Voting Rights: A Modest Proposal

You don’t have the right to vote. Should you?

 

Americans like to talk in the language of rights: the right to life, the right to self-defense, the right to privacy. Some of these things are spelled out in the Constitution. Some of them are not. They are considered human rights: they come from our nature as human beings.

Voting is not a human right. Voting is a civic right.

A civic right comes from being a member of a political community. If you want to vote in America, you need to be recognized as an American. In particular, you have to be recognized as a real American.But who decides who is a real American? What is the rule one applies to determine if someone is American? These are the questions, usually unspoken, that lie behind many of the debates in contemporary politics. If you want to “Make America Great Again” you probably have a different idea of what an American looks like than someone who is an activist for the voting rights of the poor, the foreign-born, the non-Christian, or the non-White. This doesn’t mean that a MAGA voter, or a Trump supporter, is racist, or a misanthrope, or a xenophobe. He is, however, more likely than other voters to be a nationalist. He is more concerned about election fraud. He is more likely to believe things as they are today are “pretty good,” or “as good as they can be.” He is more likely to think that things were better twenty years ago, or fifty years ago.

There’s a reason, beyond simple self-interest, why the Republican Party is more associated with legislation for voter ID, or to keep felons who served their time off the voter registration rolls, or to make the lines longer at polling stations in districts that are predominantly poor or non-White. They have a more restrictive idea of what it means to be an American.

America, they tell us, is a “nation-state.” It has a “culture,” and not everyone living here is a member of that culture. And there’s some truth to that. For a political community to function there have to be some kind of common understanding and expectations. Cultures, including political cultures, are hard to define, but clearly they differ from place to place, and they can change over time. In some places, corruption is expected. In others, it is virtually nonexistent. In some places, it is expected that the dictator will rule through violence and fear. People will disappear, never to be seen again, and no one expects the perpetrator will be brought to justice. You may not like it — you may hate it — but things are what they are, what they have always been, what they will always be. Cultural differences show up in tourism, in transnational trade, and in international relations. It’s a thousand little things. In a study of diplomatic immunity among UN delegations, for example, it was found that Norwegian diplomats always obeyed the parking regulations in and around the congested streets around the UN building. This is despite the fact that, as diplomats, they could never be punished for breaking the law. As a practical matter, they couldn’t be retaliated against in any way. Even native New Yorkers, who can be punished, don’t come near that standard. You drive in New York long enough, and you’ll get a parking ticket. It’s understood. But Nigerian diplomats, who are placed under the same moral and legal restrictions as the Norwegians, are notorious for flaunting the law. They double and triple-park. They park in loading zones. They block intersections. They park on the sidewalk. Same conditions, different cultures. Norwegians respect the law, even when they can’t be held to account, and unless they take a moment to think it through they expect others to do the same. Nigerians, in general, don’t have a lot of respect for the law. At most, it’s a problem for the little people — not for an ambassador. And if you can get away with it you’d be stupid not to break the law. The same is true within these different countries as well as in front of the UN. Transnational corporations quickly learn that if they hire a local firm in Nigeria to protect their property that firm will soon start to steal from them. There will probably be less taken than if the company had left the gates unlocked (the guards don’t want to be denied a lucrative gig because they got too greedy), but the losses will begin, and they will grow. If you want to protect your property, bring in Norwegians to guard it. And rotate them back to Norway, on a regular schedule, to reduce the likelihood that the guards will eventually come to imitate the locals.

There are variations in culture, and these variations are reflected in politics. It makes sense to protect a culture that supports American politics. But what is that culture? When pressed, some defenders of American culture will find it hard to define what it is they want to protect. Some can define it, but in ways that are too excludsive. Some want to defend “Western civilization.” Some are convinced America was founded on “Judeo-Christian” values (it wasn’t) and law must be rooted in their particular interpretation of the Bible. Some on the alt-Right will go so far as to argue that to be a “real American” one has to be white, and that whites have a moral and practical obligation to keep their blood “pure,” even to the point of deporting (or building walls to block) people of color. Most won’t go that far, but they’ll will reiterate that America is a “nation-state” and a threat to the “nation” is a threat to the viability and stability of America.

