Last year at this time, as Joe Biden was assuming office, I had a warning for my Facebook friends: “Getting rid of the filibuster—like getting rid of the electoral college—is a desire for tyranny of the majority. This is a republic. But I fear the people are losing their virtue. Without that, we are not a nation. We cannot—we must not—subject our destiny to the mob. Democracy is a local affair. The attempt to relocate collective decision-making to the administrative state is a totalitarian wish. It prepares the ground for world government on their terms. And that is an invitation to empire and feudalism and subjection. The federal government is meant to protect our rights and manage affairs with other nations.” I added, “People, you have got to know what time it is. There are do-or-die moments. This is an inflection point.”
The struggle for our republic is apparent in a lot of things, but perhaps no more so in the attempt by Democrats to nationalize the electoral process. In pursuing his goal of fundamentally transforming America, President Joe Biden compared Americans who disagreed with the plan to our past racists, segregationists, and slaveowners, absurdly asking whether lawmakers wanted to side with “Dr. King or George Wallace,” “John Lewis or Bull Connor” or “Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis.” If that wasn’t offensive enough, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi worried out loud that the American public is too ignorant to appreciate Biden’s references (maybe she doesn’t appreciate them). Nobody knows who Bull Connor is,” she remarked. “You know, if we’re making the case to say, ‘We’re going to be with Martin Luther King or Bull Connor’—who’s that?” Vice President Kamala Harris defended the comparisons Thursday, calling them “apt.”
NBC News usefully informs us of what’s in Democrats’ latest voting legislation, and what the bills do. Senate Democrats are pushing measures that advocates say would reverse some Republican-backed state laws. These are laws that were passed in the wake of 2020, in which Democrats rigged an election to remove Trump from office, effectively the culmination of a four-year coup. However, Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virgina and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced their opposition to changing the Senate rule that has long represented a powerful institutional safeguard and then followed through with their intention to protect the sixty-vote rule. Today, the filibuster remains in place and, without it, it is unlikely Democrats can take over state elections.
This is indeed a great victory for American citizens. As I said in that Facebook post last year, the United States of America is a republic. A republic is not designed to run on majoritarian logic. A republic is designed to protect minority rights and prevent radical societal change. We now see that only two Democrat senators believe in the American republic. Maybe unknowingly, only two Democrats defended the American system against the total corporate state. Every other Democrat in the Senate voted for the corporatocracy, for the donor class to effectively take control of the federal election system. America dodged a bullet. But this is not the end of the corporate push to finalize elite rule over the people. We have to stay vigilant. The corporatocracy is in for the log haul.
We may then usefully specify what we mean by the tyranny of the majority. It may look like a desire for mob rule on the streets, but power resides not in the minions of the power elite. The supermajority rule is indeed a bulwark against the tyranny of the majority; however, Democrats are not really a majority. The party is owned by big financial and corporate power, including global finance and transnational corporate systems. When progressives talk about “the majority,” they’re talking about the “minority of the opulent” and the rainbow coalition of disaffected groups they have cobbled together (this is what drives the open borders policies of Democrats). The mob is not really a majority, either. Nor does control over the social construction and myth-making apparatus make real illusions. These groups are controlled in what Gramsci called a “historic bloc,” which the elite are having trouble finally establishing as the hegemonic force. The populist movement is a monkey wrench thrown into the machinery. The populists represent the majority—and they have no desire for tyranny.
With populist consciousness rising, Democrats and the corporate masters know they’re in for a shellacking come midterms. They manufacture a myth about the world then falsely appeal to the authority of civil rights, realized decades ago, to portray the Republican Party as antithetical to voting rights, motivated by anti-black prejudice, and thus open the process to a free-for-all they believe they can win. For Democrats, the principle is not count every valid, certifiable, chain-of-custody vote, which is the principle of integrity in elections. Rather it is every vote for Democrats counts. This is a party that wants non-citizens to vote. In fact, in New York City, they’re actually allowing non-citizens to vote. On a related note, have you ever wondered why Democrat push for drivers licenses for illegal aliens?
Democrats do everything they can to undermine election integrity because they have the street-level organization to cultivate the votes they need to carry elections. You would think with this level of organization they could get into the hands of every black person an adequate voter ID and a ride to the polls. Even feed (bribe) people before putting them in line. But this risks not generating all the votes necessary. So throw open the borders and incentivize human traffickers to deliver millions of new voters. Pave the path to citizenship for the eleven million (possibly more than twenty) illegal immigrants already in the United States. Democrats have no problem infantilizing black people (who will lose even more jobs to foreign labor) to achieve this end. The drive to undermine election integrity is to smuggle in under cover of night vans full of harvested votes.
Democrats admit upfront what they’re up to and the accuse those who object, those who demand election integrity, of voter suppression. In the run-up to 2020, Democrats and establishment media voice told us that, on election night, Trump would win but to wait—hold off on declaring the winner, they cautioned news organizations—because all through the early morning hours more votes would be found and counted and, in the end, Biden would win. And that’s what happened. But the 2020 outcome only got them the White House. The down-ticket results were not only disappointing, but exposed the fraud. But Democrats are bold. The power elite require centralization of governmental power to complete the project of integration with the transnational order, to centralize control over the 2022 election and beyond in order to fundamentally transform America.
There are elements of the voting rights bills I support. I have always supported a national holiday for voting. I have always supporting allowing felons to vote. In fact, I believe felons should be able to vote while in prison, for the simple fact that, in a republic, no law should be imposed on a citizen without the ability of that citizen to participate in the election of those officials who determine or appoint those who determine the law. But postal voting? Absentee voting should be strictly limited to those outside of the country or those who are too ill to go to the polls (2020 would have been a lot different had secretaries of state not exploited pandemic panic to arbitrarily change voting procedure). Chain of custody should be transparent. Any early voting should be brought under the logic of absentee voting criteria. Elections are for state governments to decide. There are many other things in these bills that are objectionable, but the general problem with the legislation is central state commandeering of a process that is expressly constitutionally left to the states. I cannot support the legislation. Obviously.
While Sinema stands strong on the institutions of our republic, she goes too far in supporting the substance of these bills. This is where party loyalty misleads her. And now they are delegitimizing her. The Arizona Democratic Party has censured her for her vote to protect the supermajority rule. This is not only about voting rights. For progressives, this is about stopping populism by ensuring a Democratic majority for years to come. Democrats are seeking to nationalize an intentionally federalized electoral system. They want to remove an obstacle to one-party rule. They want with a rule change what they cannot yet achieve at the ballot box: a filibuster-proof majority. That would be a disaster for our nation. This is about the future of the republic.
freedom and reason 