you can’t have your fundamental right of voting, what do you have? You don’t have nothin’.” These words could have been spoken by a Black person during the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights in 1965, but they were spoken in 2017 by Larry Harmon, a middle-aged white Ohioan. A Navy veteran and software engineer, Larry has a round face, a salt-and-pepper beard, and eyebrows that are quick to flight when he’s incredulous about something—which he was often as Demos and the ACLU represented him in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a case that aimed to strike down a process that had imperiled Larry’s right to vote, a right he’d be the first to admit that he, unlike his Black fellow citizens, never thought he’d have to fight for.
Democracy is a secular religion in America; faith in it unites us. Even when we are critical of our politics, we wouldn’t trade our form of government for any other, and we have even gone to war to defend it from competition with rival systems. Yet our sacred system allows a Larry Harmon to lose his opportunity for self-governance as easily as one lets a postcard fall in with the grocery circulars and wind up in the trash.
The truth is, we have never had a real democracy in America. The framers of the Constitution broke with a European tradition of monarchy and aspired to a revolutionary vision of self-governance, yet they compromised their own ideals from the start. Since then, in the interest of racial subjugation, America has repeatedly attacked its own foundations. From voter suppression to the return of a virtual property requirement in a big donor-dominated campaign finance system, a segment of our society has fought against democracy in order to keep power in the hands of a narrow white elite, often with the support of most white Americans.
A recent study by political scientist Larry M. Bartels found that Republicans who score high in what he calls “ethnic antagonism”—who are worried about a perceived loss of political and cultural power for white people in the United States—are much more likely to espouse antidemocratic, authoritarian ideas such as “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” and “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules to get things done.” Three out of four Republicans agreed that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,” a stunning opinion reflecting the way that decades of anti-immigrant, anti-poor, anti-Black, and antigovernment political messaging can tip over into an antipathy toward democracy itself at a time of demographic change.
Then again, the antidemocratic concept of minority rule—and rule by only the wealthiest of white men, in fact—was the original design of American government, despite any stated “self-evident truths” about equality to suggest the contrary. When the Constitution was ratified, the majority of white men were excluded from participating in this vaunted new system of representation, given that every one of the original thirteen states limited the franchise to men wealthy enough to own property. I’ve found it’s easier to understand the sorry state of today’s elections if one starts by unlearning the grade school narrative of the framers’ commitment to equality and democracy and recognize that the framers left holes in the bedrock of our democracy from the outset, in order to leave room for slavery.
The South won the Three-fifths Compromise in the Constitution, giving southern states added power in Congress based on a fraction of the nonvoting population of Black people and diminishing the legislative power of white people in free states. Possibly the most consequential of the founding racist distortions in our democracy was the creation of the Electoral College in lieu of direct election of the president. James Madison believed that direct election would be the most democratic, but to secure slave states’ ratification of the Constitution, he devised the Electoral College as a compromise to give those states an advantage. As a result, the U.S. apportions presidential electoral votes to states based on their number of House and Senate members. With the South’s House delegations stacked by the three-fifths bonus, the region had thirteen extra electors in the country’s first elections and Virginia was able to boost its sons to win eight of the first nine presidential contests. The three-fifths clause became moot after Emancipation and Black male suffrage at the end of the Civil War, but the Electoral College’s distortions remain. An Electoral College built to protect slavery has sent two recent candidates to the White House, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, who both lost the popular vote. The Electoral College still overrepresents white people, but in an interesting parallel to the free/slave tilt from the original Constitution, not all white people benefit. The advantage accrues to white people who live in whiter, less-populated states; white people who live in larger states that look more like America are the ones underrepresented today.
population of the new country skyrocketed—tripling that of the Revolutionary era in just four decades—states began to reconsider the property limitations on the franchise. In the South, the growing threat of both slave revolts and cross-racial uprisings by Africans and landless white men helped convince the plantation aristocracy that it might be better if all free white men, not just the richest, had a stake in defending a white-supremacist government. But in state after state in the North, the push for universal suffrage among men regardless of class came in the form of a zero sum, at the expense of the few Black men who had heretofore been allowed to vote. Property requirements were eliminated in the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s in the same stroke that removed the tenuous voting rights of free Black citizens, so that only 6 percent of the free Black population lived in states that allowed them to vote by the early 1860s. This move to make real the republic’s promise of self-government, but only for those with white skin, sent a powerful zero-sum message that white equality would be purchased with white supremacy. Universal white male suffrage redefined the meaning of human worth in a society with whipsawing economic vicissitudes: wage-earning white men no longer needed to be wealthy to find esteem in the eyes of their society. They just needed to be white. In many states and territories in the nineteenth century, white-skinned immigrants didn’t even need to become citizens to be granted the prized right of citizenship, the vote.
