People like to think they're special
Ronald Reagan, man's search for meaning, and history on repeat
If you search for “no, yeah” on Google, dozens of memes will appear, all claiming that the city, state, region, or country the meme-maker is from distinctively uses the phrase to mean “yes”. The Midwest? California? Miami? Canada? Australia? All of these places, apparently, are the progenitors of “no, yeah.” Hundreds of thousands of likes certainly can’t be wrong.
On an individual, group, and societal level, humans strive to find meaning and establish a unique identity. Some find it in religion, others in politics, others in getting five likes by posting a particularly witty retort on Twitter.
But we all find meaning in feeling unique and superior to the outsider. Groups, no matter how large or small, will almost inevitably turn exclusionary after a time, either pushing out those seen as insufficiently obsequious to group norms or erecting a tall barricade between them and the rest of the world. That barricade can be metaphorical or literal— both work in a similar fashion, maintaining the insularity and perceived superiority of the protected group. If we relented that the in-group wasn’t superior to, or at least in some way meaningfully distinguishable from, the out-group, after all, would our lives be as meaningful?
You should probably read Reaganland by Rick Perlstein, if you have the time and the arm strength to pick it up. It’s a hefty volume— over a thousand dense pages about four years of history— but eminently readable1. Telling the story of the emergence of the conservative movement over the four years of the Carter presidency, its parallels to contemporary politics come almost too fast to count. Of course, it’s probably written with that intent. Reaganland was published just last year, and historical works are written within the context of the current political and cultural zeitgeist, whether by the author’s conscious choice or not.
One symmetry stood out to me among all the others, however. Perlstein recounts the Carter administration’s early and ambitious election reform proposal:
President Carter, on March 22, sent a letter to Congress recommending a package of electoral reforms… Carter recommended same-day registrations be adopted universally- tempering concerns that such measures might increase opportunities for fraud by increasing penalties against it to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He asked for $25 million to help states comply, an expansion to congressional elections of the current system of federal matching funds for presidential campaigns, and closing a loophole in campaign finance law that advantaged rich contenders by allowing them to evade spending limits if they funded their own campaigns.
Sounds quite nice to me. In fact, it feels similar in spirit and content to voting reform bills like HR1 advocated by the Democratic Party today. One striking dichotomy between today and 1977, however, was the initial Republican response.
The bill for universal registration, which RNC chairman Brock called “a Republican concept,” was cosponsored by four Republicans. Senator Baker suggested going even further by making election Day a national holiday, keeping polls open twenty-four hours, and instituting automatic registration. House minority leader John Rhodes, the conservative disciple of Barry Goldwater, predicted the proposal would pass “in substantially the same form with a lot of Republican support, including my own.”
But, one might wonder, why don’t Americans enjoy the universal same day registration the bill called for even today? The answer to that question was, in two words, the New Right: a group of then-radical conservatives who called for a ruthless, take-no-prisoners approach to politics.
{New Right magazine Human Events} argued that the current electoral system had never disenfranchised a single citizen- at least “no citizen who cares enough to make the minimal effort”… A Berkeley political scientist, Human Events noted, predicted national turnout would go up 20 percent under Carter’s reforms- a bad thing, the editors said, because "the bulk of these votes will go to Carter’s Democratic Party… with blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups accounting for most of the increase.”
While Human Events engaged in transparent realpolitik, the future face of modern conservatism was making arguments of a similar vein couched in a concern that might seem familiar.
Ronald Reagan had been making similar arguments for years. “Look at the potential for cheating,” he thundered in 1975 when Democrats proposed a system allowing citizens to register by mail… Now, following Carter’s electoral reform message, Reagan wrote in his column that what this all was really about was boosting votes from “the bloc comprised of those who get a whole lot more from the federal government in various kinds of income distribution than they contribute to it.”
What happened next was tragically inevitable: the preppy upstarts of the New Right convinced the GOP establishment to do an about-face, with leadership figures pretending that their initial statements on reform simply never existed, and the bill was unceremoniously killed.
Whether expressing worries that expanding the franchise would hurt Republicans by bringing in adversarial voting blocs or concealing that sentiment in concern for the integrity of the voting system, Republican retorts to voting rights bills seem to have changed less over the past four decades than the coelacanth.
But why, exactly, were those few pages about a long-extinguished effort to marginally improve American democracy so interesting to me? I already knew that contemporary Republican efforts at voter suppression weren’t the only ones of their kind. Prominent figures in liberal politics have breathlessly drawn parallels between modern-day bills in Republican-led states and the systematic disenfranchisement of black voters in the Jim Crow south. President Biden himself called them “21st century Jim Crow.” But why has there been far less discussion (none that I’ve seen, but I’m not a very passionate consumer of news media, so I may have missed some) of the parallels to 1977?
