Suppress THIS Voter... I Dare You: I hope you all exercised your franchise today!
One thing that struck me recently was that liberals don’t really understand why voter ID is so popular. Yes, it’s a sham, yes, it’s a front for suppression. But why do people fall for it?
As usual, as an apostate, I have the answer that doesn’t always occur to my fellow lefties.
At one point in my life, I honestly did believe the lies. Democrats regularly cheated, even if it couldn’t be strictly proven, and they hid behind the lack of accountability laws to do the cheating. Of course they did! Or at least, that’s what I believed. Hook, line, and sinker.
The thing is, it’s seductive. And it’s not seductive just because it lets you get away with your own racism — and I say that as someone who at that same time (when I was a Republican) did (to my great personal shame) hold various beliefs which I now believe to be racist.
No, it was seductive because it allows you to still believe you’re right… about everything. To me, not only did Democrats cheat, but the illegal voters they brought in were helping to illegitimately force policies on America that would be disastrous. Republicans were so right, and we deserved to be winning elections in order to keep the Democrats from doing something really stupid. Whatever “unfair” advantages we needed to marshal, even if they were suspect in implementation — oddly, even back then I believed that voter ID should come with free and widely available ID — were probably for the better anyways, at least until people could be convinced to come off the good old “Democratic Plantation”. Until then… it was all for their own good.
The point is, the voter suppression isn’t an end in itself of voter ID laws. Rather, voter ID is a permission structure that allows its supporters to indulge their other beliefs. That, in turn, gives permission to their politicians to do what they do best and we hate most.
Understanding this is key to beating it. And that’s why Democrats haven’t ever been able to beat it. The reason why “Voter ID Is Racist” backfires on swing voters is because they’re attached to it as a psychological crutch. It’s their permission slip for something else, not for being happy-little-voter-suppressing-racist-asshats. You don’t beat it by calling it — and them! — racist. You beat it by persuading them that they don’t need the permission slip anymore.
I always wonder why people are so obsessed about whether “we’re, like, in the Matrix, man”. Dude. We have video games. That’s our Matrix. Just enjoy it.
True Lies: One of the structural challenges of “lies to children” is that the majority of students never actually progress to the point that they can understand the more complex reality, and thus end up only knowing the lie. When they’re only later told that it’s a lie, anchoring bias means that only the people who are skilled enough to accept the new information, do. The rest remained anchored in ignorance, and the very attempt to correct the lie leaves them distrustful of an intellectual authority that can’t seem to make up its mind.
I think this has only become a greater problem as education has expanded. We took the process of telling lies to children and implemented it on an industrial scale, creating ever more enemies of intellectual authority. All those lies to all those children become “common knowledge” that isn’t actually true.
This is one reason why people have such a hard time accepting non-binary and non-conforming genders. But it’s also why no one trusts diet science, or medicine, or vaccines, or… pretty much any expertise.
Happy voting!
I think the best thing for Democrats to do is if they require voter ID, but they make the ID's free. And get rid of mail ballots in most situations. I remember in 2016, I had a friend whose uncle would take everybody's ballots and fill them out "for them", and thus my friend said they were made to vote for Trump. It seems mail ballots may fall victim to power dynamics within a household.