Anti-Blackness gave citizenship its weight and its worth. Perhaps that helps explain why so many whites reacted to the post–Civil War possibility of Black citizenship not with debate but with murderous violence. John Wilkes Booth made up his mind to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln after he heard him advocate for voting rights for Black men. “That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make….By God, I’ll put him through,” Booth declared. He assassinated Lincoln three days later.
In the years that followed, federal troops traveled across the South registering seven hundred thousand recently freed Black men. The white backlash to Black suffrage was immediate, and not just by elites who saw their political privilege threatened. In Colfax, Louisiana, for example, when a pro-Reconstruction candidate supported by Black voters won a fiercely contested gubernatorial race in 1872, the following spring, a mob of armed white men attacked the courthouse where the certification of the election had been held, killing about one hundred Black people who were trying to defend the building, and setting the courthouse on fire. The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.
hundred years in American history were shaped by relentless assaults on the right of Black and Indigenous Americans to vote and by elite efforts to prevent class-based interracial resistance. Because the Fifteenth Amendment barred states from denying the right to vote based on color, class served as a proxy. The Reconstruction era saw movements of impoverished white farmers making common cause with Black freedmen in political parties and populist alliances sometimes known as “Fusion.” Their aim was to break the grip the plantation oligarchy had on government and the economy, provide interest rate relief to debtors, raise taxes for public works, and resist railroad land grabs. The ruling class fought against the cross-racial populists with a campaign for “white supremacy,” promising material and other advantages to whites who broke with Blacks—and violent intimidation to those who didn’t.
When they won, the white supremacists attacked the franchise first. In 1890, unsure that one barrier to the ballot would suffice to control growing Reconstruction-era Black political power, Mississippi implemented literacy tests, new registration rules, standards for “good character,” poll taxes, and more. Other states soon created similar laws, and poor white voters were caught up in the dragnet. For instance, poll taxes, usually in the range of one to two dollars (two dollars in 1890 being almost fifty-seven dollars in today’s money), required cash of poor white, Black, and Indigenous people who were often sharecroppers with little cash to their names. In some places, grandfather clauses exempted whites whose grandfathers could vote before the war; in others, candidates or party officials would pay white voters’ taxes for them in exchange for their loyalty. But in many places, the poll tax continued to work almost as effectively to disenfranchise poor white people as it did Black people, and the result was a slow death of civic life. After several southern states adopted the menu of voter suppression tactics, turnout of eligible white voters throughout the region plummeted. In the presidential election of 1944, when national turnout averaged 69 percent, the poll tax states managed a scant 18 percent.
Some of the voter manipulation tactics of the post–Civil War era remain in full force today. The requirement that we register to vote at all before Election Day did not become common until after the Civil War, when Black people had their first chance at the franchise. Throughout its history, writes legal scholar Daniel P. Tokaji, “voter registration has thus been a means not only of promoting election integrity, but also of impeding eligible citizens’ access to the ballot.” Today, the burdensome and confusing registration process is particularly onerous on people who move frequently (young people, people of color, and low-income people) or who may not know about lower-profile, off-cycle election dates before the registration deadlines, which are as much as thirty days before the election in some states. One of the top barriers to voting, the registration requirement kept nearly 20 percent of eligible voters from the polls in 2016.
Over six million Americans are prohibited from voting as a by-product of the racist system of mass incarceration. (The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote even while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.) Many felony disenfranchisement laws were enacted after the Civil War alongside new Black Codes to criminalize freedmen and women. “Some crimes were specifically defined as felonies with the goal of eliminating Blacks from the electorate,” as legal scholar Michelle Alexander wrote. These included petty theft in Virginia and, in Florida, vagrancy, which was a notorious catchall used to send into prison labor any Black person in a public space without a white person to vouch for him. In 1890, Mississippi designated crimes such as bigamy and forgery as worthy of disenfranchisement, but not robbery or murder. The disenfranchisement laws, combined with discriminatory policing and sentencing, hit their target and today ensnare one in thirteen African American voters. But their reach is wider than their aim: one in fifty-six non-Black voters is impacted as well. In Florida, voters in 2018 overturned the state’s lifetime disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions by ballot measure, enabling more than a million people to regain their voting rights—the majority of whom are white.
Desmond Meade is the visionary founder of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. I got to know him during the multiyear ballot initiative campaign because of Demos’s partnership with FRRC. We had frank conversations about the headwinds of racism and the challenges of creating a multiracial coalition on an issue as charged as criminal justice in such a conservative state. But like so many Black leaders I’ve known, Desmond had a vision with an irresistible breadth, and it attracted the grassroots energy of people from all walks of life. I asked him to put me in touch with one of FRRC’s white activists, and a week later, I was on the phone with a woman named Coral Nichols.
