Conservatives Argue For ‘Fewer Voters,’ And Question The ‘Quality of Voters’

The right-wing rag National Review, founded by snooty patrician William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of modern movement conservatism, defended white supremacy and American Apartheid (sate sanctioned racial segregation and Jim Crow black codes).

The Intercept reflects that In 1957, Buckley wrote an editorial  entitled “Why The South Must Prevail.”

The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote,” he goes on. “In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.

Buckley goes on to weigh whether such a position is kosher from a sophisticated, conservative perspective. “The central question that emerges,” he writes, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer is clear:

The sobering answer is Yes —  the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own. NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

Having justified denying the vote to Black people in the South as “enlightened,” Buckley then grapples with the proper level of violence needed to sustain the “civilized standards” he is intent on upholding.

Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

By 1957, when Buckley was writing the column and Congress was considering its civil rights legislation, lynchings were continuing in the South, a mechanism of discipline to enforce Jim Crow, a regime that rendered the post-Civil War constitutional guarantees of the franchise and the right to equal protection of the laws mere words on paper. Buckley concluded the editorial by suggesting that with enough guidance and charity from white people in the South, Black people may one day be worthy of an equal standing.

Buckley’s argument, “undemocratic” as it may be, is an articulate defense of white supremacy — with a capital W, as was the house style at the magazine then — as the proper means toward the goal of a good society. Maintaining that good society through disenfranchisement and a reasonable amount of violence was justified. The column appears not just in the magazine’s archives but also the 2008 book, “From The New Deal to The New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism,” published by Yale University Press and authored by Joseph E. Lowndes. The thesis of Lowndes’s book, that the fusion of Southern white supremacists and the business class was forged with the intellectual guidance of National Review.

Some 64 years later, National Review is still defending white supremacy and Jim Crow laws.

Current National Review editor Rich Lowry, who lost all credibility years ago when he felt the need to tell us all about the “little starbursts” ricocheting around his living room the first time he saw Sarah Palin on TV: “I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me” (eeew! I don’t need to hear about your political porn boner, creepy perv), and more recently at POLITICO found his new love interest, the Covid-19 criminally negligent governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis Is What the Post-Trump GOP Should Look Like, actually had the nerve to write The Voter-Suppression Lie (excerpt):

Biden says the new law is “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and “an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.”

Anyone making this charge in good faith either doesn’t understand the hideousness of Jim Crow or the provisions of the Georgia law.

Dude, what fucking planet are you from? There has been voter suppression in this country my entire life, which dates back to the Jim Crow era before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I’ve spent over 25 years doing voting rights litigation and legislation. This is a serious case of projection from the National Review which, as noted above, has always been articulating white supremacy and Jim Crow voter disenfranchisement.

Rich Lowry was shown up by Kevin Williamson, who previously articulated his views on the proper punishment for women who get abortions in a September 2014 episode of his National Review podcast: “I would totally go with treating it like any other crime, up to and including hanging,”  by writing Why Not Fewer Voters? (excerpt):

Much of the discussion about proposed changes to voting laws backed by many Republicans and generally opposed by Democrats begs the question and simply asserts that having more people vote is, ceteris paribus, a good thing.

Why should we believe that?

Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite? That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?

Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah.

This is what passes for conservative intellectualism at the National Review:

There would be more voters if we made it easier to vote, and there would be more doctors if we didn’t require a license to practice medicine. The fact that we believe unqualified doctors to be a public menace but act as though unqualified voters were just stars in the splendid constellation of democracy indicates how little real esteem we actually have for the vote, in spite of our public pieties.

There are tradeoffs in voting, as there are in all things. Democrats prefer to minimize attention paid to voting fraud and eligibility enforcement, but even a little bit of fraud or improper voting is something that should be discouraged and, if possible, prevented. It is — spare me your sob stories — something that should be prosecuted in most cases. It is a fact that many of the things that would be useful in discouraging and preventing voting fraud would also tend to make voting somewhat more difficult for at least some part of the population. Republicans generally think that tradeoff is worth it, and Democrats generally don’t. Is there motivated reasoning at work there? Of course. But the mere presence of political self-interest does not tell us whether a policy is a good one or a bad one.

There are currently two grand juries in Georgia hearing evidence of Donald Trump’s criminal interference in the election to throw out that state’s election results and to declare him the winner. The evidence is overwhelming – there are recordings. You can be certain that if the grand jury indicts Donald Trump (and Rudy Giuliani, and possibly Sen. Lindsey Graham) for criminal interference in the election in Georgia, this guy is not going to support their prosecution.

One argument for encouraging bigger turnout is that if more eligible voters go to the polls then the outcome will more closely reflect what the average American voter wants. That sounds like a wonderful thing . . . if you haven’t met the average American voter.

You mean like these “quality” people?

Voters — individually and in majorities — are as apt to be wrong about things as right about them, often vote from low motives such as bigotry and spite, and very often are contentedly ignorant. That is one of the reasons why the original constitutional architecture of this country gave voters a narrowly limited say in most things and took some things — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. — off the voters’ table entirely. It is easy to think of critical moments in American history when giving the majority its way would have produced horrifying results. If we’d had a fair and open national plebiscite about slavery on December 6, 1865, slavery would have won in a landslide. If we held a plebiscite on abolishing the death penalty today, the death penalty would be sustained.

If the question is the quality of policy outcomes, then both major camps have reasons to dread genuine majority rule.

[T]he real case — generally unstated — for encouraging more people to vote is a metaphysical one: that wider turnout in elections makes the government somehow more legitimate in a vague moral sense. But legitimacy is not popularity and popularity is not consent. The entire notion of representative government assumes that the actual business of governing requires fewer decision-makers rather than more.

