I'm reading all sorts of post mortem analysis of yesterday's disastrous election. One thing I have not seen anyone say, and it seems to me the most obvious point.
This was the first election to occur since two key Supreme Court decisions. Many people have discussed the fact that the Koch brothers and Citizens United had a lot to do with the outcome.
But this was also the first election after the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.
I was seeing this play out in story after story as state after state passed voting laws that would never have been allowed if they had been reviewed. Voting has been seriously restricted by radical voter ID laws and by making it harder for working people and the poor and minorities to register and vote. Diarists here have told personal stories and there are thousands of others out there. These laws have closed early voting sites in busy African-American districts; they have restricted the use of identification that can be used, making it almost impossible for people who work long hours, who depend on public transportation, for whom the bus fares, time off work, and fees, to vote, no matter how many times they had voted before.
One of the people I was making calls with yesterday kept telling the people he spoke with, "If we vote, we win." And that's the basic fact - if we vote, we win. Not everywhere, and not all the time, but enough to change things in favor of ordinary people. The second half of the twentieth century is perhaps the only time in our country's history that we had a strong middle class and our income inequality lessened, when a college education or a new house was suddenly available to ordinary GIs returning from war who could never have afforded these luxuries without government programs. Unions gave power to workers they had not had before.
All this progress was still full of racial inequality, the greater availability of working people to buy houses facilitated white flight from our cities, school desegregation never really happened, and so forth.
But the Voting Rights Act created real changes in the Jim Crow states and northern cities. John Lewis went from the Edmund Pettis Bridge to the US Congress.
I think the Shelby County decision had as much to do with yesterday's election results as Citizens United. After all, the uber-class always found ways to exert their influence disproportionately.
Yesterday I saw the first post-Shelby-County election.