At a dinner with friends, the conversation came around, almost regretfully, to politics - the "craziness," as one friend, a Texan, introduced it. After we commiserated - Republican-led Texas has reecently taken the lead in craziness on reproductive rights, voter suppression, and guns - I waxed purple about the days when American democracy worked, when political parties won elections by hearing the citizenry and so adjusting their platforms that they represented majorities, rather than representing the presumably fixed interests of a given subset of the population and pouring their efforts into suppressing votes from others. With all due respect, another friend, an Italian American, said, that's a very white view. Indeed ... it is. The playbook for what's disengenuously called "electoral integrity" was written during Jim Crow, when white southerners (Democrats) used every lever of power to prevent African Americans from exercising the right to vote guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments. One might bring in Jill Lepore's reminder that, since the franchise was restricted to men until 1920, for most of US history most adult citizens weren't able to vote. Democracy in America has been stumbling from the start - indeed has been tripped up, usually by, yes, folks like me. But the ideals distinguish truly better from worse behaviors, and not every appeal to democratic ideals has really been an effort at usurpation.
