THE ARC OF JUSTICE

 Jay R. Mandle

When people say that the arc of history bends towards justice, what they really mean is that the extent to which justice prevails depends on whether a population can defend itself against oppression. But successful defense requires political power, and political power means having access to the ballot box.
That is why the opponents of voting rights have always fought so hard. In the past, they have restricted the right to vote to protect their privileged access to power. Today, their attacks on voting rights seek to recapture the power they fear they are losing.

Seen in this light, the historical struggles to protect and extend the right to vote in the United States have been foundational. Their success has made the country more just.
But from the country’s inception, the voting rights of all citizens were not guaranteed. The Constitution was of no assistance in that regard. Instead, decisions about who could vote were left to the states. It took political struggles in the first half of the nineteenth century to extend the vote to men who did not own property. It took a Civil War to enfranchise former male slaves. And it took pitched suffrage battles for women to win the right to vote. But even so, it was not until 1948 that Native Americans attained the unfettered right to vote.

Despite successes, the fight for full enfranchisement of American citizens was not without setbacks. The most glaring example was the reversal of Southern Black enfranchisement when Reconstruction was dismantled after 1877. The adoption of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 had added almost 500,000 Black male voters to the rolls. But within a generation, state level Jim Crow laws resulted in an almost complete purge of those voters. The injustice done was incalculable. It took the national civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to create a voting rights act that could begin to reverse the denial inflicted on Southern Black men and women.

This is the framework within which to understand today’s attacks on voting rights. Indeed, some of the techniques that are being employed by Donald Trump’s followers today are not very different from those used in the South. As was the case after Reconstruction, Trumpists are explicitly attempting to purge voting rolls by making registering and voting more difficult, by corrupting election administration, and by falsifying the counting and certifying of votes. Trump’s allies are installing partisan officials at every level of government who share his goal of limited voting rights. Undergirding all of this is the not-very-hidden threat that violence will be used against anyone who stands in their way.

All this is designed to bias the electorate by depriving millions of American citizens of their right to representative government. Today’s campaign is particularly malevolent because it is national in scale. It’s goal is comprehensive – to achieve enough disenfranchisement to reverse the country’s movement toward a more just nation.

It is fear that is motivating the anti-voting forces. They know that Americans are learning to value diversity and increasingly understand that we all gain from sharing our differences. The Trumpist worry centers on the growing numbers who affirm the importance of respecting the rights of women, the working poor, people of color, and LBGTQ individuals. Increasingly, American culture has acknowledged the importance of empowering these and other previously marginalized groups.

As a result, Trumpists now believe that the only way to reverse progressive change is to increase the electoral clout of those who, like them, resist it. In addition for Trump himself and the elite that he protects, what is also at work is the fear that the greater cultural equality that has begun to characterize American society could spill over to a demand for greater economic equality as well.

Only by resisting attacks on representative government can the arc of American history bend toward justice.