Excellent and true analysis. Republicans look strong because to their followers they are strong. They not only promised to destroy Roe v. Wade, that actively fought against it since the 1970s, collecting money, marching, fighting court cases over and over, making state laws over and over. They never gave up. The Democrats during that time never even started by contrast. They never pushed and pushed to codify a national law after Roe, letting it get beaten up. Instead of protecting Civil Rights, they side with republicans to beat Civil Rights into oblivion, helping with mass incarceration, building more than twice the number of jails 918-ish) from 1980 to 2005 than were built in the previous two hundred years (750 ish). The conducted the largest mass arrests of blacks nationally than ever to fill those jails they built, working hard every year to do so and to keep oversupplying the police with military equipment, and they then stripped away or alienate the voting rights of more Blacks then ever before that time, making it the first and biggest national disenfranchisement in American history.
The Republicans and white Democrats created the successful image of the “criminal,” the “super predator,” to justify this first nationalized disenfranchisement, about 25% of black men, or millions. Never before had so much apathy been built up around stripping away the right to vote because of the belief that the government has the right to take away civil unalienable rights because a person his arrested and labeled “a criminal.” That did NOT happen before the CRA of 1965, and they successfully bent the Democrats to their will, who, like Joe Biden, created minimum and mandatory sentencing laws. Today, millions of blacks (and many latinos and some poor whites) remain disenfranchised in the worst case over three decades in our nation’s history. Biden said he did have time for the John Lewis voting rights act to protect Voting—to protect voting in what should be a democracy. He just can’t be bothered to protect voting.
The Republicans keep trying to stop minorities from voting, and millions of blacks and minorities outside of jail still can’t get their civil rights back and are not full citizens. They remain stripped of their citizenship rights sometimes decades after serving. No democrat talks about “re-enfranchisement” of these human, who had their unalienable rights alienated, which should be illegal and should render this country an autocracy. The Republicans aren’t just good at continually attacking, they are great at it. If any one speaks out in the public media and says that Trump is a domineering white racist (which he is) they are told to shut up, issued threats, and told to stop “playing the race card.”
Americans are far from woke, including me. These type of articles keep telling us to wake up, and I’m going to keep trying. This author is great daily achiever of improving democracy by reminding us to pay attention to our past because it shapes our present. And I thank him for the light he shines.
