Conservative excuses for preventing everyone from voting

In late February 2019, former Maine governor Paul LePage, a Republican, went on a local radio show to talk politics. The topic of abolishing the Electoral College came up, and LePage essentially freaked out. A national popular vote for president, LePage said, would be tantamount to turning America into a “dictatorship,” and the types of people voting would prefer “the constitution of Venezuela” to that of the United States.

Why? Because, LePage said, echoing an old GOP line rarely spoken in public, if the actual vote reflected the actual public, “it’s only going to be the minorities who would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida.” And those states are filled with Latinx and black people. Speaking of the movement to end the Electoral College, LePage said, “What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do, white people will not have anything to say.”

There are basically three types of people—or three movements—interested in limiting the voting public to white people and, even at that, to discouraging young, old, and working-class white people from voting just as aggressively as they want to prevent people of color from voting.

They can be referred to with the shorthand labels of Calvinists, libertarian oligarchs, and white supremacists. There is, of course, considerable overlap among the three, but generally the arguments made—and legislation and policy advanced— reflect one of these three core belief systems.

The Calvinists have a worldview similar to that of the followers of French theologian John Calvin, who adopted the precepts of a new offshoot of Christianity around 1520 in Geneva.

Central to the idea of Calvinism are the doctrines of “total depravity” and “unconditional election.” Calvinism asserted that because we are each born out of a woman’s womb, we’re all “dead” in sin (totally depraved) and unable to save ourselves. Instead of salvation coming from confession or good works, Calvin taught, only his god could decide (unconditionally elect) who would be saved and who would eventually rot in hell.

This solved a big problem for many of the royal families of Europe in the 16th and following centuries: how to use Christianity (denial of which was a capital crime across most of Europe) to justify their absolute rule over their subjects.

If Calvin’s god decided who was to be saved and who was to burn even before birth, how then could mankind separate the saved from the sinners, and the noble from the wicked?

The answer was simple: the outward sign of Calvin’s god’s election or salvation was wealth. Since his god controlled everything and man was without agency, then through “irresistible grace” (the fourth of five Calvinist doctrines) Calvin’s god’s will would be shown to all by virtue of earthly riches and political power.

People were rich and in charge because they were blessed by God and, as Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4–6, chosen by him “before the foundation of the world.”

Modern-day conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will advocate a secular version of Calvinism, but instead of a distant god determining who should rule, DNA would do it: the smart should be in charge, and the dumb should keep their mouths shut and, preferably, not vote or participate in politics at all.

Herbert Spencer, in his 1842 treatise The Proper Sphere of Government, made essentially this same argument, suggesting that while happiness and safety in society were the goals of political activity, they had to be guided by people who had the best DNA (using modern shorthand) and thus should be political leaders. (He also argued in the treatise that government should never provide for education or health care—a conservative ahead of his time.)

Spencer’s ideas led directly to Francis Galton’s invention of the word eugenics in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Eugenics held that sterilizing or even killing of what have often been described as defective or substandard people would weed out our gene pool and improve the overall intelligence and fitness of the human race in both current and future generations.

Eugenics was enthusiastically adopted by Winston Churchill, who tried unsuccessfully to make it law in Great Britain in 1912, and Woodrow Wilson, who promoted it heavily in the United States during his presidency, leading every state in the union to put compulsory sterilization laws or policies into effect.

Adolf Hitler, of course, picked up Churchill’s and Wilson’s slogans almost verbatim and applied them to Jews, Gypsies, the mentally disabled, and homosexuals (in that order of aggression), leading Germany straight to the Holocaust.

George Will has argued that if voting is easy and widespread, we’ll experience a sort of reverse social Darwinism, causing people of poorer quality and intelligence to vote and thus screw things up. As he wrote in an article for the Washington Post in 2012, “As indifferent or reluctant voters are nagged to the polls—or someday prodded there by a monetary penalty for nonvoting—the caliber of the electorate must decline.”

This perspective has a long history in American politics. Alexander Hamilton and his conservative wing among the founders and framers of the Constitution believed there must be some filter to keep out what conservative John Adams called “the rabble.”

Hamilton wrote, “If it were probable that every man would give his vote freely, and without influence of any kind, then, upon the true theory and genuine principles of liberty, every member of the community, however poor, should have a vote. . . . But since that can hardly be expected, in persons of indigent fortunes, or such as are under the immediate dominion of others,” they should not be able to exercise the franchise.

Similarly, Adams stated, “Such is the Frailty of the human heart, that very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own.” Therefore, men without property should play no role in governance, including not being able to vote.