Coral is a white woman in her early forties from Largo, Florida, and is among the hundreds of thousands of white Floridians denied the right to vote under the state’s Reconstruction-era felony disenfranchisement law. While she was still under probation, Coral started volunteering with FRRC —“because we’ve served our time, and we should be given the opportunity to belong,” she explained to me. Coral went door-to-door in her county encouraging local citizens to do what she could not—vote on a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to people like her. Coral could tell that a lot of people she spoke to had a preconceived notion about people with felony convictions: “They think that most felons are monsters. They don’t see the depth of a personal story, which is why I think that stories are so important.” Race played a role, too—and that’s why Coral always chose to canvass alongside an African American “brother or sister,” as she put it. “It was important that we were united together. When we encountered any type of stereotype, what could break the stereotype was what was standing in front of them.” Amendment 4 passed with 65 percent of the vote on November 6, 2018, and on April 19, 2019, Coral finally got released from the ten years of probation that followed her incarceration and was free to register to vote.
In reaction to Amendment 4, Florida’s Republican governor and legislature passed a state law that required people with a felony history to pay all outstanding fines and fees before voting. This move—redolent of the poll tax—is particularly troubling in Florida, where it is nearly impossible for returning citizens to find out what the state thinks they owe and where “there is no database…to be able to check all the different court costs that might be outstanding,” as one county supervisor of elections testified. The restrictive new law was challenged in court but upheld by a federal appeals court in September 2020. Coral is among approximately eighty-five thousand returning citizens who registered to vote before the new restrictive law went into effect and who must prove they have paid up before they can vote.
today, no politician worries that their position in a representative government is illegitimate even if only a minority of citizens votes in their election. They should. What does it mean when the officials who set policy in our name are elected by so few of us? We shouldn’t take these low standards for granted. Our election system is full of unnecessary hurdles and traps—some set by malice and some by negligence—but I would argue that all are a product of the same basic tolerance for a compromised republic that was established at our founding, in the interest of racial slavery. Countries less boastful of their democracies do much better. In Australia, voting is mandatory, and nearly 97 percent of Australians are registered, compared to about 70 percent registration and 61 percent voting in the United States. Canada and Germany don’t make voting compulsory, but their registration rates are about 93 and 91 percent, respectively.
America’s fifty states, and even counties within them, confuse and discourage voters with an archaic patchwork of varying laws, rules, and practices. In some states, you can go to the polls on Election Day and sign up as you vote. In others, you have to register thirty days before an election, a deadline you’re likely to know only if you’ve missed it. In some states—a growing number since the COVID-19 epidemic—you can vote at home and mail in your ballot, while in others, you have to provide an excuse for why you could not go in person. Not surprisingly, Americans at all educational levels are deeply uncertain about their own states’ election laws. In states that prohibit early voting, only 15 percent of residents are aware of this restriction. In states that allow same-day registration, only a quarter of its residents know it. Around half of Americans are unsure whether their state permits them to vote if they have unpaid utility bills or traffic tickets—prohibitions that no states have adopted (yet).
To see what U.S. democracy would be like without the distorting factor of racism, we can look to the states that make it easiest to vote, which are some of the whitest. Oregon, for example, was judged the easiest state in which to vote by a comprehensive study. In Oregon, everyone votes by mailing in a ballot, and Oregon was the first state in the nation to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR), which means rather than making voters figure out how, when, and where to register, Oregon uses information the state already has, for instance from the DMV, to add eligible voters to the rolls. North Dakota, another largely white state, boasts of being the only state without any requirement of voter registration. Until a 2018 voter ID law aimed at Indigenous North Dakotans, you could simply have a poll worker vouch for you at the polling place. Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of Black citizens, is dead last of the fifty states in terms of ease of voting.
America’s history, voter suppression was strongest in the Jim Crow states where the Black population threatened white political control. But after the election of the first African American president, every state became a potential threat to white control. A new wave of voter suppression, funded by a coterie of right-wing billionaires, crashed into states like Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin—swing states that could turn a presidential election.
These same billionaires funded a lawsuit, Shelby County v. Holder, to bring a challenge to the Voting Rights Act’s most powerful provision. Decided by a 5–4 majority at the beginning of President Obama’s second term, Shelby County v. Holder lifted the federal government’s protection from citizens in states and counties with long records of discriminatory voting procedures. Immediately across the country, Republican legislatures felt free to restrict voting rights. North Carolina legislators imposed a photo ID law that “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision,” because it was based on research that pinpointed the kinds of identification to which white people had greater access and then allowed only those forms of ID. Texas introduced a voter ID law that essentially let the state design its own electorate, requiring photo IDs that over half a million eligible voters lacked and specifying what kinds of IDs would be permitted (gun permits, 80 percent of which are owned by white Texans) and denied (college IDs, in a state where more than 50 percent of students are people of color). Alabama demanded photo IDs from voters, such as a driver’s license, and within a year, it closed thirty-one driver’s license offices, including in eight out of ten of the most populous Black counties. Between the 2013 Shelby decision and the 2018 election, twenty-three states raised new barriers to voting. Although about 11 percent of the U.S. population (disproportionately low-income people, seniors, and people of color) do not have access to photo IDs, by 2020, six states still demanded them in order for people to vote, and an additional twenty-six states made voting much easier if you had an ID.