They’re wrong. They are wrong for the same reason southern whites were wrong to want to limit the rights of blacks, the same reason the “know-nothings” of the nineteenth century were wrong to oppose immigration from Ireland and Italy and Germany, the conservatives of 1960 were wrong to worry that a Roman Catholic should never be elected president, or so many today still seem so shocked that a black man could be elected to that office. They are wrong for the same reason “miscegenation” was illegal in sixteen U.S. states in 1967. They are wrong for the same reason George Wallace was wrong to cry “segregation forever” in reaction to the emerging civil rights movement.

They’re wrong because a nation — particularly the United States — is not defined by genetics. A nation is intersubjective. It is the perception, by the people in it, that they share a common community, even if they will never meet most of the other members of that community. They may reach that conclusion on the basis of a common ethnic group, or language, or history. It may be a community because of a common set of principles. It is an “imagined community.”

Nations are inventions. Political scientists differ on precisely when the nation was invented. Some go as far back as the segregation of students by language in the fourteenth-century medieval university. Some push it back even a few decades earlier, to the declaration by the Scots that they were a unique people, in opposition to an invasion from England. Or perhaps it was around 1600, which has been suggested as the time of origin of “the first nation,” England.

Some nations rest their sense of a common community in a belief in a common ethnic identity. An example of an “ethnic nation” is Germany. Germans have recognized themselves as one people, even when they were divided into multiple countries. Despite the walls and armed soldiers separating East and West Germany, when the wall came down they merged with (relative) ease. They had always thought of themselves as “German,” even when divided by very different governments and economic systems. Others have a “civic nation.” France is in this category. While they do have linguistic commonalities, the thing that makes its people “French” is the perceived project of living with one another.

In 1776, the United States was not a “nation.” Not on either dimension. It had several ethnic groups, including Englishmen and Dutch and Germans and French. The colonies were working against a common foe, but they were not a single entity. After the Revolution they codified that relationship in the Articles of Confederation, which was a “league of friendship” among independent and sovereign states similar in many ways to the earliest stages of the European Communities. It didn’t work, often because of the inability of the Confederation to function as a unit in international relations. But after the creation of a Constitutional Republic, including a Bill of Rights, it made sense to say that “We the People” were “Americans.” George Washington, in his Farewell Address, reminded people that “ [t]he name of american, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.”

And what are those common political principles that make us a nation? In fact the Constitution didn’t affirm many of the principles we hold today. We could not in good conscience say “we hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” and accept the ownership of some men by others. Lincoln privately rejected the positions of the “know-nothings”:

I am not a Know-Nothing — that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.” When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

But what does it mean in practice? Lincoln answered that question in his Gettysburg Address:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The people — all the people, regardless of sex or race or religion or ethnicity. It’s an ongoing project. Progress can be reversed — as it has been by Donald Trump and many of those who are enabling him. But it can also be advanced — as it was after FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech, which outlined why the US was about to engage in World War II, and which provided the framework of the best of American postwar foreign policy:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.

These principles do not apply to just the people who live within the borders of the United States. But we do not have the power, or the right, to impose a particular political culture upon the rest of the world. The most we can do is provide an example, to facilitate the practice of others, and show that we can live according to these ideas.

This is what it means to be an American. It is not about our minor differences. It is our commitment to protect the rights of each of us, so long as the actions we take do not directly interfere with the rights of any of us to do the same. America is not a place, and you can’t protect it by putting a wall around it. America is not an ethnic nation, and there is no blood test to determine who belongs and who doesn’t. America is an idea. That’s what’s great about it. That’s its greatest advantage in competition against China or Japan or Germany or Russia. That’s what allows us to take the best of innovations and ideas and cultures from around the world, and make them ours. If we sacrifice that, we not only don’t deserve to survive — we’re already gone.

So who should vote? The people who want to restrict voting rights are only half right. Americans should vote: people who have demonstrated they know why this county exists and are pledged to live under the rule of law. Someone who lives by these principles is an American, regardless of their appearance or unimportant cultural differences. On the other hand, people who, for example, venerate the flag of the Confederacy — the stars and bars of a collection of traitors and slaveholders — may not in fact be American, regardless of where they were born or what they look like. People who insist America must be white have no idea of what America is, and if they insist on imposing their ideas they have no right to consider themselves American.

Note that by this standard a Spanish-speaking “illegal” immigrant may be more of an American than a Christian nationalist practicing with his militia buddies in Idaho to “cleanse” the country of those who don’t look or act like him.

