Funny that the elite do everything they can to make voting difficult or impossible for a huge part of that electorate.
Okay, not overnight, but when itâs taken a couple of centuries, it seems high time to try something else.
Anything, I repeat, ANYTHING that isn taken as dogma is dangerous. And that certainly includes the declaration of human rights.
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Huh? Say what? @ActionAbe: youâre rightâŚ
Is this a UScentric position? The only place I know about properly thereâs barely any issue at all with people feeling disenfranchised (the UK). Itâs the apathy that is far more influential on voting outcomes.
If Washington and Jefferson had been convinced by those arguments, odds are they wouldnât have been rich land owners, and thus would not have come to political prominence. Someone else would have taken their place.
Moreover, if you picked a random contemporary of theirs, odds are they would be entirely complacent, at the best, about slavery. Iâm sure all the things the people of 2113 will think poorly of us for today have their critics here and now, too. Few, if any, will manage to get much political power.
The Continental Congress included abolitionists, so your argument that abolitionists could not achieve political power is counterfactual. Exactly what the extent of that power was is another matter. The Federal government was born weak and could not have been otherwise. The original thirteen colonies were not about to fight for self-rule only to hand the majority of that power over the new central government, and the Congress was an assembly of colonial representatives, not representatives of the newly conceived government. Just as Mandela and every revolutionary throughout history has had to choose between bad and worse, so abolitionists had a choice between compromising with slave-owners or having no revolution at all. Lest anyone think this was a decision the abolitionists made lightly, I recommend reading a biography of John Adams. The United States of today was forged in the power-shift of 1865, not 1776.
Edit: I should add that this isnât a value judgement on the compromises, the revolutionaries making them, or even whether or not any particular revolution is justly undertaken. Itâs a value-neutral observation about the political realities all revolutionaries face. Revolutionaries are, by definition, not the power establishment, and no power establishment establishes itself overnight. Those united by a common foe or cause, however, may still decide to set aside even substantive moral differences to achieve their shared goal(s). Just look at the 1943 Tehran Conference.
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Ah yes. I apologize. I was most definitely speaking from a UScentric standpoint. Here we have big issues with voter disenfranchisement, among other things. Our lovers of âdemocracyâ want to do their best to keep large portions of the public from voting.
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The Mandela of Palestine was probably burned to death with white phos.
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Uh, considering that many of the âfeloniesâ are drug-related offenses, yeah.
How is it right that a felony committed by a 18 year-old causes a person to be ineligible to vote in perpetuity. OK, felons cannot vote while serving their sentence. I could even see a 1-5 year loss of franchise after release. But forever? Ten years, twenty years, fifty years after they get out, they cannot vote? It is staggering how unjust this is. Essentially, the only way they can ever vote again is if they manage to emigrate to another (more enlightened) country to âstart over.â
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Also, about 95% of felony convictions are the result of plea bargains. The NYTimes says that data from nine states shows that fewer than one in 40 felony cases go to trial (it was one in 12 in the 70s). So, we are mostly talking about people who never went to trial.
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I think youâre trying to imply that because they were convicted via a plea bargain, it is somehow a âless legitimateâ conviction? Thatâs some pretty thin ice there.
A better argument might be that, because these people were generally poor, they had terrible and overworked public defenders, who jettisoned them due to their ineptitude and/or high caseload.
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A felony conviction will often prevent emigration. To move to the UK, youâre normally ineligible if you have ever been in jail for more than 2 years, or if youâve been in jail for less than two years in the last decade, or if youâve been involuntarily detained on mental health grounds in the last decade, etc.
In terms of enfranchisement - normally you canât vote in prison if youâre jailed for more than a year, but you can vote on release - the European Union is trying to force the UK Government to review this policy by threatening fines - Europe would like even people serving life sentences to be able to vote - which is probably too liberal IMHO. If youâre going to be in jail past the tenure of the government being voted into office, you probably have no need to vote, but voting should be restored when thereâs less than ~2 years to serve.
Using that argument, the same could then be said of pre-1870 voting in the US and slaves. They got counted fractionally for the purposes of supplying members to the House of Representatives, and the single-household vote would have represented them in the same way that a male head-of-household vote would have represented females. Except that, female plantation owners would have had no vote, but still gotten representation via census numbers. (Women in the US had no voting rights until 1920 - although an all-male party had been promoting womenâs suffrage since 1848.)
Or, you could banish the entire argument by not draping the definition of the word âdemocracyâ in an all-or-none cloakâŚthe word still opposes âmonarchyâ quite well.
Sadly, I donât think it would get that far. S/he would be branded as an Israeli collaborator and dealt with extralegally as a traitor.
I know plenty of people who feel disenfranchised in the UK. Unless you live in a marginal constituency and want to vote for one of the two potential winners, thatâs exactly what you are.
Which is why people are so apathetic. You need a system where everyoneâ s vote is equal and minor voices have a chance to be heard. Sadly, everyone voted to keep the FPTP status quo.
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And maybe thatâs a much better question altogether. Cory seems bent on bring up the racial stuff lately - but even with voting rights, we see that being marginalized doesnât get fixed just by being able to vote. We donât gain any particular control over the machinery that puts those candidates on ballots.
It would be easy to hop on the socialist train from thereâŚexcept thereâs no evidence that it performs any better. Nor that this mish-mosh in the US is outperforming either purist ideal - thereâs still no real practical benefit demonstrated in either direction. I canât quite see the point to arguing it philosophically, unless thereâs also a good practical result at the end. So, now what?
This analysis doesnât go nearly far enough in questioning the legitimacy of âdemocracy.â
How about political parties, which disenfranchise millions who are not represented by any names on the ballot?
How about questioning the basic fundamental belief that a democratic majority confers power to violate basic human rights?
How about the fundamental problem of the âtyranny of the majority?â
This is looking at a small, small aprt of the problem.
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Most free black men could vote when the USA was founded. Of course that means most black men in the country were disenfranchised because most werenât free. I donât know what populations of slaves vs. non-slaves were or more generally the number of enfranchised adults vs. disenfranchised.
When the federal constitution was ratified in 1789, free blacks held the same legal right to vote as whites in every state except Virginia and Georgia. As of 1792, free blacks could vote in twelve of fifteen states, and not until 1803 did a northern state restrict the franchise to whites.
Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (review)
Interesting choice of words.