These policies were targeted primarily to disadvantage people of color, but such broad brooms have swept large numbers of white people into the democratic margins as well. In general, about 5 percent of white people in the United States lack a photo ID. Within certain portions of the white population, however, the numbers increase: 19 percent of white people with household incomes below $25,000 have neither a driver’s license nor a passport. The same is true of 20 percent of white people ages 17–20. Of the fifty thousand already-registered Alabama voters estimated to lack proper photo ID to vote in 2016, more than half were white.
Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names. Sandra Watts is a married white judge in the state of Texas who was forced to use a provisional ballot in 2013 under the state’s voter ID law. She was outraged at the imposition: “Why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last forty-nine years?” Like many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all because of a law intended to suppress people like Judge Watts’s fellow Texan Anthony Settles, a Black septuagenarian and retired engineer.
Anthony Settles was in possession of his Social Security card, an expired Texas identification card, and his old University of Houston student ID, but he couldn’t get a new photo ID to vote in 2016 because his mother had changed his name when she remarried in 1964. Several lawyers tried to help him track down the name-change certificate in courthouses, to no avail; his only recourse was to go to court for a new one, at a cost of $250. Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors. Hargie Randell, a legally blind Black Texan who couldn’t drive but who had a current voter registration card used before the new Texas law, had to arrange for people to drive him to the Department of Public Safety office three times, and once to the county clerk’s office an hour away, only to end up with a birth certificate that spelled his name wrong by one letter.
Possibly the most insidious anti-voting innovation to appear after the Obama election was the purge of unwitting voters already registered to vote. In 2015, Larry Harmon’s elected secretary of state, Jon Husted, used a purge process to eliminate two hundred thousand registered Ohio voters from the rolls in the state’s twenty most populous counties, all in the name of list maintenance to prevent voter fraud. As in most states, these high-population counties were also the ones whose residents were most likely to be people of color and to vote Democratic.
Here’s how the purge process worked. If an Ohio voter failed to vote during a two-year period—say, he voted in the presidential election but sat out the midterms—the state mailed the voter a postcard to verify his address. If the voter didn’t return the postcard, the state launched a process that, unless the person cast a ballot within the next four years, would result in his name being purged from the rolls: no longer considered a valid voter in the state. There are a number of problems with this approach, starting with the fact that in the United States, voting is not a use-it-or-lose-it right. What’s more, as Secretary Husted knew perfectly well, the vast majority of people who receive these address-verification postcards in the mail do not return them. In 2012, Ohio went to the trouble and expense to send out 1.5 million address-verification notices to people who hadn’t voted in 2011—out of a total of only 7.7 million registered voters. Presuming a change in registration for almost one out of every five registered voters is a remarkably wasteful effort, given that only about three out of every one hundred people move out of a registrar’s jurisdiction in any given year.
Of the 1.5 million postcard recipients, 1.2 million never responded. This should have been a clue that something was wrong with the state’s notification process, not with the voters. Or perhaps the process was working precisely as intended: people of color, renters, and young people are significantly less likely to respond to official mail than are white people, homeowners, and older people, as the Census Bureau had discovered.
“I’ve lived in Ohio my entire life,” explained Larry Harmon, “except for when I served in the Navy, and even then, I paid Ohio taxes.” Yet, in 2015, Larry felt like he’d been disappeared in the eyes of the state. “When I went to vote, I went into the hall and I looked up my name, and I looked and I looked, but I didn’t see my name.
“While I was at work on my lunch hour, I tried to google to see, did I do something wrong?…I didn’t quite understand why I wouldn’t be on the list; I’d voted there before.” Then he ran across information on Ohio’s purge of inactive voters. “I didn’t think I was required to vote in every election!” Larry said, incredulity in his voice.
He had been voting since 1976, mostly in presidential elections. His reasons for skipping the 2012 election were, like those of so many Americans, both personal and political: a combination of a lack of inspiration and the pressures of real life. “I think I went through a period after my mother’s death that I wasn’t interested in voting, and I didn’t think it did a whole lot of good, so I didn’t vote for one presidential election and, they told me, one midterm election.”
But in 2015, Larry was closely following an issue that he knew would be on the ballot—a proposal to legalize marijuana but to concentrate the industry in a few corporate hands. He was opposed to the idea and was eager to have his say. And the more Larry thought about being denied the opportunity to vote, the more upset he became.
“I thought, ‘Well, jeez. You know, I pay my taxes every year, and I pay my property taxes, and I register my car.’ So, the state had to know I’m still a voter. Why should we fight for the country if they’re gonna be taking away my rights? I mean, I’m a veteran, my father’s a veteran, my grandfather’s a veteran. Now they aren’t giving me my right to vote, the most fundamental right I have?”
