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Republican voting laws are unfair. Democrats need to explain how.
“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” President Joe Biden warned on Tuesday, speaking at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Republican officials, who have enacted a spate of voter suppression laws in dozens of states, are “not only targeting people of color, they’re targeting voters of all races and backgrounds” who did not vote for them, the President said. The only solution is “to forge a coalition of Americans of every background and political party — the advocates, the students, the faith leaders, the labor leaders, the business executives — to raise the urgency of this moment.”
The President is correct. To save democracy, we must unite as Americans against this assault on our sacred right to vote. To do that, though, those of us on the left must explain not only what is happening, but why it is bad.
Earlier this year, a conservative British friend who is doing his PhD in political history corrected my assertion that Britain in the 19th century was a democracy. It was not, he contended, because the franchise was not universal. Only propertied men could vote. Women, no matter their class, could not. If significant portions of the population are de jure or de facto denied access the ballot, he reasoned, you cannot claim to be a democracy.
