The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.
As they say in the article, it’s harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.
It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.
Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we’ve never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.
This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the “democratic process.”
This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.
The implication of the assertion that “democracy works when people vote” is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It’s simply ahistorical. It’s as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.
Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.
This history isn’t just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They’re the events that created the world we live in today. We aren’t free of their influence and we haven’t even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can’t have both and still be honest with yourself.
You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.
Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That’s what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We’re now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.
If democracy worked unerringly, we’d be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.
The only people I’m blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.
The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.
Watch the movie ‘Network.’
When it came out it was a cutting edge satire; it’s become a quaint and staid docudrama
I watched it recently and it’s shocking how well it’s held up. Aside from the fashion, it feels like it could have been made last year.
Ok, when was this? I tried looking in to voter turnout rates over time. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
As they say in the article, it’s harder to get good estimates of earlier turnout rates, but for the sake of talking about it, lets take for granted that the numbers are in some reasonable ballpark of accuracy.
It looks like turnout tops out at about 80% (presidential elections) of the VEP in the later half of the 19th century. Before this the numbers were even lower than they have been in modern times. This of course was a time when many people could not vote. It was also a period of growing inequality and monopolization. It took 2 major wars, a lot of militant unionizing, and a global financial collapse to end up with the brief period of relative prosperity for specifically white working class men.
Throughout the 20th century though, the numbers pretty consistently dropped to between 50-70% turnout. Throughout a lot of this many people still could not vote, either explicitly or implicitly through Jim Crow laws. Even post-civil rights and voting rights act, prisoners still do not have the right to vote. Considering that we know that the war on drugs was started to pretty specifically target enemies of the state like minorities and hippies, this is a pretty clear attempt to once again implicitly deny certain people the right to vote. So even through multiple slices of the population being eligible to vote over time, we’ve never really had close to a significant portion of the eligible population voting.
This is also only talking about American citizens. Again, a fundamental tenet of democracy is that it only exercises government power over those who have consented to it. US imperialism, starting with the native Americans and African slaves and only expanding from there, has extended the application of that power to countless people around the world who never got a vote on the US fucking with their country and were often denied the opportunity to participate in their own democracies. Taken from this perspective, the majority of people under US rule/influence have NEVER gotten to participate in the “democratic process.”
This is also all before we talk about the ways that the electoral system and government structure was explicitly designed to not allow the popular will to have proportional influence over the government.
The implication of the assertion that “democracy works when people vote” is that the condition of these millions of people who have been systematically denied the right to influence the government that rules over them is their own fault for not voting anyway. It’s simply ahistorical. It’s as much a call to a mythical glorious past that conservatives engage in.
Rights have never and will never be won through the ballot box so long as the US remains a plutocracy. It has always required people to work outside the system and engage with violence, whether they are doing it or it is being done to them.
This history isn’t just some bad stuff that bad people did in the past. They’re the events that created the world we live in today. We aren’t free of their influence and we haven’t even stopped all of them. You can learn from that or you can keep blaming people. You can’t have both and still be honest with yourself.
You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.
Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That’s what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We’re now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.
If democracy worked unerringly, we’d be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.
The only people I’m blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.