Lawyers at my organization learned of Ohio’s singularly aggressive purging practice—no other state initiated a purge process after just one missed federal election—and concluded that it violated federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Most commonly known as the “motor voter” law because it made registration more available at DMVs and other government offices, the law also bars states from a number of burdensome voter registration practices, including purging registered voters for not voting. In early 2016, we took Ohio to court and, over the next two years, battled the case all the way up to the Supreme Court.
On January 10, 2018, I was in Washington, D.C., to watch the oral arguments before the Supreme Court for the case, which was now called Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI). A membership group of Black trade unionists whose volunteer activities include voter registration were plaintiffs, along with Larry Harmon and the Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. The early morning was chilly as I walked to the Court building with my colleague Stuart Naifeh, who had argued the case successfully in the lower court. As we climbed the wide stone steps, I looked up at the words inscribed in marble above the Court’s columns: Equal Justice Under the Law. I couldn’t help contrasting those stirring words with the mess Ohio had made of its voting system.
As another Demos colleague, Chiraag Bains, later wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, “In the United States, if you don’t buy a gun for several years, you do not lose your Second Amendment right to bear arms. If you never write a letter to the editor or participate in a street demonstration, you retain your full First Amendment rights to free speech. If you skip church for years on end, the government cannot stop you from finally attending a service.” But despite our contemporary reverence for the idea of equality under the law, the truth is the Constitution wasn’t written with an affirmative right to vote for all citizens. It’s always been a power struggle to create a representative electorate, and currently, the forces against equality have the upper hand. Purges and other kinds of voter suppression are forms of racial oppression that vitiate the goal of democracy, and white voters like Larry Harmon end up being collateral damage in a trap not set for them. Across the country, states purged almost 16 million voters between 2014 and 2016. Some 7 percent of Americans report that they or a member of their household went to their polling place only to be told that their name was not on the voter roll, even though they knew they were registered. In the courtroom, we didn’t hear much about race—Demos was arguing that Ohio’s purge process violated federal election law, not civil rights law or the Equal Protection Clause—until Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the country’s first Latinx Supreme Court justice, spoke to what she called the “essence of this case.”
She said, “It appears as if what you’re reading is that the failure to vote is enough evidence to suggest that someone has moved….[I]s that a reasonable effort to draw that conclusion, when [what] you do results in disenfranchising disproportionately certain cities where large groups of minorities live?” she asked. “There’s a strong argument…that at least in impact, this is discriminatory.” In the end, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court ruled against Harmon and allowed Ohio’s secretary of state to continue deregistering voters for elections to come.
Husted get the idea to purge up to a million of his own state’s voters? There is a playbook of anti-voting tactics drawn up by a connected set of benign-sounding organizations such as the legislation-drafting network of conservative lawmakers, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the legal organizations Project on Fair Representation and the Public Interest Legal Foundation, all of which are funded in turn by a group of radical right-wing millionaires and billionaires, chief among them fossil fuel baron Charles Koch. (Until his death in 2019, Charles’s brother David was his partner in these efforts, and the two men, among the richest in the world, were widely known as “the Koch brothers.”) Over the past fifty years, the Kochs organized vast sums of money to advance a vision for America that includes limited democracy, a rollback of civil rights, and unfettered capitalism.
We wouldn’t know much about the radical aims of the Koch brothers, whose political spending was often as secretive as their charitable giving was public (the dance hall at New York’s Lincoln Center, for example, is the David H. Koch Theater), if it weren’t for journalists like Jane Mayer and a little-known history professor named Nancy MacLean. In 2013, Duke University professor Nancy MacLean found a neglected storehouse of papers in the archives of James Buchanan, an influential economist who had recently died. The Buchanan papers became the basis for her award-winning book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
MacLean has thick brown hair that she often pushes impatiently out of her eyes as she speaks, which she does at a breakneck pace. Her words chase one another out of her mouth, accelerating to a crescendo at the end of every packed sentence. Considering the astonishing revelations that are flying at you that quickly, the whole experience of a MacLean conversation can leave you feeling like you’ve just been picked up by a twister and dropped in an entirely different universe.
Sadly, though, the universe she describes is ours. Her work has exposed an influential movement of radical right-wing libertarians opposed to the very idea of democracy. Through five decades of money and organizing, this movement has permeated conservative media and the Republican Party with its fringe, self-serving vision of an undemocratic society. Its goal is a country with concentrated wealth and little citizen power to levy taxes, regulate corporate behavior, fund public goods, or protect civil rights. The obstacle to this goal is representative democracy.
