The Crimson Tide is Turning

If you are looking at the accelerating number of urban and non-white voters entering the body politic, and you are a rural or a rural values voter, you have to be concerned that your voice will be diluted into oblivion by these demographic trends. Back when our country was formed, Ben Franklin architected the “New Jersey Compromise” where all states, regardless of population (a concession to less-populated farm states), would have an equal voice in the Senate, but the House, with numbers of representatives based directly on population, would control the origination of all appropriation legislation. The Civil War erupted over the rising power of urban votes (from manufacturing states) over farm votes, most singularly represented by the question of slavery, an issue that benefited the southern agrarian states but had no benefits for the manufacturing north.

This thorny issue never seems to recede, and as census figures illustrate that for the first time, white citizens are dying off faster than they can reproduce, but whether by way of immigration or fertility, non-whites are slowly becoming the majority of voters. So those rural value, traditional states have focused on how to reduce the voting power of these mostly-urban “minorities” while bolstering votes from their traditional white constituents. Where rural value legislators control state houses, they’ve Gerrymandered minorities and urban voters into marginalized blocks, effectively depriving such constituents of gathering a meaningful majority in a sufficient number of House districts to elect their proportionate share of representatives.

They’ve tried poll taxes, making voting too expensive for a more liberal poor, and various forms of pre-qualifications as a precondition to being able to vote. These almost always used to get struck down. But since elections are often decided by very small margins, any effort that would reduce those likely to vote for bigger government or more liberal policies would most certainly benefit those seeking to imbue rural value voters with disproportionate power. So far, the rural efforts have been wildly successful.

A photo ID would seem to be a reasonable voting requirement, but then you have to look at what those IDs would have to look like. While states often offer non-drivers a document for identification purposes, very few folks who don’t drive take advantage of this (it is time-consuming and often requires the payment of a processing fee). Instead, it’s generally a passport or a driver’s license that fits the bill. In urban areas, where there is mass transit, many voters just don’t drive, and they don’t have enough money to travel, so a passport is out as well. That’s particularly true among the urban poor, people of color and the elderly. Folks on the farm, being far from supplies in isolated communities, almost always drive. So requiring a photo ID effectively weeds out those elements, most of which would not support rural value candidates.

Seven U.S. states currently have photo ID laws, and the recent Shelby County vs Holder Supreme Court decision effectively reinstates those photo ID laws by holding as unconstitutional the provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that had been used to invalidate such statutes. In no small way, the conservative majority in the court is legislating a change that could never have made its way in Congress, invoking a never-used-before power (where did the court get this power?) for to require new Congressional fact-finding because, even though the Act was reviewed and extended in 2006, of old statistics applicable to named southern states.

Moving from Texas across the south, these are the state legislatures that have tried their best to control the impact of new voting trends. But the tide of change is coming and overwhelming. It’s just a matter of time, and at best, these are rear-guard efforts aimed at halting or at least slowing the inevitable. “[T]hose who have studied the region closely say that a more unstoppable force is approaching that will alter the power structure throughout the South and upend the understanding of politics there: demographic change… The states with the highest growth in the Latino population over the last decade are in the South, which is also absorbing an influx of people of all races moving in from other parts of the country.

“While most experts expect battles over voting restrictions in the coming years, they say that ultimately those efforts cannot hold back the wave of change that will bring about a multiethnic South. .. ‘All the voter suppression measures in the world aren’t going to be enough to eventually stem this rising tide,’ said Representative David E. Price, a veteran North Carolina Democrat and a political scientist by training.” Jonathan Martin writing in the June 25^th New York Times.

Will the South fall… again? Are the new minorities viewed as the next “Carpetbaggers,” dedicated to changing the rural values that have defined the old South for so long? Are the efforts to stop change simply the product of fear, anger and bitterness… and will those who eventually assume the inevitable power remember those demographic segments who tried to hold them back? And retaliate?

I’m Peter Dekom, and fighting rear guard actions almost never benefits the fighters.