The Consequence of Lost Voting Rights Will be Massive Acts of State Violence

The death-cult mentality of US fascism has stumbled upon an ingenious epiphany – the tepid commitment of American voters can be surgically directed at specific voting blocs.

By Phil Wilson, Z Network

The Center for American Progress has recently published a warning that Donald Trump and his handlers aspire to “steal” the upcoming elections via 15 tactics:

• Casting doubt on election integrity via disinformation to justify nationalizing elections
• Weaponizing the federal government by installing election deniers in key government positions
• Gutting key agencies and essential election security programs
• Weaponizing federal databases and demanding personal voter information from states to track or purge voters
• Issuing unconstitutional executive orders to limit voting access
• Pressuring Congress to pass legislation that would suppress eligible voters
• Curtailing voting by mail
• Preventing states from using voting equipment
• Diluting voters’ power through a mid-decade gerrymandering crisis
• Using the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to intimidate election administrators
• Seizing election-related materials and voting equipment
• Deploying the military to interfere with the election
• Deploying federal agents to interfere with the election
• Declaring a national emergency to take over or postpone elections
• Interfering with issuance of state election certificates or pressuring the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives to block seating of duly elected members

The main-stream media often frames Trump’s longing for mass voter disenfranchisement as if it were a minor legal inconvenience (to create busy-work for the ACLU), and even on lefty “alternative” platforms we find a muted sense of alarm. Meanwhile, we are barraged with the optimistic notion that Trump’s popularity has cratered, that in formerly deep red Texas Talarico now leads the fascist puppet, Paxton, by a small margin. We are given 80% betting odds of a Democratically controlled “House.” The speculation, and typical commodification of political events belies the subterranean themes – the fascist kakistocracy aspires to dismember the voting structures. No other issue ought to preempt the press’ focus at this moment in time. But, there is no Polymarket wager to be made on whether the midterms will be rigged. The public compulsion to speculate has no institutional encouragement to put cash on the table regarding such existential issues as a consolidated fascist coup, or environmental collapse. We are subtly shepherded into the notion that chance contingencies exist within familiar parameters.

One might wonder why voter suppression matters at all – poor people don’t often vote and they never have in viable numbers. The US political culture has a time honored means of voter disenfranchisement – political nihilism. US politics have always been a sham in the eyes of the electoral majority – George Carlin presciently spoke for the common person when he observed, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” Most politicians recite a tedious script about freedom and democracy while endorsing war, Machiavellian military expansion, and corporate plunder. Potential voters, in vast numbers, understand that voting (as a ritual meant to legitimize a machine that performs with unerring fidelity to corporate power) has neither personal nor collective meaning.

Political nihilism has two factions – those who support fascism as a means of destroying political institutions, and those who believe that these institutions have already been destroyed and, thus, don’t vote. Non-voters are the most powerful political force in America, dwarfing either the Republicans or Democrats in towering fashion. In the 2014 midterms, for example, over 63% of the electorate found something better to do on Tuesday, November, 4 than cast a ballot. In 2022, that number fell to 53% – still a majority. It isn’t that people don’t give a fuck – no polls determine whether non-voters withhold their vote out of indifference or because the US electoral system produces appalling results. If George Carlin is the non-voting archetype, disgust triumphs over indifference.

The Republican party has learned to weaponize the meaninglessness of American politics. The death-cult mentality of US fascism has stumbled upon an ingenious epiphany – the tepid commitment of American voters can be surgically directed at specific voting blocs. Fewer polling places situated in majority Black voting districts culls just enough votes to maintain the momentum of a slow-motion MAGA coup.

Voter suppression is not theatrical. It might be that ICE agents show up at polling sites to grab Black voters with electric gloves, but mostly, I suspect, that voter ID requirements will peel off just enough votes. How hard will people fight over this issue? Voting rights inspired hundreds of northern volunteers to register Black voters in Jim Crow states during the 1960’s. Clearly, the US public is sometimes aroused and mobilized. We saw it during Vietnam. The 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention featured as many as 15,000 resistors willing to dedicate a week to political action and public theatrics. The George Floyd police murder inspired weeks of action with participants in the tens of millions. Resistance and protests reached a sustained pitch, but fizzled as segments of the power structure coopted the outrage. I recall a “Black Lives Matter” poster in my local bank window.

