I suspect they may have been thinking of referring to things that happened before the 1970’s; and, if so, may have concluded that that wasn’t going to work.
I completely agree that the Democrats show no interest in rigorous campaign finance reform and not much more in passing the Fair Representation Act, both of which I believe are critical for better elections.
That’s not bothsidesism. Republicans consider both of those concepts as threats to their very existence.
Sure that’s true. If we were having this discussion in 1961, for example, I would have no hesitation in saying the Democrats were the party that was responsible for voter suppression.
But that was sixty years ago. The Democrats are not engaging in voter suppression now. The Republicans are the party that is responsible for voter suppression in 2021.
Agreed; I’m just making the distinction between undermining democracy through corporatism (something that “both sides” do), and specifically undermining the electoral process only “one side” (the GOP) is engaged in.
Even when the Dixiecrats were undermining elections in the South and denying minorities the right to vote, it wasn’t part of a concerted effort to undermine democracy on a national scale. What the Republican Party is doing today is essentially unprecedented, at least in post-Civil War history. Of course, the poster in question was unclear about what he actually meant by “the Democrats have been attempting to circumvent our very process for decades,” and literally resorted to the “sad” pejorative favored by a certain would-be demagogue, so whether there was any actual argument under the dissimulation is purely speculative.
Stranger
This points to why I feel the current Republican program to suppress voting is more dangerous than the old Democratic program to suppress voting.
The old Democratic system did not collapse under its own weight. It functioned quite well for decades and there’s no reason to believe that it wouldn’t still be functioning if it hadn’t been broken up.
And what broke if up was outside pressure from the federal government. The south only ended its system of voter suppression because there was a larger political body that existed to enforce the laws.
If the Republicans succeed in setting up an equivalent system on a national level (and they are about halfway there) then there will be no larger political body that will be able to break up the system. It will be the end of democracy in the United States.
The Republican regime will probably be overthrown eventually, but it will be through violent revolution rather than peaceful change. And regimes which attain power through violent revolutions are almost always as anti-democratic as the regimes they overthrow once they get in power.
Conservatives have amply demonstrated that they have no difficulties in leveling accusations against the Democrats. So if they had a real case, they would not hesitate to present it and give it the widest possible publicity. If there was a local schoolboard election where a Democrat had suppressed five votes, Fox News would be running it as a headline for months.
The fact that they aren’t doing so tells me that it is virtually certain no such crime has been committed by any Democrat. As we’ve seen with Al Franken and Andrew Cuomo, when a Democrat does something wrong, he is exposed, held accountable, and removed from office.
That’s true. They weren’t trying to invalidate the entire electoral process; they wanted people to trust the results of the vote. They just (more like unjust) wanted to prevent certain people from having access to it.