On his book The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present
Cover Interview of August 21, 2019
In a nutshell
The Embattled Vote explains why Americans have fought
and died for the right to vote. The book is more relevant than ever after the
Supreme Court sanctioned partisan gerrymandering in a ruling issued on June 27,
2019.
The world’s oldest continuously operating democracy
guarantees the franchise to no one, not even citizens. This lack of universal
voting rights originated in a crucial mistake by America’s founders: omitting a
right to vote from the Constitution and leaving the franchise to the discretion
of individual states. During Reconstruction, Congress missed an opportunity to
rectify the founder’s error and enshrine a positive right to vote in the
Constitution. Instead, they framed the Fifteenth Amendment on racial voting
rights negatively, in terms of what states could not do. They set a precedent
for later amendments on sex and age.
The lack of a constitutional guarantee has meant that the
right to vote has both expanded and contracted over time. In the early
republic, only those with a “stake in society” proven through the ownership of
property or the payment of taxes could vote in most states. In the nineteenth
century, states eliminated economic qualifications but embraced the ideal of a
“white man’s republic,” with people of color and women excluded from the
franchise.
Despite advances since adoption of the landmark Voting
Rights Act of 1965, our voting rights are still in jeopardy. Politicians that
benefit from voter suppression rely on bogus claims of voter fraud to deprive
millions of American of the franchise through voter identification laws, political
and racial gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement,
and voter purges.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down one of the Act’s
most effective provisions, which required states and localities with a history
of voter discrimination to preclear changes in voting laws and procedures with
the U.S. Justice Department or the Federal District Court in D.C. The Court
held that the “pervasive,” “flagrant,” “widespread,” and “rampant”
discrimination that Congress sought to correct in 1965 no longer existed in the
21st century.
Yet, by neglecting new forms of voter suppression, the Court
unleashed a renewed push to erode voting rights. Dallas minister Peter Johnson,
a civil rights activist since the 1960s, said, “There’s nobody that’s going to
shoot at you if you register to vote today. They aren’t going to bomb your
church. They aren’t going to get you fired from your job. You don’t have those
kinds of overt, mean-spirited behaviors today that we experienced years ago…
They pat you on the back, but there’s a knife in that pat.”
Historically, players in the struggle for the vote have
changed over time, but the arguments remain depressing familiar and the stakes
are very much the same: Who has the right to vote in America and who benefits
from exclusion?
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
The Embattled Vote explains why Americans have fought and died for the right to vote. The book is more relevant than ever after the Supreme Court sanctioned partisan gerrymandering in a ruling issued on June 27, 2019.
The world’s oldest continuously operating democracy guarantees the franchise to no one, not even citizens. This lack of universal voting rights originated in a crucial mistake by America’s founders: omitting a right to vote from the Constitution and leaving the franchise to the discretion of individual states. During Reconstruction, Congress missed an opportunity to rectify the founder’s error and enshrine a positive right to vote in the Constitution. Instead, they framed the Fifteenth Amendment on racial voting rights negatively, in terms of what states could not do. They set a precedent for later amendments on sex and age.
The lack of a constitutional guarantee has meant that the right to vote has both expanded and contracted over time. In the early republic, only those with a “stake in society” proven through the ownership of property or the payment of taxes could vote in most states. In the nineteenth century, states eliminated economic qualifications but embraced the ideal of a “white man’s republic,” with people of color and women excluded from the franchise.
Despite advances since adoption of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, our voting rights are still in jeopardy. Politicians that benefit from voter suppression rely on bogus claims of voter fraud to deprive millions of American of the franchise through voter identification laws, political and racial gerrymandering, registration requirements, felon disenfranchisement, and voter purges.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down one of the Act’s most effective provisions, which required states and localities with a history of voter discrimination to preclear changes in voting laws and procedures with the U.S. Justice Department or the Federal District Court in D.C. The Court held that the “pervasive,” “flagrant,” “widespread,” and “rampant” discrimination that Congress sought to correct in 1965 no longer existed in the 21st century.
Yet, by neglecting new forms of voter suppression, the Court unleashed a renewed push to erode voting rights. Dallas minister Peter Johnson, a civil rights activist since the 1960s, said, “There’s nobody that’s going to shoot at you if you register to vote today. They aren’t going to bomb your church. They aren’t going to get you fired from your job. You don’t have those kinds of overt, mean-spirited behaviors today that we experienced years ago… They pat you on the back, but there’s a knife in that pat.”
Historically, players in the struggle for the vote have changed over time, but the arguments remain depressing familiar and the stakes are very much the same: Who has the right to vote in America and who benefits from exclusion?