ANTIDEMOCRATIC

A cutting analysis of the long-term project to disenfranchise left-leaning voters.

“Our country is bitterly divided today in no small part because conservative political strategists have gerrymandered it to be that way,” writes political commentator and former Salon editor-in-chief Daley, author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn't Count. Gerrymandering is one of the favorite tools in the GOP toolkit to disenfranchise citizens inclined to vote for a Democratic candidate. The chief weapon, Daley argues convincingly, has been the Supreme Court, seeded with far-right-leaning judges who endorse this antidemocracy movement. At the heart is John Roberts, who conveys himself—and whom the media portrays—as a mild-mannered centrist. Wrong: Roberts, as the author clearly shows, operates by small steps, such that “each landmark decision begins with a smaller case that invites the next big question.” This approach disguises Roberts’ role as a “patient bulldozer.” A case in point is the Roberts-led dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, tenet by tenet, with the redistricting of a majority Black legislative district in Alabama so that the majority of its residents were now white. Daley traces this project to the Nixon-era activism of Lewis Powell and his multipronged assault on democracy, one means for which was to fund right-wing law schools and raise generations of antidemocratic judges, five of whom now populate the Supreme Court. Roberts, who began his career as a counsel to Ronald Reagan, had the VRA in his sights as long ago as 1982, “a young ideologue despite his carefully curated image of scarcely having been touched by ideology at all.” The subterfuge means to disguise the complete dismantling of the concept of one person, one vote—and all, Daley proves persuasively and evenhandedly, by careful design.

More evidence that today’s Supreme Court, antidemocratic by nature with its unelected judges, is an enemy of democracy.