The End of Voting
When Donald Trump spoke to the “Believers Summit” he promised when elected, “you’ll never have to vote again”. Most pundits interpreted these remarkable comments as a thinly veiled threat of a future Trump dictatorship. But they jumped to the wrong conclusion.
Trump is echoing a darker aspiration of the Christian Right to devolve back to an era when a small elite ran the government as an aristocratic Republic. We see hints of this agenda in the Supreme Court of Kansas, who ruled its own citizens had a limited state’s-right to vote, the Washington State Republican Party, which claimed “we don’t want democracy” (advocating repeal of the 17th Amendment with its populist direct election of the Senate), and Project 2025.
At campaign rallies Trump often wanders off on incoherent tangents (bird-killing windmills, death by electric batteries, …) which reflect a distorted recollection from an an earlier briefing. Trump must have been apprised of these right-wing disenfranchisement efforts to silence the vox populi by bringing test cases before his “originalists” Supreme Court. Who would then double-down, entrenching voting as a limited privilege. Locking in a permanent Republican autocracy.
As usual, he muddled the message.
All modern democracies start with a universal right to vote- how could it be otherwise? While 49 states offer some form of a constitutional right-to-vote on state matters, there is no corresponding political right at the federal level.
Our government remains mired in a tradition of aristocratic rule and fear of “the mob”- we never fully modernized the very democracy we pioneered. It’s time for all patriotic Americans who put country first to support an Amendment making voting a fundamental and foundational right.
