At one level, the Republicans do realize that actually winning the culture war requires them to do what the white South did to post-Reconstruction Blacks: deny their critics the right to vote. That’s become the fundamental electoral strategy of a party that understands that they can’t hold power in an America based on majority rule. But it may be that their racism, sexism, homophobia, assault-weapon infatuation, and primitive religiosity targets so wide a spectrum of Americans that no campaign of voter suppression can encompass all the Americans they’ve threatened, or deter all the enemies they’ve made. It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night. Does the GOP have to keep them away from the polls, too?
You take away Americans’ established rights at your own peril, as Kansans made very clear last night.
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Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect