Today's Republicans And Their Antipathy Towards Democracy

Mixed throughout much of the hate and vitriol disseminated by today's Republican Party against those who are not whites, straight, conservative Christians - and according to Mitt Romney the 47% of Americans who are parasites - is a mindset that all others are not "real Americans."  So what does one do if you are a member in today's Republican Party?   You try to disenfranchise "those people" who do not look like you, think like you or subscribe to a fear and hate based version of Christianity.  In short, you try to distort democracy so that those you don't like cannot vote.  The GOP backed voter ID laws are a prime example.  Laws that seek to address a problem that doesn't exist and the real goals of which are to disenfranchise blacks, Hispanics, the poor, etc.  The people that per the GOP aren't "real Americans" and who I suspect Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and their "family values" Christofascist view as something less than fully human. Ana Marie Cox has a piece that looks at the GOP antipathy towards democracy where all citizens get to vote.  Here are excerpts:

The Drudge Report, which I've always considered more mischievous than malicious, gave "Unskewedpolls.com" some link love earlier this week. The site tinkers with the poll results of major firms by re-weighting them  . . . .

At their heart, Unskewed Polls express a pseudoscientific rationalization for a pre-existing belief: the mathematical equivalent of intelligent design. But the site represents more than just modern conservatism's skepticism about science; it underscores what has become a more animating and alarming concern – conservatives' distrust of democracy as a process.

This is nothing new, of course. . . . .  Anti-Federalists. . . . pushed successfully for the US constitution to mandate election of senators by state legislatures and not voters – a quaint affectation that was superseded by the 17th amendment in 1913.  There is a growing movement among Republican elected officials to repeal that amendment; among those advocates are five Republican Senate nominees.

However, it is one thing to wonder if the mass electorate can make good decisions and quite another to back-engineer the exclusion of a specific class of voters for the sake of a specific outcome. That, of course, is what voter ID laws do.

But voter ID laws are just a specific, particularly obvious example of a generalized contempt for voters. A better reflection of the mood: Romney's careless dismissal of 47% of America. The comment wasn't just callous and strategically idiotic (Karl Rove, who masterminded the GOP's outreach to "ungettable" voters, must have hurt his head banging it against the wall when he heard); it reflected also the apparently widespread presumption among GOP supporters that democracy is a zero-sum game – and that voters are motivated out of greed.

Republicans' assault on democracy (the voter ID laws, the repeal of the 17th amendment, the creeping disempowerment of women) is probably designed to scare those exact voters they want to disenfranchise as much as it is to legally disenfranchise them. Anti-voter ID activists often say that making someone believe their vote won't count is as effective as actually barring the vote.

So, you know, bring it on. It's not the 47% that needs to worry; it's Romney.