The moves being undertaken by Republican legislatures- restricting mail-in ballots, Sunday voting, and of course attempting to increase the stringency of voter ID, are certainly targeted towards reducing the turnout of Democratically-inclined voters (often meaning, in effect, black ones). However, Nate Cohn shows that the effects of the Republican bill in Georgia on turnout will probably be quite small— a provision targeting long wait times at the polls may even more than fully counteract negative effects from other changes— and are exaggerated by partisans on both sides for a variety of reasons.
Contrast that to the actual effects of Jim Crow on turnout in the segregated Deep South, compared to other states:
Voter turnout in the Deep South today is still not that impressive compared to the rest of the country, but the regional disparity is nowhere near the stark dichotomy presented in 1960.
More recent bills, such as the one proposed in Texas, seem to generally hit the same points as the Georgia bill—a combination of franchise restrictions that will probably have a limited effect and increased purview for partisan officials to monitor and potentially overturn results, which probably has the potential to have much more catastrophic effects, yet doesn’t exactly fall under the purview of “Jim Crow” worries.
There’s more of a resemblance to 1977. Conservatives, concerned by recent electoral trends (support for Carter and Biden, respectfully), force a backlash to an expansion of the franchise. While some of the underlying suppressive sentiment harkens back to the days before the Voting Rights Act, the new restrictions are more reactive than proactive, wishing to roll back trends of liberalization, such as drive-in and mail-in voting in 2020.
In all honesty, the legacy of the defeated, and largely forgotten, 1977 voting rights bill probably has greater repercussions even today than moves made by Republicans in the past few months ever will. But even with that said, I think a historical allusion to the ill-fated 1977 voting rights bill is far more appropriate of a comparison to today’s politics than to Jim Crow, however much its legacy still hangs over all of us.
Now, why am I kvetching about “new Jim Crow” terminology? After all, plenty of people on the left, center and (of course) right have pointed out its manifold flaws.
I see something in it beyond just cynical messaging or partisan anxiety: underlying the exaggeration, and similar catastrophizing across the political spectrum, is our in-group bias. Psychological biases don’t distinguish between ideologies or parties. They’re so ubiquitous that they underlie a great amount of popular discourse despite few recognizing their presence. But this in-group bias is unique— not based solely on an ethnicity, ideology, or belief, but rather the very fact of being alive at the present moment.
We like to think we’re more important than we actually are. Our minds, as humans, and as residents of 2021, are stuck in a solipsism of the current day. Every fight is the fight of a lifetime. Infringements on voting rights cannot be one of a pattern of similar attempts. No, they must be the Threat of a Lifetime. The next election is always the most important of the generation. If we don’t stop them, our country will never look the same. One foot is already lolling over the side of the cliff, and our grip is slipping. The end times are upon us.
Fake regional dialects and a hyperbolized battle for voting rights are both artifacts of our quest for meaning. If the words that I speak are unique to my group, they are instilled with a specialness that elevates them over others. If the battle we fight today will be remembered, our daily political anxieties were all worthwhile. They were serving History. We’re not at the end of history, we’re right in the center of it. Our presence in the current moment means that it must be important.
Everything from climate doomerism (generally, the belief that climate change will effectively destroy human civilization in the foreseeable future, running contrary to the vast preponderance of evidence) to the perennial accusation by conservatives that X Democratic president will make America into a Communist dictatorship and send a goon squad after patriots to take away their guns are in some way motivated by this force.
Strangely, everything appears to be going on while nothing is happening. The world is shifting at an ever-faster rate, yet we seem to be running up the down escalator. Sometimes, it feels like we are presented with a dichotomy of grand narratives: either you’re a Pinkerite progressive who believes that Line Going Up Means World More Gooder, or you’re ranting about how if climate change doesn’t kill us then fascism inevitably will. What if the world is gradually falling apart but also kind of cleaning up after itself sometimes? Maybe it’s falling apart a bit faster than it’s repairing itself, or vice versa. Neither heaven nor hell awaits.
I don’t want to end this essay on a needlessly pessimistic note. Despite it all, progress is still made. The Child Tax Credit expansion, as just one recent example, is in a utilitarian sense far more important and meaningful than any procedural political complaints that I may have.
But will we ever recognize that in so many ways we’ve been peering into a funhouse mirror, and contemplate looking away?
Yeah, no.
I’ve only read 150 pages thus far but I feel like I’m making a reasonable extrapolation for the rest of the text. Please don’t sue.