The Day the Music Died

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

For years it worked like a charm, at least from the 1980s until around 2016. Even when Democrats did win elections, they had to eschew labels like “liberal” and take positions like Bill Clinton’s infamous “the era of big government is over,” as was “welfare as we know it.” President Barack Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, added billions to the coffers of big insurance and drug companies and continued to legally prevent Americans who were under 65 (and not disabled) from accessing Medicare.

And then, in 2015, a real estate mogul and reality TV star burst onto the scene, blowing up the carefully crafted Potemkin village that his fellow billionaires had built over two generations.

The Republican Party was corrupt, Trump said, lying to get Americans into phony wars for political gain, cutting taxes on rich people like himself at the expense of the average guy, and fawning over phony war heroes like John McCain and low-energy hustlers like Jeb Bush and Rick Perry. The Democratic Party was rigged, too, Trump pointed out, sympathizing with Bernie Sanders, who had been almost entirely ignored by corporate media for nearly a year even as he was drawing crowds of 5,000 to 30,000 at nearly every stop.

Trump talked about giving people the universal health care they’d been yearning for since the 1940s (when the GOP first shot down Harry Truman’s single-payer plan) and said he’d do so at a “lower cost” and with “better benefits” than either Obamacare or Medicare. Union jobs were going to flood back into the country. Billionaires were going to be crippled by higher Trump taxes—“I’ll take a huge hit,” he solemnly proclaimed.

Most of the conservative billionaire class was horrified, and the Koch network (which holds a semiannual get-together for billionaires to raise hundreds of millions to spend on politics) declined to support Trump in 2016. But a few, among them Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer, threw in with Trump, and with a little help from oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, Trump ended up in the White House.

Within a year of Trump’s taking over the Oval Office, and the GOP taking over both the House and the Senate, Americans began to realize that the entire thing was just another Reaganesque scam. Trump was able to hold together his base mostly by using race-based fear tactics about invading brown hordes from south of the border. He kept Republicans generally on his side by threatening to support Republican primary challengers if they didn’t swear fealty.

But it wasn’t enough, and the professionals in the Republican Party knew it. They could see the wipeout of 2018 coming, and it scared them to their core. Demonizing unions and universal health care didn’t work anymore, because candidate Trump had called them both out as benefits. The 2017 tax cut was widely seen as a $1.5 trillion gift to the billionaire class, put on the credit card of the nation’s children and grandchildren.

Even their fear tactics about black crime and invading Mexicans were backfiring, and the Supreme Court had had the gall to end the debate over gay marriage by simply legalizing it nationwide.

There was only one serious path left: figure out a way to prevent the wrong people from voting or, if they voted, to make sure their votes weren’t counted.

Voter suppression and election fraud became the principal method of ensuring electoral success, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars in TV advertising and sophisticated online influence operations.

It was a new day for the Republican Party—one that meant going all in, nationally, at every level, to block young people, elderly people, poor and working poor people, and people of color from having a say in who represented them in government.