Let's be blunt, shall we? If you are from a poor family or minority, Republican strategists do not want you to vote. That's because polling tells them that when you do vote,
it is far less likely to be for their candidates than for their opponents - so smaller turnouts favor Republicans. If you think I'm making this up, try watching this video
for a small sample, straight from the horse's mouth:
That's Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, summing up why he doesn't want everyone to vote.
The above is old news by now, surely, yet Republicans I encounter still manage to surprise me, sometimes even shock me. Who would have thought that,
in this day and age, such anti-democratic notions as poll taxes and property requirements for voting are still so desirable???
I recently dusted off this old graph,
which shows that on the whole, low-income Americans are less than half as likely to vote as their upper-income neighbors:
Flattening out this curve by raising voting rates for poor and working-class Americans would have a profound effect on politics in the USA. When I discussed
this recently with one long-time Republican, he not only agreed he would rather lower-income folks not vote, he justified this by saying they are less likely
to be educated and well-informed. Then he really made my head spin by saying if he had his way, we would go back to the way things used to be, when only
property owners (meaning land owners) could vote. Well, I say that is a great way to keep learning among the already educated, and keep property among the
already wealthy. Maybe that is their goal. After all, in the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., "A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history
yelling Stop!"
googoosyndrome.html ... released 29 October 2012 ... expires 30 November 2024