That’s why the hundreds of millionaires in the Koch network have taken aim at the rules of democracy, funding think tanks, legal organizations, public intellectuals, and advocacy groups to promote a smaller and less powerful electorate and weaker campaign finance laws. Since 2010, the groups they fund have spurred more than one hundred pieces of state legislation to make it harder to vote, almost half of which have passed; launched dozens of lawsuits attacking both voter protections and controls on big money in politics (including both Shelby County v. Holder and the case resulting in the notorious “corporations are people” decision, Citizens United); and invested in technology to allow extreme partisan gerrymandering. The scale of their organization is as large as a political party, but they use front groups and shell companies to keep their funding mostly secret. The core philosophy that unites their economic aims with their attacks on a multiracial democracy is that a robust democracy will lead to the masses banding together to oppose property owners’ concentration of wealth and power.
On its face, the aim of this movement is not white supremacy. Professor MacLean says they’re about “property supremacy.” But racism has long been useful to the movement. James Buchanan was awarded a Nobel Prize for his ideas about taxes, the size of government, and the deficit, but he first made his name in 1959 by offering a way for Virginia to resist desegregating public schools after Brown v. Board of Education. Buchanan co-wrote a memo to Virginia legislators and advocated in support of using public funds for private (and therefore segregable) schools, which could be economically efficient if the state used the revenue from public assets like school buildings. Buchanan and his co-author wrote, “We believe every individual should be free to associate with persons of his own choosing. We therefore disapprove of both involuntary (or coercive) segregation and involuntary integration.”
Many of today’s right-wing political actors take their libertarian economic philosophy from people like Buchanan and their funding from the Koch brothers network. The success of their policy agenda hinges on an unrepresentative electorate, because their vision can’t garner majority support. Their unpopular ideas include lowering taxes on the wealthy (64 percent of Americans want higher wealth taxes), slashing government spending and eliminating public transit (70 percent want a big infrastructure plan paid for by a wealth tax), and drastically minimizing the government’s role in health insurance (56 percent support a fully public single-payer system).
This is where racism becomes strategically useful. Whatever the Koch movement operatives (which now include many Republican politicians) believe in their hearts about race, they are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy. Take for example the widespread unconscious association between people of color and criminals; anti-voting advocates and politicians exploited this connection to win white support for voter suppression measures. They used images of brown and Black people voting in ads decrying “voter fraud,” which has been proven repeatedly to be virtually nonexistent and nonsensical: it’s hard enough to get a majority of people to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles to vote in every election; do we really think that people are risking jail time to cast an extra ballot? Nonetheless, the combination of the first Black president and inculcation through repetition led to a new common sense, particularly among white Republicans, that brown and Black people could be committing a crime by voting. With this idea firmly implanted, the less popular idea—that politicians should change the rules to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote—becomes more tolerable.
And this opens the door to a complete undermining of American democracy. As one of the architects of today’s right-wing infrastructure, Paul Weyrich, said in a 1980 speech, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Adherents to this belief system “see democracy as essentially infringing on economic liberty, and particularly the economic liberty of the most wealthy and corporations,” MacLean told me.
Voter suppression, an age-old racist tactic, has been reanimated in recent years by subtly anti-Black and anti-brown propaganda, but is now useful against a broad base of white people who could be in a multiracial coalition with people of color. MacLean recalled, “The voter suppression legislation in many cases, certainly in [my state of] North Carolina, didn’t only aim at African Americans. It also aimed in particular at young people. And this older generation of white conservatives…understand[s] that young people are not liking these ideas….That young people are…raising questions about the inequities in the way that capitalism is operating.
“So, for example, in my state, they took pains to eliminate a program that led to the automatic registration of high school students….They took aim at early voting, which tends to be something that many young people also use. And frankly, many white people prefer, too.
“They also moved polling sites away from campuses,” said MacLean. “A really egregious example of that was in Boone, North Carolina, which is a predominantly white community in the western mountains….The Republicans in charge moved the polling place from the campus, which is right in the city and very convenient to lots and lots of people….[T]hey moved it halfway down the mountain to a place where there was no parking, no public transportation, and it was dangerous to walk along the road to get to this place.”
Air Force captain Henry Frye went to register to vote in Richmond County, North Carolina. The state had enacted a literacy test in 1899 as part of the White Supremacy Democrats’ defeat of the Fusion Party populists, but Frye, an honors college graduate, was more than literate. Nonetheless, he was turned away. The test as administered by the white clerk? Name all the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Nearly a decade later, North Carolina’s voter suppression law and hundreds of similar restrictions across the country finally fell under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s crowning achievement and the cause for which marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. It’s hard to overstate the difference that the Voting Rights Act made in the country’s journey toward true democracy. The year before its passage, less than 10 percent of eligible African Americans in Mississippi were registered; five years later, that figure was almost 60 percent. In 1962, only 36 percent of Black North Carolinians were registered; one year after the Voting Rights Act, it had grown to 50 percent. Throughout the South, about one million new African American voters registered within a few years of the Voting Rights Act’s taking hold. Back in Richmond County, North Carolina, the law freed Henry Frye to become a voter, then to run and win a campaign for the state legislature. He would go on to become the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.