Representatives are people who act in other people’s interests, which is distinct from carrying out a group’s stated demands as certified by majority vote. Legitimacy involves, among other interests, the government’s responsibility to people who are not voters, such as children, mentally incapacitated people, incarcerated felons, and non-citizen permanent residents. Their interests matter, too, but we do not extend the vote to them. So we require a more sophisticated conception of legitimacy than one-man, one-vote, majority rule. To vote is only to register one’s individual, personal preference, but democratic citizenship imposes broader duties and obligations. When we fail to meet that broader responsibility, the result is dysfunction: It is no accident that we are heaping debt upon our children, who cannot vote, in order to pay for benefits dear to the most active and reliable voters. That’s what you get from having lots of voting but relatively little responsible citizenship.

* * *
Progressives and populists like to blame lobbyists, special interests, “the Swamp” [this was the Trump 2016 campaign], insiders, “the Establishment,” vested interests, shadowy corporate titans, and sundry boogeymen for our current straits, but the fact is that voters got us into this mess. Maybe the answer isn’t more voters.

Philip Bump at the Washington Post responds to The toxic elitism of declaring voters to be unworthy of the task (excerpt):

This idea that there are good, valid Americans and bad, tainted ones permeates a lot of the current conversation. A poll released in February found that most Republicans see Democrats not as political opponents but as enemies, a group that poses a danger to the country. Most Republicans say they believe that Joe Biden only won election last year because of voter fraud, an obviously ridiculous assertion for which there’s no evidence — but one that overlaps with a sense that the political left is dangerous, dishonest and toxic.

In November, 81.3 million Americans voted to elect Biden president, nearly 10 percent more than the number who voted for Trump. The conservative Heritage Foundation has identified voter fraud associated with the 2020 election — one case in which a guy in Michigan forged his daughter’s signature to submit the ballot at her request. The vote was not counted. And that’s it.

That so many more voters rejected Trump than supported him poses a bit of a conundrum for those who believe that they are the true political elite. How does one reconcile the un-Americanness of the left with the idea that so many more Americans preferred the candidate representing that position? One answer that’s newly in vogue: Those voters are somehow not worthy of voting, muddying up and misdirecting the system.

In the past seven days, the conservative National Review has twice presented arguments against the broad exercise of the franchise. On March 31, there was Dan McLaughlin’s argument against mandatory voting. On Wednesday morning, Kevin Williamson’s step further: Maybe the system would be better if fewer people voted.

Democrats, Williamson begins, are of the opinion that more people voting is a good thing. But why should we think that?

“Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite?” he writes. “That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?”

The word that carries that latter sentence — and, really, the entire article — is “better.” What does it mean to be a “better” voter? What test does one apply to make that evaluation? Williamson never answers this directly, understanding that he doesn’t need to. He knows and his readers know what he means, as surely as Trump supporters knew what Trump meant when he proclaimed at his rallies that they were the elites.

Williamson means people like Kevin Williamson. He certainly doesn’t mean just anyone.

“One argument for encouraging bigger turnout is that if more eligible voters go to the polls then the outcome will more closely reflect what the average American voter wants,” he writes. “That sounds like a wonderful thing … if you haven’t met the average American voter.”

This is just so grossly disdainful, and in a way that reflects the sort of elitism that Trump claimed to reject. It’s centered on an idea similar to the one Trump promoted, though, that some people know better and others don’t. Here, though, Williamson offers the idea in service of constraining the vote to people who pass his unstated quality test. (He does at one point argue that the voting age should be raised to 30, certainly a reflection of where he stands.)

He makes a number of frankly weird arguments in defense of his position, such as comparing unqualified voters to unqualified doctors, which is simply the inverse of arguing that anyone should be allowed to fly a F-16 over foreign airspace since we don’t keep people from walking around shopping malls.

[Of] course, we do rigorously validate identity at the polls in a way that almost entirely eliminates fraudulent voting. We also enforce having a license to drive a car, but that doesn’t prevent people from driving without one — something that almost certainly occurs far more often than people vote illegally. The added threat of legal consequences for driving without a license serves as an effective control on the number of people who do so. And many people have to drive. Most people are not going to risk a federal jail sentence by adding a few extra doctored ballots into an election, so it simply doesn’t happen very often.

Late in the piece, Williamson presents his examples of voters who simply don’t take their responsibility seriously — and, by implication, don’t qualify as “better voters.”

[Do] we even need to call out the subtext to all of this? Williamson, like McLaughlin the week prior, is responding in part to the law passed in Georgia that will impose new requirements on voters seeking to cast absentee ballots, among other things. That change, advocates in the state fear, will disproportionately affect those without the time and money to obtain the necessary identification allowing them to do so. However easy the state makes it to meet that requirement, there will always be a hurdle to overcome — the sort of bureaucratic hurdle that often lands more heavily on the poor and, by extension, people of color.

[B]ut you get his point, given the broader context of the piece: Barriers are fine if they prevent the wrong sorts of voters from voting. It was the motivating rationale for literacy tests that blocked Black voters from casting ballots in the South 75 years ago. That non-White Americans vote so much more heavily Democratic means it’s difficult to extricate systems that disadvantage Democrats from ones that disadvantage non-Whites, and vice versa. The result is that partisan motivations can often seem like racist ones.

As William F Buckley, Jr. argued in 1957, “The White voters in the Jim Crow South were better voters — that’s all. They were the deserving elites, the real Americans with the superior culture.”

“History echoes.”