NOTE: It took me awhile to realize it, but my joining the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama in 1965 was like walking into a theater showing an action movie/thriller just in time for the climactic car chase and shootout: high excitement and historic triumph for the good guys. Within six months, it seemed to this rookie, it was all over but the shouting, and the counting of millions of newly-enfranchised Black voters.
Okay, I was a greenhorn rookie, a young white northerner. Only later, in the rheumy eyes and muffled voices of a few surviving elders, did I begin to take in the scope of the backstory: sixty-five years — three generations — of official exclusion from the voting rights supposedly won with civil war and emancipation. Not to mention the long terrors of Reconstruction, and slavery before that. I’m still learning about all of it.
By now, though, on the verge of 80, I understand something more about this long, bloody past. There’s also an old beginner’s sense of its cyclical character: one or two steps forward, then one or three lurches back. I read about it, but more: saw the cycle repeat in the fabled birth of the Voting Rights Act, and now the extended torture of its ongoing, public ”legal” evisceration.
Few writers give me more economical and clear-eyed insight about this today, than Jamelle Bouie, in his columns. In these excerpts he cuts to the Jekyll-and-Hyde nub of it, and further illuminates how it is coming to another crisis point in the imminent midterms, but will surely not end there, whatever happens:
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times:
[The] legal scholar Aziz Rana has observed that for many Anglo-Americans in the 18th century, freedom was an “exclusivist ideal, accessible only to Anglo-Saxons and select Europeans, whose heritage, land practices, and religion made them particularly suited to self-rule.
Such exclusivism presupposed that settler security, as well as more grandiose dreams of utopian peace, required the subordination of internal and external enemies, who threatened Anglo social and political supremacy.” Freedom and domination, he writes, were “bound together.”
This duality is present in our federal Constitution, which proclaims republican liberty at the same time that it has enabled the brutal subjugation of entire peoples within the United States. The Constitution both inspired the democratic vistas of radical antislavery politicians and backstopped the antebellum dream of a transcontinental slave empire.
Move a little closer to the present and you can see clearly how American democracy and American autocracy have existed next to each other, side by side, with the latter just another feature of our political order. If we date the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1890s — when white Southern politicians began to mandate racial separation and when the Supreme Court affirmed it — then close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.
It was a system that, as the legal scholar and former judge Margaret A. Burnham writes in “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” rested on “the chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life.”. . .
Which is to say that for most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism. Although we’ve taken real strides toward making this a less hierarchical country, with a more representative government, there is no iron law of history that says that progress will continue unabated or that the authoritarian tradition in American politics won’t reassert itself.
If we do see even greater democratic backsliding than we’ve already experienced over the past decade — since the advent of Donald Trump, yes, but also since the decimation of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder — there’s no reason to think that most elites, and most people, won’t accommodate themselves to the absence of democracy for many of their fellow Americans.
After a time, that absence of democracy may just become the regular order of things — a regrettable custom that nonetheless should more or less be left alone because of “federalism” or “limited government.” That, in fact, is how many politicians, journalists and intellectuals rationalized autocracy in the South and reconciled it with their belief that the United States was a free country. . . .
American traditions of authoritarianism have shaped American traditions of democracy in that they frame our ideas of who, exactly, can enjoy American freedom and American liberty. They degrade our moral sense and make it easier to look away from those who suffer under the worst of the state or those who are denied the rights they were promised as members of our national community.
As we look to a November in which a number of vocal election deniers are poised to win powerful positions in key swing states, I think that the great degree to which authoritarianism is tied up in the American experience — and the extent to which we’ve been trained not to see it, in accordance with our national myths and sense of exceptionalism — makes it difficult for many Americans to really believe that democracy as we know it could be in serious danger.
In other words, too many Americans still think “it can’t happen here,” when the truth is that it already has and may well again.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington.