In 17th-century England, the Levelers, the democratic socialists of the day, provided the troops for Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army defending England’s Parliament against the tyrant King Charles I. The army of commoners defeated the Royalists and installed Cromwell in place of the King.
At that time, only landed gentry could vote. So, the foot soldiers, all commoners, demanded their right to vote for the members of the Parliament for whom they had just risked their lives. Cromwell agreed to meet with the Martin Luther Kings of the day, the voting rights leaders. Cromwell ordered those who demanded the right to vote to draw straws. The one who drew the shortest straw was executed on the spot on Cromwell’s orders.
The fight to vote is long and bloody.
History repeats itself, said Karl Marx, first as tragedy, second as farce. Oliver Cromwell is tragedy; Katherine Harris, Kris Kobach and Agent Orange are the B-movie farce. But I’m not laughing.
The fight for the franchise started long before America was America.
George Washington, whom we dismiss as “The Father of Our Country,” as if he were just some sperm donor with wooden teeth, was a radical on today’s simplistic spectrum, well to the left of Bernie Sanders. Instead of food, he nourished his cold, starving troops at Valley Forge with readings from Tom Paine’s Crisis and its call for armed revolt.
The hardest fought victory for Washington, according to fellow warrior Thomas Jefferson, was for the Disestablishment Clause of the Constitution, what we call “Freedom of Religion” in the First Amendment.
Via the First Amendment, Jefferson and Washington did battle against the pre-revolutionary requirements of voters to swear an oath to the Lord Jesus that had kept Jews from voting. Likewise, some states required voters to swear they had no allegiance to a foreign power, that is, the Pope. Catholics could not vote until Jefferson won the Bill of Rights.
Of course, the First Amendment was not enough. The Bill of Rights aimed to give the federal vote to all citizens, but Rhode Island did not allow Jews to vote in state elections until 1842, nor could Catholics vote in North Carolina until 1868. Notably, Catholics obtained the franchise in that state after African-Americans.
American Natives did not obtain US citizenship until 1924. But these indigenous Americans did not get the federal government’s protection of their right to vote until 1962, and no practical right to have their votes counted until . . . well, that hasn’t happened yet. More ballots are spoiled or disqualified in pueblos and reservations than in any other community.
In 2004, the BBC sent me to New Mexico to investigate the mysterious failure of the state’s pueblo dwellers to cast votes for President. But the “undervote” was astronomical, sufficient to cost John Kerry the election to George Bush. New Mexico’s then-Secretary of State, Rebecca Virgil-Giron, explained away the massive presidential undercount, telling me that in the pueblos and poor Hispanic communities, “People just don’t want to vote for President.”
We Progressives bitch and moan about America—that’s our prophetic imperative, and I don’t apologize—but if you step back and look over the arc of history, America has grown more progressive over the decades. We are indeed the Shining Light on the Hill, even if Trump and his billionaire buddies keep trying to blow out the Light.
And this little beam of ours is the direct result of the expanding group of voters that politicians must pay attention to.
Progressive humanism has been America’s defining trajectory, from George Washington building lighthouses along the coast and thereby establishing government as protector of the general welfare, to regulating the prices of the power and gas monopolies, to Medicare, to the War in Iraq. (OK, not the war. Two steps forward, one back.)
Americans take democracy’s irresistible advance for granted, and therefore don’t protect it, in part because we Americans are weirdly proud to be ignorant of our own history. Hillary Clinton’s comment that no candidate has ever challenged the outcome of a presidential election was notable for the fact that the press parroted this gem of nincompoopery as gospel truth.
I guess Hillary was in a coma in 2000 when Al Gore went to the Supreme Court to challenge his loss to Bush.
In fact, challenges are the norm, not the exception, beginning with Andrew Jackson’s fury when John Quincy Adams swindled Jackson out of the Presidency (a steal corrected four years later).
No challenges to the theft of elections? What may be the most consequential presidential election in US history threatened to re-ignite the Civil War—and it’s a shame it didn’t. Democrat James Tilden crushed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in both the popular vote and in the Electoral College. However, Congress shifted 20 electoral votes to Hayes in a “compromise” that even the Devil found disgusting: Southern white Democrats sold their electoral votes to the Republicans in return for Hayes agreeing to pull US troops from the South, thereby ending Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow replaced the Union troops. The gains of the Civil War were reversed: Black people lost their right to vote and fell into financial servitude.
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There are fights for the vote Americans don’t know we fought. Not many Americans know or care about one of the giant steps in voting rights, the right to elect our Senators, not granted until the 17th Amendment was won in the early 20th Century. Until then, state legislatures chose Senators. These were often just auctions for moneyed interests, such as the “election” of Sen. William Andrews Clark, the robber baron railroad magnate who flat-out purchased his US Senate seat by buying Montana’s legislators with cash.
The response to the Senate for sale was the 17th Amendment, the crowning achievement of the Populist Movement and The Grange, whose peasant uprising against the railroads and other corporate monopolies left a lot of patriot blood on the prairie.
The 17th Amendment was shepherded by Republican Senator Joseph L. Bristow, who represented what was then the most progressive state in the union, Kansas. Special props to Bristow for successfully fighting to remove language in the proposed Amendment that would have allowed states to restrict Black voters.
(Don’t take your right to vote for Senator for granted. The late Justice Antonin Scalia questioned the Amendment; so has his Sith Warrior colleague, Sen. Ted Cruz [R-TX].)
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Because Americans are born with a genetic inability to absorb history, even progressives don’t question habitual vote suppression techniques such as the wholly unnecessary, absurd requirement to register to vote. Registration is the place where most racist vote suppression mischief occurs—and that was always the intent.
This unnecessary extra step to your “inalienable rights” began as a method to block the vote of new citizen immigrants in cities, to keep power in rural areas. Voting historian Alexander Keyssar notes that the registration game began in the 19th century when the Pennsylvania state legislature required voters to register, but only in Philadelphia, not the farm counties. This was aimed at keeping the new citizens from Europe and Black migrants from the South from voting.
Thom Hartmann’s terrific Hidden History of the War on Voting notes that, in 1908, New York limited registration to Saturdays or during the Yom Kippur holiday, to exclude Jewish Levelers.
What if we simply did away with registration? In 1951, North Dakota got rid of voter registration. Yet no one has caught a Canadian moose sneaking into a Dakota voting booth. Nor do “aliens” from South Dakota try to vote in the North, nor do escaped felons or the undead.
The alien in my house has the right to vote in her native Switzerland without registering. The Swiss don’t have a fear of hordes of “illegal alien” voters—though the nation has a foreign-born immigrant population that is, proportionately, far larger than that of the US.
So why fight over the rules of registration when we should be saying, end the registration game.