But people shouldn’t be expelled for having the wrong opinions. It is only fair that everyone should be exposed to a civic education that helps people to be citizens, and everyone should have the opportunity to demonstrate they have a basic understanding of American values before they can enter a voting machine, just as they have to demonstrate they understand the traffic laws before they are allowed behind the wheel of a car. Everyone has a right to a civic education and anyone who votes should have an opportunity to demonstrate what they know by passing a citizenship exam. Anything that can be done by a Somali immigrant should be easy for an car salesman in Omaha, right?

The citizenship test is easy. Too easy, some defenders of American culture might claim. But leave that criticism aside for now. As a practical matter, what sorts of things do you need to know? Here are some questions from a recent citizenship exam. Any immigrant who wishes to be a legal citizen of the United States should be able to answer questions like these: six out of ten, selected from a set of 100 that the potential citizen is provided to study prior to the exam:

The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution. What are these words?

What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

How many amendments does the Constitution have?

What did the Declaration of Independence do?

What are two rights in the Declaration of Independence?

What is the “rule of law”?

Name one branch or part of the government.

What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?

How many U.S. Senators are there?

Who is one of your state’s U.S. Senators now?

The House of Representatives has how many voting members?

Name your U.S. Representative.

What is the name of the Vice President of the United States now?

If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?

What are two Cabinet-level positions?

Who is the Chief Justice of the United States now?

Under our Constitution, some powers belong to the states. What is one power of the states?

What is the capital of your state?

What is the name of the Speaker of the House of Representatives now?

What are two rights of everyone living in the United States?

What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy?

What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?

There were 13 original states. Name three.

When was the Constitution written?

The Federalist Papers supported the passage of the U.S. Constitution. Name one of the writers.

What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803?

Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s.

What did Susan B. Anthony do?

Who was President during World War I?

Who did the United States fight in World War II?

What did Martin Luther King, Jr. do?

Name one American Indian tribe in the United States.

Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.

What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?

Name one U.S. territory.

Name one state that borders Canada.

Why does the flag have 13 stripes?

Name two national U.S. holidays.

Not too hard, was it? It shouldn’t be. If there are any you don’t know now, you can look up the answers in an afternoon on Wikipedia and memorize them. Many of those questions have more than one acceptable answer. You only need one for each.

But an amazing number of Americans can’t provide answers to enough of those questions to pass the six out of ten required for a citizenship exam. A lot of people need to brush up on what they learned as kids. A lot of people have to learn it for the first time. But that’s ok. If you live in this country, you have the right to take the exam again, and again, to have the right to vote. It’s no more onerous a requirement than passing a written test to get a permit to drive.

So that’s my modest proposal: to vote in an American election you have to demonstrate that you have a basic understanding of how America works, and why.

Whadda you think?

I hope this will be the first in a series of “modest proposal” essays. on Medium. It’s not my intent to argue for one party or another, one candidate or another, one policy or another. I’m looking for general reforms of the system that will allow it to work better for everyone. I want to suggest alternatives. Some of them may require amending the Constitution, but that’s all right. The people who wrote the Constitution realized it was an imperfect document. They knew it was the product of a particular place and time, and they knew they couldn’t anticipate how it would have to change to meet the needs of the 21st century and beyond, so they left mechanisms to change it. This includes methods to change the amendment process itself. We now have more than two centuries of research in political economy. We have a better understanding of what kinds of results we can expect from various voting schemes. We can compare the American experience to the successes and failures of approaches tried around the world. We can better see what preserves liberty, and what threatens it.

Thomas Jefferson said it better than I could:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Once you identify some of the underlying issues a range of solutions can be fairly obvious. One problem is the political class — any political class — will resist changes that undermine their self-interests for the good of the whole. So, the people must take the lead to institute changes that will limit the politicians’ freedom of action, including the institutions that allow those politicians to maintain their positions. One way to do so would be to end the practice of gerymandering. Another would be to divide some of the more populous states into smaller units, to better balance against the power of the states that are large in territory but small in population. There are practical ways to reform or eliminate the electoral college. It would be a fine, and doable, project to finally ratify the first ammendment of the Bill of Rights, the real first ammendment that was proposed in the original twelve, but has since been buried in history.

But those are Modest Proposals for another time.