Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America by Andrew Gumbel

[lightreads]

This book, which does exactly what the title says, managed to alienate, outrage, and offend me while expressing opinions about our electoral system and current president that I entirely agree with. It started out with a bang, with this little gem in the introduction:

The Republican sweep of the House of Representatives in 1994 marked one high-water mark of this new radicalism as Newt Gingrich notoriously described President Clinton as “the enemy of normal Americans” and the neoconservative stalwart Kenneth Starr went sniffing through the dirty laundry of a White House intern who didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.

And aside from being a terribly written sentence, excuse me? Of all the – I don’t even – sexist fuckwit! Yeah, that was clearly all her fault. God!

So yeah, my teeth were sharpened for the rest of this book, which details the scope of election fraud in this country, from the Boss Tweed machine to the organized and often violent voter disenfranchisement in the south to Chicago to 2000. And it’s a good history, as history goes, rather lacking in personality but stunning in scope even to those of us who already know these things. However.

However. You do not get to call your book “nonpartisan,” as Gumbel does in his introduction, and then turn around and deliver frothing screed after screed against the Republicans and Bush. It just makes you look like more of a jackass than you already do. Granted, the history did include both Republican and Democratic fraud, but that’s not being nonpartisan, that’s reporting, and he should really know the difference, considering his job.

But here’s the real problem. This is a book about how the American electoral system is broken, about the hundreds of thousands of mostly low-income and minority people who do not get to meaningfully participate in government for very deliberate and specific systemic reasons. And the book is written to a college educated audience of liberals (I guarantee even many moderates would put it down after the introduction), presupposing a very deep and specific knowledge of political history (I looked a few things up, and I have a fucking degree in this stuff). And in the small handwave to reform he gives in the conclusion, he’s all about how change has to come from the bottom. Uh, yeah, and by “the grassroots” you mean college-educated, left of left liberal men? You know, it’s really a particular kind of disgusting when an author sneers at the elitist machine, and then turns around and pulls crap like this.

Lastly, and I really am almost done here, Gumbel just isn’t very good at, you know, making an argument. He spends three hundred pages knocking down the widespread American assumption that our elections are fair and honest (they aren’t and never have been), and simultaneously keeps pounding at the fact that the popular right to elect the President is not actually a constitutional right. (No, it’s really not – the first mention of it is in the fifteenth amendment, and strict constructionists still can and do argue that the right does not rest at all with the people.) And a better writer could have pulled this off into the presumptive argument that we do all in fact deserve votes, and things need to change. Gumbel, however, makes a few vague hand wavy motions on the subject, assumes again and correctly that everyone reading will be a political science professor or a journalist or someone else who has already reached that conclusion, and forgets the whole thing.

Graaah.

Comments

[josanpq.livejournal.com]

(No, it’s really not – the first mention of it is in the fifteenth amendment, and strict constructionists still can and do argue that the right does not rest at all with the people.)

Holy shit! This I did not know. What ever happened to: one man, one vote? Or does this come out of the British (admittedly 20th C) system of democracy?

I do know that at one time, here in Canada, one had to be male and own property to vote, and that women got the right to vote here in Quebec the latest in all the provinces (1945, I believe...off the cuff. I would have to go research in my books and I'm too stuffed up with sinus crap to feel like doing so. I'd have to put my brain into gear and I'm not doing that until I have to.). The one person (aka citizen) one vote is not something that gets argued against up here -- except with the pure-laine separatists, who would like the next referendum limited to themselves..so they would be assured of winning...and they get laughed at by the local French media more than by the English one!


Your reviews are very educational. Keep them up.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Well, see, here's the deal. Back when the Constitution was first written, there was massive disagreement about how the President ought to be elected. To the point of nearly wrecking the entire endeavor, in fact. Which is how we got this bizarre and twisty electoral college system, but that's beside the point. The framers explicitly did not outline in the Constitution how the President would be elected, though from the first 1796 election, popular vote was the method of choice (other possibilities include selection by electors chosen by state legislatures, and some other stuff). Of course, the voters at that point were white, propertied men, as was true in every other democratic-leaning country. The fifteenth amendment enfranchises African-Americans (women get their own amendment later), and it was the first time that the Constitution explicitly says, in unambiguous language, that the general voting public has a right to cast a ballot for President.

Now in reality, if someone came along and proposed abolishing the popular vote and throwing the Presidential into the state houses, he'd be shot on sight. However, the issue still comes up -- the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore was the first to remark in recent memory that the dominant right in elections is not necessarily the right to cast a meaningful ballot -- I'm wildly paraphrasing here, but peaceful transfer of government can potentially be more important, strict reading of the Constitution, no guarantee, blah blah blah. Which is to say it's something you can throw out when you're engaged in blatantly partisan maneuvers.

"one man, one vote" is a slogan, not a component of law (at least in the Constitution, because by now any number of general election related law and jurisprudence is on the federal and state books. It's not like the right is about to be yanked from under our feet -- at least no more than it is by general electoral hanky panky -- it's just not one of the ten holy of holies. Which most people don't know, and would be disturbed if they did.

I'll stop election geeking at you now.