Can I Get A Witness?

Ballot Box Blues

This episode introduced our new segment called Can I Get a Witness? This is where we connect the past to the present. After we explore the historical arc of the legal efforts associated with Reconstruction, we want to delve into how those same issues are playing themselves out in our current times. With that goal in mind, at the end of each month, we will invite subject matter experts to help us identify these issues, probe into their impact, and explain how we are endeavoring to solve them. We begin with voting rights.

Voting rights was one of the major issues of Reconstruction, and how that privilege of citizenship is protected and guaranteed today is the subject of this episode. We were joined by Tharon Johnson and Brian Robinson. Both are political consultants; Tharon works primarily with Democrats and Brian mostly with and for Republicans. Both are thoughtful and knowledgeable. Each of them is highly competent and passionate. And it was a special delight to have them provide their insight on the present state of voting rights and help us sort out the "ballot box blues."

In our discussion, we explored the current state of voting and examined the legal decision that put a dent in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But it was Brian’s responses to two of my questions that piqued my curiosity.

When we talked about the ability to get beyond tribal politics, he noted that pretty soon we would have two political parties that would be diverse. He mentioned that “the diverse coalition is the growing part of the country” where there “won’t be an all-white party every again. “ That realignment, he says, will produce two parties with a lot of diversity where we will have “new day in this country, where we can have a little bit of a fresh start.”

He also noted that his main worry is that the “toxicity, this venom in our system just continues to get worse…because it is not inevitable that we bounce back.” “There is,” he says, “historically the risk of national decline.” Citing a national debt that exceeds $25 trillion, a Congress that no longer functions, and the entrenched partisan divide over the makeup of the Supreme Court, Brian worries that “we will fight each other to a standstill, and our country will just continue to go into decline.”

There dark clouds of division seem to suggest the coming of a civic storm unlike any we have seen. It seems that, without some intentional and urgent intervention, we are aiming recklessly toward the type of decline of which Brian is apprehensive. But a more diverse coalition, one that could produce a realignment of the makeup of political parties, could inject into our electoral exercises a sense of deliberate and thoughtful policy proposals. If both parties (assuming of course that we remain wedded to just two) could be comprised of reasoned and diverse interests, and not just reactionary default ideology, perhaps we could reverse the spasmodic tendencies associated with governing.

That might be something worth witnessing.