One nation, divisible

By now, the Republican strategy for this November's election is clearly mapped out and, not surprisingly, resembles the strategies Republicans have relied on for the last decade. The goal is to divide and subdivide America into demographic camps, and employ differences - in cultural backgrounds, in religious persuasion, in race and national origin, and in sexual identity and orientation - to construct "us versus them" dichotomies. The hard-working, down-to-earth values of small-town voters are celebrated, while urbanites are portrayed as lazy or "elitist" and (according to Rudy Giuliani) "cosmopolitan."* The enormous complexity of religious belief is reduced to a distinction between "Christians" and everyone else. And our historical tradition of "melting pot" nationalism, or multi-cultural "mosaic" nationalism, where a single people is assembled out of the many, many cultural communities that make up the vast population of America, is discarded, replaced with a much older, and more restrictive definition of citizenship, which extends full membership in the collectivity only to those who are "white Christians."

This strategy - divide and conquer - aims at assembling just enough votes in the right selection of states to put the Republican nominee over the threshold in the Electoral College. The two principle tactics - culture war rhetoric and vote caging - work in parallel, to mobilize a wave of voters who feel their "values" and "traditions" are under attack, while obliterating as many Democrat-leaning voters (African American, Latinos, the unemployed, and, new this year, those who have lost their homes in foreclosures) as possible.

This practice of dumping registered voters from the registration lists - because they moved or can't be located - is a tactic Republicans have used for a generation. Republican operatives send mail to targeted neighborhoods where the majority of voters are Democrats. When a letter is returned as undeliverable, perhaps because the resident has moved, or maybe because the address was wrong, or the post office made a mistake, the local Republican party (or, in some cases, public officials) records the voter's name, and adds it to a list they deliver to the local election board, asking to have the voter removed from the system. The justification they use - that they are fighting vote fraud by catching people who aren't properly registered - seems plausible enough to make the practice seem valid. But all evidence points to the contrary. Improperly registered voters, or voters who vote multiple times because they are registered in multiple jurisdictions, or voters impersonating registered voters who have moved or passed away don't make any difference in electoral outcomes. Other related practices - sending misinformation about the hours polls are open; sending information about how to register, after registration deadlines have passed, to mislead registered voters into thinking they aren't registered; requiring ID's to vote, when it is disproportionately likely that the poor, the unemployed, and recent immigrants won't have ID's - aim to do the same thing, restrict turnout among voters likely to vote for Democrats.

All of this is distressing not only because it makes it less likely that Democrats will win, but because it undermines cherished hopes for our society and democratic processes. The ideal of the American "nation" has always had at its core the belief that it isn't common blood that joins us (although White supremacists might argue otherwise), or even a common language (although those campaigning to make English our official language might disagree), but a shared commitment to defend a common homeland, and to preserve an institutionalized tradition of representative democracy, and to contribute to a two- to three-hundred year-old national narrative. This idea that Republicans are offering, that Americans - true Americans - look a certain way, and speak a certain language, and worship a particular God, is a betrayal of this tradition. I'm not a utopianist, I know the reality was never as comfortable as the image I sketch out. African Americans were denied full citizenship and equal voting rights, Japanese Americans were gathered up and held in camps, many other groups have been targeted or marginalized. But these violations of civil rights - these efforts to exclude entire groups of citizens from the full protection of our laws - were later acknowledged and, if not remedied, became inserted into our national narrative as regretable chapters, stumbles in our collective pilgrimage toward a freer and more equal society.

The efforts to disenfranchise voters are, similarly, a step backward. It is a reversal of a generations long effort to guarantee the vote to women, and Blacks, and immigrants, through law, and the power of the courts, and the elimination of barriers, like poll taxes, and literacy tests, and other obstacles.

In order to win an election, despite their comprehensive failure to offer anything resembling good government, Republicans deliberately dismantle institutions and practices designed to preserve a place for the most vulnerable in our national life, and they roll back accomplishments in expanding voting rights. In the process, they thumb their noses at those who sacrificed their lives to secure these advancements and defend these institutions.

* Note: "cosmopolitan" is designed to suggest "probably gay and from somewhere else."