Adams added, “[G]enerally Speaking, Women and Children, have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property.”

Today’s version of this worldview argues that, instead of through divine predestination, poor people are poor because of defective character or intellect from birth and therefore should be discouraged from voting. And because poverty is most heavily concentrated in communities of color, they are ideally selected first for voter suppression efforts.

Libertarian oligarchs make up the second category of people who argue against widespread voting rights (although it’s not limited to the oligarchs). Libertarianism and Objectivism are inherently and openly in opposition to democracy, referring to the system as “mob rule.”

Scottish lawyer and historian Alexander Tytler (1747– 1813) is often quoted as expressing a similar sentiment. A meme attributed to him began circulating around the time of Reagan’s first election (which was about 200 years after the establishment of the United States) and exploded across the internet during the 2000 election:

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.

In fact, this was delivered as part of a 1943 speech by Henning W. Prentis Jr., former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a group that, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, more recently has been heavily funded by the libertarian Koch brothers.

This misattributed quote has had a remarkable impact and endurance, spawning a generation of libertarians and conservatives who love to cite the deadly “Tytler Cycle.”

Libertarianism fundamentally rejects the ability of the citizens of a nation to “vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury” by simply banning the spending of such taxes on anything other than an army and police force. With objectivism, author Ayn Rand tried to wrap a similar sentiment in moral terms, saying that “moochers” and “looters” really have no right to lay their hands on the wealth produced by the “producers.”

If one believes that people will always vote to take away from the “job creators” and give to the indigent voters, then there’s a coherent and somewhat circular logic to the entire hypothesis, which makes it particularly seductive to young people born into the upper classes or with considerable privilege.

For this reason, Republicans made the “they must have skin in the game” argument every few years to object to everything from Medicare in the 1960s, to virtually every social welfare program to come out of the Great Society, to the Affordable Care Act in 2009.

For example, Walter E. Williams wrote in the conservative publication Townhall, “A very disturbing and mostly ignored issue is how absence of skin in the game negatively impacts the political arena. It turns out that 45 percent of American households, nearly 78 million individuals, have no federal income tax obligation.” Calling this “a serious political problem,” Williams concluded that “Americans with no federal income tax obligation become natural constituencies for big-spending politicians.”

Williams—one among thousands of conservative writers who express similar sentiments online—wrapped up his op-ed by musing that “[s]ometimes I wonder whether one should be allowed in the game if he doesn’t have any skin in it.”

White supremacists make up the final group of people who don’t think everybody should have a right to vote. To justify this, they make several arguments, but all, at their core, boil down to the notion that white people are the superior race and thus should retain the majority of political power in the nation.

Most white people, particularly those older than 30, grew up exposed to racist cowboys-and-Indians shows, minstrels, and a century of movies that portrayed black people as the bad guys and white people as the winners and saviors. As a result, most white people carry a good dose of unacknowledged and often even denied-but-there-nonetheless belief in the superiority of their own race.

For example, Kali Halloway compiled research that demonstrated rather shocking, but provable, realities that have grown out of this. College professors, for example, are more likely to respond to identical letters requesting mentorship from people with white male names than from people with names associated with nonwhite groups or women.

White people experience less empathy when seeing black people in pain, and emergency room personnel give lower doses of pain medications to people of color; this belief that black people experience pain less acutely than do whites begins, among white people, around the age of seven.

A UCLA study found that white people across the board, including police officers, were more likely to assume criminality when a person was black; and black men, on average, get 20 percent longer prison sentences than white men for identical crimes.

When, in a Stanford study, white people were told that laws like three strikes were more likely to harm black people than white people, their subsequent support for criminal justice reform dropped measurably. And multiple studies have found that light-skinned African Americans are perceived as smarter and more competent than darker-skinned persons.

The problem of this deep cultural (and, perhaps, human) racism that’s built into all of us comes at the level of voting and governance when cynical and exploitative politicians use race as a weapon to divide people from one another, or to justify making it easier for one race to vote than another.

Donald Trump’s “shithole countries” epithet about black-run countries, and comments to his former attorney Michael Cohen that black people are stupid, are well-known examples of this more modern version of the openly racist public and media language of previous generations.

More subtle were Richard Nixon’s “law and order” and “silent majority” campaigns, designed explicitly to mobilize white voters, a policy that has since become a staple of Republican (and some Democratic) politics.

While the idea of white superiority is apparently held by an absolute majority of whites, even if in a less-than-conscious fashion (and often by people of color as well; none of us are immune to our culture), when it’s used as a political weapon, it becomes corrosive to democracy.