We are dealing with a paradox – the targets of fascist tactics, the poor and disenfranchised, have already surrendered their electoral agency. It may be that the very poorest eligible voters have been the first to understand the corrupt system that voting conceals – a coterie of corporate lobbyists and propagandists who determine policy no matter who wins elections. And yet we expect alienated voters to somehow lead the charge of resistance to “restore our democracy.” The very people who have been historically denied the franchise must rise up. If they don’t, who will?

Chris Hedges anticipates a midterm election curated by Trumpian shenanigans. His piece, “The Next Election May be Our Last,” is one of the few to manifest the ominous tone that our predicament demands. Hedges gets directly to the point:

“The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression.

Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit.”

The German people of the 1930’s do not provide a template. They were caught off guard. People inherently turn toward denial in times of threat. The German people offered no coordinated resistance to Hitler’s coup, that, like the MAGA takeover that we now witness, entered through the front door of electoral protocol.

It is up to the US voters to not merely vote (according to Hedges), but to be mobilized to act across class, racial, ethnic and gender boundaries with unprecedented conviction. And we will have to act within the ironic context of electoral disgust. We will have to take personal risks in defense of an institution that repulses many of us.

The true predicament centers on arbitrary violence, the ability of the US fascist regime to conduct violent acts (on a whim) against its own citizens. Voting does little to discourage war, violations of international law, and US manipulation to overthrow democracy in Latin America. Nor do voters have the power, as yet, to prevent militarized police from terrorizing people living in poverty. The traditional electoral loop, the choice that voters normally make between tweedledeeday and tweedledeedum, created a class of interchangeable, disempowered politicians who were merely fronting for corporate power. Fascism, however, requires a disinhibited, lethal class of political operatives without any constraints.

Fascist violence in its emerging scope can only be performed by political figures who have the freedom to attack the working class in three ways: Seizing, illegally incarcerating, murdering or deporting dark skinned immigrants; administering policies that result in enriched elites and impoverished workers; creating paramilitary forces with a mandate to beat, murder or incarcerate dissidents. All of these assaults on poor, working class and oppositional communities can only be done after politicians have become utterly free of electoral ire.

The electoral system in the US, historically, reflecting the guiding hand of capitalism, has created an illusion of democracy, but also has imposed some tentative limits on the worst criminal aspirations of the ruling class. If the electoral system functioned as a nominal facilitator of public opinion, Trump and his Kakistocratic collection of thugs would be soundly rejected. If we lose the right to vote, we lose any ability to limit state violence.

Here is Hedges’ conclusion:

“The feebleness of legislative and judicial branches of government, coupled with the transformation of federal agencies into appendages of the Trump White House — including the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — make these institutions unreliable.

We can only save ourselves.

This means shutting the country down.

Millions of us must be prepared to take the streets or the iron doors of fascism will slam shut.”

Hedges sees this all too clearly. After the election I believe it will be too late to effectively resist. People should be warned and ready right now. There is no other choice.

But what are we resisting? Is it the end of basic voting rights or something even more ominous? Paul Street, in his piece, Sorry but We Can’t “VOTE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS MESS,” writes:

“Well, here’s a harsh reality: None of these messes — ecocide, nativism, patriarchy, racism, economic exploitation, savage inequality, oligarchy/plutocracy, imperialism/militarism, reckless automation, and fascism — can be truly stopped under the anarchic and sociopathic class dictatorship that is capitalism, the profits system, which depends on the ruthless and ever-escalating exploitation of human beings and nature. Each of these messes can perhaps receive momentary partial defeats and rollbacks but none of them can be remotely eliminated under capitalism.”

The struggle to maintain our wholly inadequate, capitalist controlled “electoral farce” is not an end in itself. It is the mere means to restrict state violence against the dissidents tasked with confronting the militarized, murderous imperial state. I am not certain that the attack on voting rights will suffice to mobilize mass ire. The public should be warned that lost voting rights will unleash an orgy of state violence – a trend already well underway and directed at immigrants and poor people. The targets will soon include, as the recent house “procedural” vote to condemn “socialism” reveals, almost anyone voicing opposition to far right mythology. Fear, however mendaciously contrived, has mobilized millions of MAGA voters to vote for candidates who “oppose migrant crime.” Journalists (particularly on the left) must give theatrical life to the just and realistic fear of fascist violence? It will come immediately and cruelly after the consolidated MAGA coup.

Phil Wilson also writes at Nobody’s Voice.