The second coming of Jim Crow
by Tom Sullivan
“The essence of the Confederate worldview,” Doug Muder wrote in 2014, “is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.” So it was in the pre-Civil War United States. So it is today. The political parties devoted to safeguarding that established social order have changed over time. The Confederate worldview has not.
Defeated on the battlefield, men of the South set about undoing their loss. They morphed the Civil War into The Lost Cause. Reconstruction they morphed into Jim Crow. Through stubbornness and “terrorist insurgency,” the planter aristocrats that lost the war succeeded in winning the peace and rewriting history. The “three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state,” Muder wrote. “Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, [blacks] vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.”
Nancy LeTourneau pulled together several more recent threads at Washington Monthly that leave the impression history being made today at least rhymes with that Confederate past. If the 1960s represented a second Reconstruction, legislative terrorism being wrought now by a rump Confederate faction against American minorities represents a renewed insurgency against rights they’ve won at the ballot box and in the courts since then.
In “The American Right Gets Tired of Democracy,” Josh Marshall examines how in the face of a demographic trajectory unfavorable to upholding the white political and cultural dominance God intended, the right concluded “the culture war and the related battle for an ethno-nationalist identity are simply too important, immediate and dire to have any time to worry about things like the rule of law or even democracy.”
Conservative faux-patriots are systematically laboring to ensure their incipient plurality status will not mean they must share power with neighbors not of their tribe. “Republicans in red and battleground states have spent the last six years winding back the clock to the good old days when voting was a (white) privilege, not a right,” Bob Moser writes at The American Prospect in a near-exhaustive accounting of post-Shelby election-rigging. He begins, naturally, in North Carolina.
A series of field hearings across the country sponsored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi would examine voting discrimination since Shelby. The hearings hope to document the persistence in 2018 of election practices outlawed in 1968 and loosed again with the Supreme Court overturning the “preclearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in her dissent that past “attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra. Wherever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.” She predicted “second-generation barriers” would arise to replace the old Jim Crow system. And so they have:
She proved to be prophetic. The field hearings, which concluded in Birmingham in late May, provided ample evidence of the Hydra-headed nature of the new voter suppression—and how Republicans in Southern and battleground states have been learning from each other since the monster law set the tone for the post-Shelby era. “Notes are compared,” Tomas Lopez, head of the civil rights group Democracy North Carolina, said in Halifax. “You see something in one place, it gets used in another.”
The recent battle cry for “uniformity,” for instance, hadn’t originated with North Carolina lawmakers; it was the brainchild of Ohio Republicans. And that, in turn, means that the 900,000 voters in Ohio’s largest county, Cuyahoga, have just one polling place till Election Day—making Cleveland a supersized version of Halifax County. At the hearing there, longtime county board of elections member Inajo Chappell projected photos of the predictably long lines that ensued. She couldn’t tell the subcommittee how many voters in her majority-black county had simply given up and gone home. “There is no way to estimate the number. But I can say that uniform rules have continued to be implemented in a manner that limits voter access,” she testified. The Republicans’ justifications for the changes did not pass muster, she said. “The constant clamoring about rampant voter fraud is discouraging voter participation, and my experience over the years permits me to say that persistent claims about voter fraud are wholly without merit.”
Ohio Republicans also popularized voter purges, with former Secretary of State Jon Husted (who’s now lieutenant governor) showing other states how to perfect the art of tweezing minority voters from the rolls. As Tom Roberts of the Ohio NAACP testified, Husted used a provision in the 2002 Help America Vote Act—Congress’s timid response to the Florida debacle in 2000, which “we all thought was a helpful law,” said Roberts—to start removing voters from the rolls if they’d sat out two straight elections. The Supreme Court upheld the practice, which stripped 270,000 voters from the rolls in Ohio in 2018. There’s ample evidence that the practice disproportionately affects poor people and voters of color, who tend to move more and miss the notices that come in the mail from the state, directing them to update their information to remain active voters. “The decision allows states to treat the fundamental right to vote as a use-it-or-lose-it right,” Roberts said.
Repressive practices that pop up in one state replicate themselves in others where Republicans control legislatures. Diabolical in their “sheer inventiveness,” the measures end up in litigation that drags out for years.
“We will support democracy in Venezuela, in Russia, in China, everyplace but here,” said Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio. “Every time we change the rules, which we do in every single election, we make it more difficult for people to vote. If you’re confused about what time of the day you can vote, it is suppressing your vote.”
North Carolinians have voted since 2012 in state and congressional districts declared unconstitutional. Still, the costly court battles to enforce those rulings continues, sewing “nothing but chaos and confusion” among voters. But Republicans are well funded. They’re fighting a war of attrition. If they retain control of North Carolina’s legislature after 2020, they’ll gerrymander, suppress, and go to court again for another ten-year cycle. Voting rights advocates have overcome the obstacles through aggressive organizing, but they shouldn’t have to.
LeTourneau adds that conservatives in America as well as in Europe are poised to replace democracy with authoritarianism:
This willingness to eschew democracy in favor of authoritarianism was forecast by Zachary Roth before Trump’s election. He noted that, recognizing that they were about to become a permanent minority, Republicans decided that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.” The strategies employed to undermine democracy included voter suppression, gerrymandering, fighting for the involvement of dark money in politics, judicial engagement, and something called pre-emption, by which red states overruled laws passed by more progressive local communities.
Frustrating in the debate over impeaching Donald Trump is Democrats’ insistence on procedure and rule-following in the face of an administration openly rejecting liberal democracy. Pundits peddling both-siderism may argue that were the demographic shoe on the other foot, Democrats would do the same. Adam Serwer argues the opposite case:
Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate; instead they took up arms in two world wars to defend it. Japanese Americans did not reject liberal democracy because of internment or the racist humiliation of Asian exclusion; they risked life and limb to preserve it. Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187, or because of a man who won a presidential election on the strength of his hostility toward Latino immigrants. Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic. This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them. But it is also because of a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.
Bishop William Barber II, a leader of the renewed Poor People’s Campaign, argues what we are experiencing in America today are the birth pangs of a Third Reconstruction. Meeting it head on is a second Jim Crow thinly disguised as “election integrity” or “uniformity” or state-sponsored terrorizing of Latinos and blacks. It is a cat-and-mouse game played by flag-waving legislators, their hands over their hearts and humming Lee Greenwood, as they ensure no matter how much the white majority shrinks, the established order — their Confederate order — retains power, democratically or not.
