It's not Shakespeare, and it's not fair

Will this election be affected by the Trump-inspired voter suppression efforts?

Dear Readers:

Sometimes it’s useful to look back and learn. My vacation this week might offer just such an opportunity. Since the publication schedule of The Upstate American coincides with my flight home, I’m once again sharing with you a previously published essay — in this case, from July 17, 2021.

Back then, just six months into the new Biden-Harris administration, some of us were awakening to the disheartening possibility that the Republican Party wouldn’t break free of its dumbfounding allegiance to the lies of Donald Trump. A lot has changed in the three years since then, but we are still plagued by the biggest fib of the very many that Trump and his enablers lay upon us every day: that Trump was the victim of a fraudulent presidential election. It is an unconscionable libel of our democracy, which ought to disqualify any of its cynical adherents from public office. (“Dream on, dream on,” Shakespeare wrote in Richard III.)

I’ll be back next week with a new essay for The Upstate American. Thanks for reading.

- Rex

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That guy William Shakespeare gave us a lot of phrases that now come trippingly to the tongue — see what I did there? — but he often gets credit for a line that was not his: “All’s fair in love and war,” to which some folks now add, “and politics.” The attribution to Shakespeare is wrong, as is any countenancing of politics as a no-holds-barred brawl.

We will give due credit to the author of the original phrase in a moment, but it’s worth noting first the awful condition of American public life that now confronts us, where one of our major parties is building its campaign on a fundamental lie and trying to gain power by inhibiting democracy — which by any code is clearly immoral.

I’m sorry if this sounds overtly partisan. I’m not a member of a political party, though I am a progressive, and I hope that if Democrats were doing what Republicans are these days, I’d call them out just as clearly. Right now, though, every American who cares about this country ought to be doing whatever they can to shame the defenders and vendors of Donald Trump’s blatant lies — the biggest one, of course, being that he was cheated out of re-election. He absolutely was not, as any honest reader knows, and as any moral American would assert. 

Just as importantly, we need to stand up to the effort in 17 states (so far) to limit voting rights, which would aid Trump’s dream of regaining power by whatever means necessary.¹ We should be shouting about that, too, and labeling it for what it is: an assault on democracy. This is no time for beating around the bush.

Though those who are misled by the unconscionable distortions of Fox News may not see it clearly, here’s what’s happening: To curry favor with Trump — who alone among America’s 46 presidents fought to overturn a legitimate election and encouraged a violent insurrection on his behalf   — Republican officials around the country are moving to restrict voting. It’s a lot of procedural stuff, and that doesn’t move the needle for most voters. But it matters, and it is almost entirely aimed at the kind of voters who tend to favor Democrats. 

Some of it seems a bit crazy in a country that just had a vigorous and fair national election with record turnout. In Florida and Georgia, for example, it now will be illegal to give water to a thirsty voter standing in line to cast a ballot; in Iowa, Montana and Georgia, the number of polling places and hours for voting will be curtailed, making it harder for working people or those with more than one job or limited child care to cast a ballot. Several states have given partisan poll watchers more clout over local election administrators. State legislators are lining up to give themselves power to overrule state election administrators.

And, of course, Republicans in Congress are blocking consideration of a bill that could limit this widespread effort at voter suppression. Because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, the Democrats, who represent 41.5 million more voters than their Republican colleagues, can’t do anything about it. 

There is no moral argument to support voter suppression. If America had a problem of vote fraud, one might argue for a tightening of restrictions, but that hasn’t been the case. No, the right moral choice now would be to welcome the record voter turnout of 2020 and try to build upon it. That would be good for democracy.

Unfortunately for democracy, it also would be good for Democrats, since demographic trends favor them, so as more people vote, the likelihood of Democratic victories rises, as well. So Republicans instead are lining up again behind Trump — who made quite clear throughout his presidency, and especially after the election, that he is hostile to the constitutional exercise of democracy. 

Some of my liberal friends question how Mitch McConnell and his ilk can live with their consciences. Won’t their moral sensibility at some point lead them to stand up to Trump, they wonder, and in favor of American democracy? How can they justify even blocking a bipartisan probe of the lethal Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, or repeat the outrageous libel that it was really the work of the left, or of an anti-Trump cabal in the government? For that matter, how can Republicans in Congress fail to rein in the anti-vaccination forces in their midst, which are sure to cost still more American lives, knowing that Trump’s politicization of the pandemic contributed to the spread of the coronavirus?

Here’s the problem with that thinking, and with hoping for an exercise of conscience by congressional Republicans: Political ideology isn’t guided by morality. In fact, research shows that it’s more likely that our political feelings will shape our moral judgments, rather than the other way around.

Two years ago, a study by three respected political scientists advanced an analysis of data supporting just that notion: that while people act on gut feelings — or what the researchers called “moral intuitions” — those feelings are set by political ideology.² “Moreover,” noted Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, a philosophy professor who reviewed the study, “political ideologies appear more stable than moral foundations and are more strongly predictive of them than the reverse.”³ Moral arguments are often fashioned to justify political acts, that is, rather than political behavior arising from a moral code.

This is troubling if you’ve been hoping that the moral backbone of politicians will someday strengthen, and they will come to recognize the damage to our democracy that is being done — that all’s not fair in politics, in fact, any more than it is in love and war. 

Getting back to that non-Shakespearian notion: It actually came from an English writer named John Lyly, who was a contemporary of the Bard of Avon. Lyly is familiar to English scholars for a literary style known as euphuism (yes, “you-foo-ism”), a word you’ve probably never heard, though the style you know: ornate phrases larded upon one another, as though the self-impressed writer couldn’t help but drop in some sophisticated alliteration and onomatopoeia.⁴

Lyly’s approach to language is precisely not what we need right now, in the face of this challenge to democracy. We need plain talk. Like what President Joe Biden said this week in Philadelphia.

“This is simple,” he said. “This is election subversion. It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” Calling out the Republicans who are backing the assault on voting rights, including many who were his Senate colleagues, Biden asked, “Have you no shame?”⁵

Apparently not. Shame is an outgrowth of a moral sensibility — which, remember, is guided by political ideology. So democracy must be saved not by moral argument — Abraham Lincoln didn’t avert the Civil War by arguing the immorality of slavery, remember — but rather by political strategies. 

That’s the task at hand, then: to marshal political forces for a cause no less high than to save our democracy, which cannot be rescued by moral force alone. It’s a dispute in which we are all called to choose our side. In that, of course, Shakespeare had some direction. “I will keep where there is wit stirring,” he wrote, “and leave the faction of fools.”⁶

1

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-may-2021

2

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12448

3

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-death-and-the-self/201912/the-relationship-between-politics-and-morality

4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lyly

5

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/13/remarks-by-president-biden-on-protecting-the-sacred-constitutional-right-to-vote/

6

https://kwize.com/quote/1497

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DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN NOW: MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay. 

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” And it’s worth your time.

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NOW, LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS

If you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class that Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.

Our next class is Thursday, Oct. 17, at 4 p.m. Join us!

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. 

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about *our common ground, this great country. I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-REX SMITH