a short history
The design of RMS Titanic, with its multiple watertight compartments, made it seem, even to experts of the day, âpractically unsinkable.â So it provedâright up until the night it sank.
It might now be a good idea to view the American political system with the skepticism that Titanicâs design deserved. Over the past two centuries and a half, as monarchy has faded into the past and autocracy has discredited itself again and again, âdemocracyâ has come to be seen as the only legitimate form of governance, with the American variantâonce considered a bold experimentâits shining ideal. Nowadays, that shine is so bright that it is difficult to see the reality that lies behind it. In the current cultural environment, anyone questioning the superiority of American democracy, in theory or in practice, is liable to be accused of doing so in the service of âfascism.â
Yet there are many aspects of the contemporary American political structure, such as universal voting rights for citizens 18 years or older, and the âdemocratizationâ of the electoral college system, that even the Founders would view skeptically. Why? Because they are changes to the original structureâand are often changes that the Founders specifically did not want.
There are also some features of modern American politics that the Founders, looking out from their simpler 18th-century world, simply failed to foreseeâfeatures that, like Titanicâs underappreciated vulnerability to an iceberg sideswipe, have the potential to cause the failure of the entire enterprise.
One of these features, I think the most worrisome by far, is the practice of expanding the electorate in a way that advantages one political party over its rivals. It is directly analogous to âcourt packingâ and thus has been called âelectorate packing.â
Americans have been very slow to recognize the danger of this political exploit. Although a handful of conservatives warned for decades that the Democrats were using it to create an impenetrable electoral majority in the country, they were, until recently, mostly ignored, even as one state after another (think of California, New Mexico, Colorado and New York) was flooded with non-European immigrants, i.e., Democrat voters, until it turned durably âblue.â
Why have Americans been so passive and unconcerned about electorate-packing? Probably in part because it is not at all a new feature of their politics. Indeed, Americaâs political history is, to a surprising extent, the history of the use of this tacticâby virtually all parties.
Immigrants as Electoral Weapons
The US at its origin was strikingly underpopulated, compared to most European countries. It also had enormous adjacent territories that it wanted to occupy, and expected to have to defend. It therefore needed more people, and, to attract them, increasingly had to offer them relatively quick acquisition of citizenship and voting rights.
Thus, in the countryâs first decades, virtually all parties accepted, at least broadly, the necessity of electorate expansions, firstly from immigration (from Britain and nearby European countries) and secondly from expansions of the franchiseâwhich initially had been limited almost entirely to âĽ21-year-old, white, property-owning males.
It wasnât long, though, before electoral expansions began to be seen as helping some parties more than others. English, Scots, and Welsh immigrants, who were mostly Protestants and were more concentrated in the northeast, tended to prefer the Federalist Party of Hamilton and Adams, while the more numerous Irish and German immigrantsâand Catholic immigrants generallyâflocked to the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson and Madison. The Federalistsâ Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which greatly stiffened citizenship requirements, were, in part, reactions to an ongoing wave of Irish immigrationâand when Jeffersonâs party triumphed in the 1800 elections and repealed most of those measures or allowed them to expire, it effectively expanded the Irish vote in its favor. The Federalists never won another presidential election, and by 1820 had faded away.
In the decade that followed, the Democratic-Republican Party also came apart, but its main successor, the Democratic Party, retained the allegiance of Irish and Germans, the top migrant ethnicities of that era. With their help, the Democrats dominated antebellum politics. Immigrant inflows were sometimes strong enough to provoke nativist movements, the largest, in the 1850s, being led by the anti-immigrant American (a.k.a. âKnow-Nothingâ) Party. But such movements tended to die out when immigrant waves subsided, and the Democratsâ electoral supremacy ended only when they split over slavery in 1860.
Blacks and Women
The War Between the States was, in part, a continuation of the struggle that had emerged in the 1850s between Democrats and their up-and-coming rivals, the Republicans. Even many northern-state Democrats (known as âcopperheadsâ) opposed the war and wanted to let the southern states go. In this sense, it is not too surprising that the Union armyâs triumph on the field led to political measuresâincluding a colossal re-engineering of the southern electorateâaimed at ensuring GOP dominance.
President Lincoln had felt that African Americans, following emancipation, should live and govern themselves according to their own ways on their own lands, preferably in Africa. But after Lincolnâs assassination, radicals in the Republican-controlled Congress prevailed with their own plan for the freed slaves. They saw to it that Black men were given US citizenship and voting rights in southern states, even as southern White menâs voting rights were limitedâand many former Confederates were barred from holding office. The Republicans set many of these measures in stone by forcing the southern states to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. There were moral justifications for all this. But the Republicans also had a strong partisan motive, which, to their political opponents (and to many subsequent historians) was the real driver of their policies and represented an enormous abuse of power.
