Are you black? If not, then why are you speaking for all of them (making a generalization), as if they ALL would be offended by the term, "colored people"? How racist.
Quoting LD Saunders
I don't see any real evidence here of GOP voter suppression, but that isn't to say that it doesn't exist. What we do have is real evidence of Democrat voter suppression. Remember the 2016 Democratic primary?
The fact is that both parties engage in underhanded and unfair tactics. You only realize this once you step back and take an objective look at the American political system. It is broken and the main problem is that we have political parties in the first place. People now treat their political party as a religion, as if their side is always righteous and the other side is a horde of demons. They divide us and have us at each other's throats when we shouldn't be pointing the finger at each other, rather we should be pointing the finger at them and the system that they have designed to keep themselves in power.
No, I'm not black, but rest assured that black people (f/k/a "colored people" or "negroes") have empowered me to speak blackly on their behalf on all matters relating to blackness, including on the proper use of descriptive terms pertaining thereto. Glad we cleared that up.
It's the NAACP not the NAAPOC. What is the matter with 'you people'?
Golly gee whiz! It's fine that people are sensitive to language, but the fault of 'political correctness' is that it implies one is exceptionally informed and caring about everyone with disadvantages and diversity and equal opportunity, and all that when, in fact, such actual sensitivity may be far from the reality. And even if it isn't far from reality, most of the language correction I hear hear is mere game playing, point scoring.
Oh, I'm not gay, I'm queer. Oh, I'm not queer, I'm homosexual. Oh, you know, I'm non-binary. Oh, I just don't believe in labeling people.
Negroes, "I'm a colored spade, a nigger; a jungle bunny, jigaboo, coon, pickaninny, mau mau, Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, Little Black Sambo..." (line from Hair), darkies, niggas, blacks, colored people, people of color, African American, Afro-centric... Hispanic, Spanish American, Chicano, Mexican, wetback, spic, beaner, latino, illegal alien ... WASP, white, wop, kike, bohunk, anglo, dago, redneck, hillbillies, trailer trash (not a slur! it's merely descriptive) peckerwood, honky, whitey, gringo, cracker, caucasian...
Uhh.. The NAACP is a black organization calling themselves "Colored People". Obviously not all blacks think that it is an improper descriptive term. Those blacks who think that it should be are racist in thinking that other blacks shouldn't think for themselves.
You do realize that the NAACP was formed over 100 years ago, don't you?
a person who is wholly or partly of non-white descent."
Google.
Genetic fallacy.
Put your money where your mouth is. Go tell it to the NAACP.
Don't worry: the next time the NAACP and I meet to update our agreement wherein I am empowered to be the white guy who speaks for black people the world over, I will remind them that their name is a bit outdated.
I hereby rule in favour of @Arkady.
What is offensive is subjective. Claiming that you are offended is just a passive-aggressive way of limiting free speech.
Claiming that claiming that you are offended is just a passive-aggressive way of limiting free speech is just a passive-aggressive way of defending a bad argument.
No, that's not the way it works in a society with norms of communication that are generally accepted and agreed upon. It's about as sensible as saying that the claim that 'this paper stuff I have in my hand is dollars' is purely subjective, or the claim that 'Donald Trump is the President of the United States' is purely subjective.
I guess it's based on the obvious falsity that being offended is always a choice as if if someone came up to you on the street and shouted "get out of my way, you cunt" you could somehow choose not to feel anything at all. As if there isn't a visceral system of physical defense that is triggered by a verbal attack that has real physiological consequences beyond the immediate control of almost every normal human being. As if it's the offended person's fault that they feel offended rather than the offenders because they choose to feel bad. Et voila, a get out of jail free card for racists, sexists, homophobes and miscellaneous verbal abusers everywhere. After all, they are the real victims just exercising their right to free speech while their targets are the real culprits with all this passive-aggressive being offended!
Yet we have comedians pushing the envelope of what is acceptable to say. We have new words with new meanings, and even old words with new meanings (take the n-word for example. It isn't offensive to some because they accept being called the name).
Quoting Baden
That person on the street doesn't know me. Their use of words speaks volumes about them and nothing about me. I won't get offended by that because I know the person saying it is the actual cunt for behaving in such a way.
