This is the second part of a series on politics that is geared toward the 2014 elections. Here is the first part.
I believed for decades that the United States was the beacon of democracy in the world, the nation that had the most respect for its citizens’ rights to choose their government’s leaders.
I believed this as a child. I believe this as a college student who majored in Government & Law. I believed this as a newspaper reporter who covered government and politics.
I thought everyone in the USA believed that we were the nation’s No. 1 democracy, including my high school and college Social Studies and Government teachers, all the editors and reporters I worked with over the years, and politicians who talked about the greatness of our nation constantly.
It’s possible we were all wrong. It’s also possible that the United States WAS the greatest democracy, but American voters and politicians got too complacent, or became too enamored of our economic and military power, or became too interested in who won elections rather than how everyone played the game. The political campaigns of Richard Nixon and a presidential election that resulted in the major candidate with the fewest votes, George W. Bush, winning didn’t help.
One thing’s for sure in 2014 — the USA is no longer the world’s beacon of democracy. In fact, we were rated No. 21 in the most recent Democracy Index by The Economist newspaper behind nations such as Malta, Mauritius, South Korea, and Uruguay. The world Top 10 is Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands.
In addition, the Democracy Index rates the USA as behind several “flawed democracies” in two of the five factors that constitute the Democracy Index — ‘Functioning of government’ and ‘Political participation.’
This Democracy Index was determined in 2012. It’s very possible that the USA could fall even further behind the world’s best democracies if the Election of 2014, and other future elections, have anti-democratic results.
The Republicans are trying right now to produce elections with anti-democratic results. Below is how Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, described what is happening in Politico Magazine.
“Over the past four years—and for the first time since the Jim Crow era—nearly two dozen states have passed new laws making it harder to vote. The laws range from cutbacks on early voting (Ohio and North Carolina), to a repeal of Election Day registration (Maine), to harsh rules requiring specific types of government identification to vote (states from Texas to Tennessee). Florida even cracked down on nonpartisan voter registration drives, forcing the League of Women Voters—hardly a Trotskyist cell!—to shut down its operations.”
All six of the states mentioned in the previous paragraph have Republican governors. The Republicans have lost the battle for ideas in this country by moving dramatically to the right in the past several years. Their ideology includes a contempt for a large percentage of Americans and a contempt for democracy. They can no longer win elections fair and square so they have decided to try to win by preventing millions of Americans, mostly political opponents, from voting. The Texas laws alone could prevent more than 600,000 Texans from voting, according to this article.
Republicans have argued that some of the laws will prevent voter fraud, but they are liars. Many of their laws are poll taxes pure and simple, exactly the kind of laws that existed in the South during the Jim Crow era.
If Republicans were concerned about voter fraud, they would issue photo IDs to everyone (and have the strictest laws on absentee voting), but they’re not. Instead, they’re asking most Republican voters to do nothing, while requiring millions of Democratic-leaning urban and minority voters to spend significant time and money getting an ID they otherwise wouldn’t need. That’s a poll tax on specific people.
The Republicans already control the U.S. House of Representatives although their 2012 candidates received 1.4 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates. They did this by using the power they gained in many states in the 2010 elections to redraw Congressional district boundaries. Politicians choosing their voters is about as anti-democratic as you can get.
The future of this nation rests in seven crucial states where Democrats have beaten Republicans in most recent elections by wide margins in statewide and congressional elections, but hold only a small percentage of the seats in the U.S. House because of Republican gerrymandering. Those states are Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In Michigan, Democrats received 240,000 more votes in 2012, but won only five of the state’s 14 House races.
Most political experts are focused on the elections in the U.S. Senate, but I believe those elections aren’t very important because neither the Democrats nor Republicans will accomplish much of anything with a majority. On the other hand, governors and state legislatures have the power to decide who will vote in their states. They have the power to control Congress and the presidency.
On Election Day, which is on Nov. 4, the television networks will obsess about which political party wins a majority in the Senate, but I will be focused on the gubernatorial elections in the five states of the Crucial Seven that have such elections in 2014 — Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It’s no coincidence that Republicans have tried to fix elections in all of these states.
|