The fear that drives the violence and mendacity of American voter suppression is rooted in a zero-sum vision of democracy: either I have the power and the spoils, or you do. But the civil rights–era liberation of the African American vote in the South offered a Solidarity Dividend for white people as well. The elimination of the poll tax in particular freed up the political participation of lower-income white voters. Indeed, white voters in Georgia and Virginia had challenged the poll tax requirement, but the courts upheld it in 1937 and 1951. After the civil rights movement knocked down voting barriers, white as well as Black registration and turnout rates rose in former Jim Crow states. And a fuller democracy meant more than just a larger number of ballots; it meant a more responsive government for the people who hadn’t been wealthy enough to have influence before. It meant a break, finally, from what the southern political scientist V. O. Key described in 1949 as the stranglehold of white supremacy, single-party politics, and the dominance of the Bible Belt planter class.
“When you talk about the effects of the Voting Rights Act and political participation, just going to the ballot and casting your vote is only one step,” economist Gavin Wright told me. He’s the author of Sharing the Prize, which details the economic benefits the civil rights movement brought to the entire South, whites included. “What the Black political leadership got, and economic leadership, was a seat at the table.” With that seat, they won investments in public infrastructure, including hospitals, roads, schools, and libraries that had been starved when one-party rule allowed only the southern aristocracy to set the rules. More voters of all races meant more competitive elections; for the first time since the end of Reconstruction, a white supremacy campaign wasn’t enough. Candidates had to promise to deliver something of value to southern families, white and Black. In Sharing the Prize, Wright writes that “after the Voting Rights Act…southern…gubernatorial campaigns increasingly featured nonracial themes of economic development and education.”
Pre–civil rights Alabama was a quintessential example of racist inequality starving the public. Nearly half the state’s citizens over age twenty-five had no more than an elementary school education in 1960. This was the case for two out of three Black Alabamians, but also for two in five white Alabamians. After the Voting Rights Act swelled the electorate, Gov. Albert Brewer faced arch-segregationist George Wallace and hoped to appeal to a modern-day Fusion coalition of the white middle class, newly enfranchised Black Alabamians, and working-class whites outside the retrograde former plantation counties in the Black Belt. So, he called a 1969 Special Session on Education that passed twenty-nine bills and appropriated an unprecedented one hundred million dollars toward education in the state. Brewer narrowly lost in a runoff, but the impact of the educational investments he spearheaded continued.
prevent a thriving multiracial democracy, the same movement that puts up barriers to voting has hacked away at the safeguards against money flooding into elections. It’s not very often thought of this way, but the current big-money campaign finance system is a linchpin of structural racism, and the stealth movement to create it has been driven by people who often also work against government action to advance civil rights and equality. (Fifty years after libertarian economists laid out the case for school privatization instead of integration, a Koch brothers–founded libertarian group helped dismantle one of the country’s first and few remaining voluntary school integration systems, in Wake County, North Carolina.)
Most people who wonder why our politics are so corrupt can’t draw the line from racist theories of limited democracy to today’s system, but the small group of white men who are funding the effort to turn back the clock on political equality can lay claim to a long ideological pedigree: from the original property requirement to people like John C. Calhoun, who advocated states’ rights and limited government in defense of slavery, to the Supreme Court justices who decided Shelby County and Citizens United. Over the past few decades, a series of money-in-politics lawsuits, including Citizens United, have overturned anticorruption protections, making it possible for a wealthy individual to give more than $3.5 million to a party and its candidates in an election cycle, for corporations and unions to spend unlimited sums to get candidates elected or defeated, and for secret money to sway elections.
The result is a racially skewed system of influence and electoral gatekeeping that invalidates the voices of most Americans. When you consider the impact that the flow of money and lobbying has on policy making, it’s no exaggeration to say that the white male property requirement for having a say in government is still the default mode of business. One pair of political scientists stated, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” They conclude that “in the United States…the majority does not rule—at least in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” Another political scientist found that “senators’ [policy] preferences diverge dramatically from the preference of the average voter in their state…unless these constituents are those who write checks and attend fundraisers.” Still another wrote that the preferences of people “in the bottom one-third of the income distribution have no discernable impact on the behavior of their elected representatives.”
Since the early 1970s—not coincidentally, shortly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act began to dramatically increase the voting participation of African Americans—the donor class in America has grown more powerful and more secretive, but the number of donors who give contributions large enough to require tracking (above $200) is minuscule, less than 1.2 percent of the entire adult population. Their outsize donations totaled more than 71 percent of all campaign contributions during the 2018 election cycle.