Being offended is just giving power to others to define you. You'd only get offended if you believe that what they say is true in some sense.
It's always a bizarre non-sequitur to me when people conflate a legal or constitutional right to free speech with the "right" to not have said speech criticized (which, ironically, would thereby limit the free speech of their critics - free speech for me and not for thee, in other words).
I also think that while political correctness, on both the right and left, has gotten way out of hand these days, hat the original idea, of having people be more adult and not needlessly hurt the feelings of others, is a good idea, in fact, an excellent one. If only it didn't get so far out of control.
Here's why it's insulting:
It reminds one of those times. Semantically equivalent, but less charged, is the term "people of color".
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as a [i]bi-racial[/I] endeavor to advance justice for African Americans"
Negroes, niggers, colored, people of color, blacks, African American, and so on are terms which a demographic found being applied to them. Sometimes a particular term were preferred, sometimes not. We white folks might decide that from now on we are going to use the term "aboriginal" to apply to the original inhabitants of the western hemisphere -- whether the native Americans, American Indians, red skins, and Indians like it or not. Are people asians, orientals, yellow, asiatic, or something else?
What about that Sunday school song, Jesus Loves the Little Children? "...red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight"? "Yellow" has negative associations, after all, when referencing people. Loving little children might reference pedophilia. BANNED!
'Colored' and 'Indian' may be dated, may not be the preferred term of the people about whom one is speaking, but neither term is in the category of scandal that using 'nigger', 'red skin', gook, or honky is.
[Url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter]John McWhorter, a Professor of Linguistics, writes [url=https://amp-slate-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.slate.com/human-interest/2016/08/colored-person-versus-person-of-color-how-does-society-decide-which-racial-terms-are-acceptable.html?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQCCAE%3D#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s]
in this article[/url] on use of the term "colored":
[I]Malcolm X didn’t spearhead a change from colored and Negro to black because he wanted to keep the white man on his toes, but because he felt that those terms had associations with evil, negativity, and more specifically slavery and Jim Crow. He wanted to start afresh with a more neutral and even muscular term...The rolling terminology, then, is an attempt to refashion thought, not to be annoying....
...colored was replaced not because it was processed as an insult but because of something subtler, its association with a bleak past. As such it can seem odd that anyone would treat someone’s slipping and saying the term as an insult, given that “Colored!” was never a slur in the way that a word I need not mention was and is...
"The reason 'colored people' is offensive without being a term of abuse is that it reminds many people of times when we were, whatever we were being called, abused."[/i]
If people can get away with it, names change. Philip Morris is now called Altria, but they are still in the same old tobacco business. Younger people probably wouldn't have heard of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, but they have heard of 3M. Scotch tape is a 3M brand, even though people shamelessly misuse the term for non-3M sticky products. Best Buy used to be Sound of Music (they didn't sell refrigerators back then). Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo is more memorable as Sony. You'd probably rather have a Nintendo than a Marufuku, its original name.
I don't find your reasoning very compelling. You know that the term is considered offensive by some people, and abandoning the term doesn't constrain your ability to communicate since other terms are available that have the exact same referrent. Therefore willfully continuing to use the term implies you're fine with offending some people.
My usage is quite correct, but I do not think we must be bound by either a fear of offending people (so, some people are just plain fat) or an excessive concern with using the most up to date term. If I hear someone reference "colored", I don't feel obligated to correct them.
I don't find the case for transsexuals or transgendered people compelling either -- but I will consistently use the preferred name and pronoun if I interact with a trans person often enough to know what they prefer.
Be that as it may, vote suppression is not tolerable in a society that considers its political establishment legitimate.
The GOP seems bent on achieving long-term or permanent dominance. This is extremely worrisome. No political party can be trusted that far, that much. The consequence would ultimately be the disenfranchisement and marginalization of not only liberals of any stripe, but the poor, racial minorities who do not vote Republican, and various other groups (like gays).
Everyone - black, white, or whatever - have been called names, offensive names, racial slurs, etc. Therefore everyone has skin in this game and has the right to talk about in an objective manner.
It has nothing to do with peoples skin color. It has to do with one's self esteem and self-image. Those that have a weak self-image or low self esteem are the one that get offended - no matter the skin color.