As Black men became loyal Republican voters during Reconstruction, the many White women who had supported Black suffrage renewed their efforts to win their own voting rights. Here again, the Republicans saw an opportunity for electoral gains. Ultimately, they provided nearly three-quarters of the âyeaâ votes in Congress for the passage of the 19th Amendment, which outlawed voting rights restrictions based on sex, and thereby added tens of millions of women to the electorate.
A Reversal of Fortune
The Democrats reversed these Republican advantages chiefly in three ways: The first was their effective opposition to Reconstruction, which led to their re-capture of southern states, the suppression of the Black vote in those states, and the establishment of the âJim Crowâ racial segregation system. The second, in the 1930s and 40s, was the welfarism of the New Deal, which attracted the votes of many African Americans as well as lower-income voters of all races. The third was the partyâs transformation, in the 1960s, into a civil rights partyâpowered, as the Republican party had been a century before, by an unusual level of political dominance following a presidential assassination. By the 1968 election, Black neighborhoods were voting Democrat at rates approaching 100 percent. The Democratsâ welfare, affirmative action and feminist policies also increasingly endeared them to women.
The Democrats didnât just capture voters from prior electorate expansions; they also turned this tactic decisively into their own again with the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished country-of-origin restrictions on immigrants. Combined with affirmative action laws that extended preferences to immigrant nonwhites, this expansion brought another enduring electoral windfall for the Democrats.
In 1971, the Democrat-controlled Congress approved a constitutional amendment that expanded the electorate further by lowering the minimum voting age from 21 to 18. The âold enough to fight, old enough to voteâ argument helped make it a relatively non-partisan event, but since younger people tended to vote left, it represented a net gain by the Democrats.
The Republicans, in the decades that followed, tried to improve their image among the newly enfranchised, for example by signing on to various immigration-liberalizing bills, including amnesties for illegal immigrants. It availed them little, as the Democrats maintained a tight grip on every group that had become voters through immigration and other electorate expansions. In the 2012 presidential election, the Democratic candidate (Obama) received 93 percent of the Black vote, 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, 73 percent of the Asian vote, 85 percent of the Muslim vote, 55 percent of the female vote, 63 percent of the low-household-income (<$30K) vote, and 60 percent of the vote among 18-to-29-year-olds. The Republican candidate (Romney), an uncontroversial moderate, therefore lost badly despite getting 59 percent of the white voteâand 62 percent of the white male vote, representing the countryâs pre-Civil-War electorate.
Feature or bug?
What happened next is very recent history: In the runup to the 2016 election, Republicansâand even many independents and Democratsâbelatedly perceived how seriously immigration-based electorate-packing had imperiled them, and chose the most anti-immigration leader available, overlooking his many flaws. He won an upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, but made no lasting progress in his first term. When the Democrats took over again, they moved towards endgame with an overt open-borders policy. The Democratsâ power, however, was limited by their own dissident legislators (Manchin, Sinema) and the Republicans were spared the mass amnesty for illegals that Democrats had planned. The Democratsâ complacent extremism also began to repel many of the voters they thought they owned en bloc. Thus, Republicans were given another reprieve in 2024âand vowed that this time they would really fix things.
It is tempting to conclude from all this that occasional electorate expansions, and subsequent partisan tussles over those new voters, may be messy but are essentially ordinary aspects of a modern republic. American politics has, over time, featured a variety of electoral cheats and hacks including vote-buying, ballot-harvesting, and the stuffing of ballot-boxes with fake ballots, yet the country is wealthy compared to most Western peers, and its citizens still consider it mostly functional and âdemocratic.â Also, few Americans now would question the legitimacy of all the citizenship and/or voting rights extensions since their countryâs founding.
On the other hand, all these extensions were at least somewhat controversial in their day. Most should have been, since electoral expansions that principally benefit one party have the same effectâand typically the same intentâas large-scale, long-term vote-buying, and are much less reversible. They are in principle as unfair as the âcourt-packingâ of the Supreme Court that both FDR and Joe Biden threatened and backed away from.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the Democratsâ aggressive electorate-packing attempts over the past four years have given us glimpses (e.g., Haitians in Ohio) of the Camp of the Saints dystopia to which this tactic seems to want to take us.
This is, then, an issue that the incoming Trump administration should prioritize, since the Democrats can be expected to resume their open-borders electorate-packing measures, without compunction, if they ever again control Congress and the White House. If Republicans want to talk about somehow blocking or outlawing this practice, though, they should probably start by acknowledging their partyâs prominent role in normalizing its use.
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