As with the Virginia elections last month, Doug Moore’s victory over accused pedophile and Constitution-shredder Roy Moore demonstrates that some basic laws of politics remain alive and well in what often seems like a post-Newtonian Trumpian universe to which we’ve all been delivered. Energized base voters will help you win elections; competent and inspiring candidates help a lot, too; and a huge public backlash to the majority party’s politicians and policies is a big plus.
But I'm a little nervous that too many people, critically including politicians and other influential members of the Democratic party, may draw the wrong conclusions from this seeming continuity with our pre-Trump world. Progressives need to make damned sure that we're running on and implementing policies that include an accurate assessment and remediation of the rotten root causes of Trump’s ascent to power — an ascent which by this point stands revealed as an authoritarian movement that threatens American life as we know it. Trump and the increasingly right-wing Republican Party thrive off the dislocations of an increasingly inegalitarian and self-cannibalizing economy, channeling people’s economic insecurity toward fears of minorities and others perceived as different or un-American. On top of this, the increasing racial diversity of American society is provoking a white backlash that is intersecting in toxic ways with economic anxiety.
It’s extremely noteworthy that the GOP itself has placed a response to these tectonic forces at the center of its modern agenda. But rather than seeking to cure or ameliorate economic malaise or social tension, Republicans have chosen to double-down on the forces driving economic inequality, whether through aggrandizement of the financial sector, support of monopolistic corporations, passage of an unfair tax bill, or enactment of voter suppression efforts. All the while, as a distraction on the cultural front, they lie to their base about the benefits of their economic policies and encourage a demonization of minorities, whether blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims.
Even under President Obama, economic business as usual was failing most of us. Inequality continued to widen; employment may have finally increased to normal levels years after the Great Recession, but wages barely crawled upward; and the cost of basics like higher education, health care, and homeownership continued to outpace inflation. There are millions of people whose economic prospects remain stunted due to the lingering effects of the recession.
I offer this quick sketch as context for why I think we should think critically about the outcome in Alabama. It is not enough to win an election; it is critically important to then work to deliver actual benefits to voters that address the issues I identified above, and to attack the legal roadblocks that the GOP has attempted to sow in the American political landscape like so many anti-democratic pillboxes. Analyzing the Alabama election results, THS fave Jamie Bouie shows exactly how this sort of holistic diagnosis and prescription should be done. He writes that while Jones alone can't be expected to reverse racial inequality in the state, his vote may help save the Children’s Health Insurance Program or protect Medicare and Medicaid benefits, which Bouie describes as “keeping a rotten status quo from decaying further.”
But beyond this, Bouie zeroes in on a structural issue that the vote in Alabama should highlight — the degree to which Doug Jones won only because African-Americans were able to vote in force despite suppression efforts, and how fighting voter suppression should be at the center of progressive politics. Bouie describes various reports of voter suppression observed on election day, from police officers attempting to serve warrants at polling stations to enormous lines in African-American precincts — a character-building test of one’s patience and ability to miss work mysteriously denied to whiter parts of the state. In fact, voter ID laws have been carefully tailored in the state to target African-Americans while maintaining the ridiculous pretense of being race neutral:
A 2011 law mandated strict photo identification to vote in the state, and actions taken in 2015 closed voter ID offices throughout the rural counties of the Black Belt, where many black Alabamians reside. The state later lowered some of those hurdles, but the impact remains. Proponents of those policies argue any suppression is an unintended consequence—that no one wanted to keep black voters from the polls—but in Alabama, the evidence is stacked against them. One advocate of the original voter ID law claimed, on record, that it would undermine Alabama’s “black power structure,” and two of the law’s sponsors were caught on tape attacking black Alabamians in explicitly racist terms.
And this is exactly the point where the fears I highlighted at the beginning come back to haunt me. As Bouie notes, if Democrats are going to start turning statehouses and Congressional delegations bluer, voting reform and protection will need to be front and center of their agenda. But doing so is going to require not only a popular understanding of how pernicious the problem has become, but fighting the temptation to point at states like Alabama and rationalize away taking on such a hard fight by saying, Hey, we still won even with the voter restrictions! Voting reform will also mean that the Democrats will have to swear off partisan gerrymandering in their own favor, a position which will surely seem like political suicide to more conventional pols. But it’s far more important to institutionalize a level playing field than seek short-term advantage which the GOP will only exploit and push beyond all previous norms when they have the power to do so.
Given our desperate political straits, it’s critical that we learn the right lessons from this election. But I don’t want to miss the forest for the trees, either. Jones' victory is a huge deal in basic political terms — it’s effectively a repudiation of gutter-dwelling politicians like Moore and his endorser-in-chief, Donald Trump. The reduction of Republican control of the Senate to a single vote is going to haunt the GOP through 2018. And though I started on a note of caution, it IS highly encouraging that basic rules of democratic politics are intact: energy and enthusiasm still matter. So does momentum, and Democrats now have even more of it going into the 2018 elections. Substantively, too, although there’s a risk of learning the wrong lessons, Alabama provides a great chance to learn the right lessons, about how important the right to vote is, and how much people are ready for change from our current retrograde course.