This tiny coterie of elite donors who hold such sway over our political process do not look or live like most Americans. Obviously, they are wealthier than the rest of us; of donors who gave more than five thousand dollars to congressional candidates in 2012–2016, 45 percent are millionaires, while millionaires comprise only 3 percent of the U.S. population. As a team of New York Times reporters described in an exposé of the 158 families who dominated funding for the 2016 presidential election, “They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters.” The big-money campaign finance system is like so much of modern-day structural racism: it harms people of color disproportionately but doesn’t spare non-wealthy white people; it may be hard to assign racist intent, but it’s easy to find the racist impacts.
Two-thirds of Americans consider it a major problem that “wealthy individuals and corporations” have “disproportionate influence” in our elections. Though the impact is most acutely felt among people of color whose voices are the least represented, the reach is widespread enough that there’s a powerful Solidarity Dividend waiting to be unlocked for all of us. After a history of high-profile corruption cases earned the state the nickname “Corrupticut” and led to the imprisonment of a sitting governor in 2004, Connecticut passed a sweeping campaign finance reform measure. The Connecticut Citizens’ Election Program offered candidates the chance to qualify for public grants to fund their campaigns if they could collect enough grassroots donations from people in their district, in increments of five to one hundred dollars. In the first years after the reform, the change was dramatic. Candidates spent most of their campaigning time hearing the concerns of their constituents instead of those of wealthy people and check-writing lobbyists. James Albis, representative of East Haven, recalled, “I announced my reelection bid in February, and by April, I was done fundraising. So, from April to November, I could focus only on talking to constituents. Without public financing, I would have been fundraising through that entire period.” Corporate lobbyists had less sway over legislators’ agendas. Reform lifted the wealth requirement from running for office, too. “Public financing definitely made the legislature more diverse. There are more people of color, more young people, more women, and more young women,” noted the secretary of state, Denise Merrill.
One of those people was state senator Gary Holder-Winfield, an African American activist and former electrical construction manager for a power plant, who describes himself as “the candidate who wasn’t supposed to win.” He was in the first class of legislators who ran under the Citizens’ Elections system. He explains, “I didn’t come from money. I am a candidate of color, and I wasn’t a candidate for the political party or machine apparatus. I didn’t have the nomination, and I was actually able to defeat the person that had the nomination by talking about issues that he wasn’t.
“I’m beholden to the people who have been saying for a long period of time that we don’t have a voice,” he said. As I listened to Senator Holder-Winfield talk about his neighborhood constituents telling him they wanted him to focus on unfairness in the juvenile justice system, I realized I was hearing about something rare: a functioning representative democracy. “I don’t know what the issue is going to be, but I know where it’s going to come from,” Holder-Winfield explained. “It’s revolutionary in the way that it works.” I couldn’t help but think about the myth I’d learned as a child about the American Revolution creating that kind of bottom-up, egalitarian democracy—untrue then but within our grasp today.
Connecticut’s Solidarity Dividend was almost immediate. In the first legislative cycles after public financing, the more diverse (by measures of race, gender, and class) legislature passed a raft of popular public-interest bills, including a guarantee of paid sick days for workers, a minimum wage increase, a state Earned Income Tax Credit, in-state tuition for undocumented students, and a change to an obscure law championed by beverage distributor lobbyists that resulted in $24 million returning to the state—money that could contribute to funding the public financing law. Despite regular efforts to curtail it, Connecticut’s Citizens’ Election Program has endured for over a decade, highly popular with both Connecticut residents and candidates, 73 percent of whom opted into the system in 2014. This kind of reform has national popular support as well; among the most potent opposition messages is that it’s taxpayer money for politicians. Senator Winfield has a response to that: “Yeah, we are using the public’s money, but it’s the public’s government, and if you want it to remain the public’s government, you might have to use the public’s money. Otherwise, you’re going to have government by the few who have been paying for government.”
has been rigged, from the drafting of the Constitution onward, chiefly to diminish Black political participation. This flawed system has also limited the choices and voices of poorer white Americans and thwarted working-class coalitions that could have made economic and social life richer for all. A genuine, truly representative democracy is still an aspiration in America, but the vision of it has propelled waves of communities to claim a right from which they were excluded in our founding slavocracy. Class-blind suffrage in 1855; Black male enfranchisement in 1870; women’s suffrage in 1920; the full enfranchisement of Native Americans in 1962; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the inclusion of young adults in 1971. Professor Nancy MacLean, who has studied how powerful the opposition to democracy is, continues to be optimistic. “I do think that something is happening now,” she told me, “where not only is the audaciousness of the push to change the country from the right accelerating at a rapid pace that’s waking a lot of people up, but also I think good people of all backgrounds and commitments are starting to…get into action to try to defend democracy….And I’m heartened by the way that I see people, including so many white people, also recognizing that…we are all bound to one another. When one of us is hurting, that’s going to come along and hurt everyone.”