Notice a theme here this morning?
“Fueled by hostility to the civil rights movement and other societal changes that attempted to give equal rights to Black and brown people, the Republican Party has now fully embraced white supremacy and white identity politics as its dominant strategy for winning and keeping power,” Chauncey DeVega writes at Salon:
If the American people as a group had listened to Black folks’ warnings — and in particular Black women’s warnings — about the danger represented by Donald Trump, he would never have been elected president in the first place. If the mainstream news media and other prominent public voices had listened to Black and brown folks’ warnings about ascendant fascism and white supremacy, the Jan. 6 coup attempt and lethal attack on the Capitol would not have taken place.
Black and brown folks are now trying to warn the Democrats and Joe Biden that American democracy has been imperiled to such an extreme that the 2022 midterms may be the last “free and fair elections” in the United States — and even that is an optimistic prediction.
Black people are demanding the “urgency of now” to save the country’s democracy. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s leadership have instead chosen to celebrate “infrastructure” and “bipartisanship” while refusing to end the filibuster.
If America had listened to Black people’s wisdom and warnings across the centuries, it would be a safer, more secure, more prosperous and more free nation today. America’s future depends on heeding that wisdom now. There is no time to lose.
J.D. Vance’s comments last weekend confirm the exclusionary, royalist bent among about 20 percent of Americans that I have argued has been here since before the Treaty of Paris. Speaking before a conservative conference, the Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio “took a swipe at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and other Democratic politicians by suggesting that people with children should have more voting power than those of the ‘childless left.’”
Specifically, Vance said, “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.”
Move over, poll tax. Stand aside, white, male property owners. Out of the way, “one dollar, one vote.” Adults with children should have bonus political power. Those without lack literal skin in the game, Vance believes.
I don’t think Vance has thought through the demographic implications, do you? Still, if he’s doing performative trolling for his Republican base, he knows what will juice them before they think too much about it.
But the very idea that this occurs to Vance is a tell. Should the new Republican minority sink its hooks more firmly into the mechanisms of formerly democratic governance at the state and national levels, expect new and inventive ways for them to turn what was a the world’s most enduring democratic republic into a one-party state.
Republicans would consider amending the 14th Amendment with a long list of new prerequisites for citizenship. Being “born or naturalized in the United States” will no longer be sufficient in the Republican States of America.