What the Hell, Barb??!!

Think I'm exaggerating? Read this.

In graduate school, we were taught that serious analysis anticipates its toughest critics.

I don’t usually have room for that here. This week, I’m making room.

I’ll start with a question from my sister-in-law. She’s German and recently moved to the U.S. with my brother. She reads my column. At dinner the other night she turned to me and said:

“I don’t get why you think Americans shouldn’t have to show a photo ID to vote. Germany has national ID cards. It makes no sense that America doesn’t.”

First: she’s not wrong about Germany having IDs. German citizens 16 and older are required to possess official proof of identity - an ID card or a passport.

But here’s where Americans get misled by the simplicity of the argument.

Whenever you hear one party pushing hard to change something about the rules of the political game (how easy it is to vote, how districts are drawn, who counts ballots) while the other party is fighting like hell to stop it, ask yourself three questions:

• Who benefits from the change?

• What specific problem is this supposed to fix?

• Who gets helped (and who gets blocked) once the change is in place?

Republicans say voter ID laws are needed to stop voter fraud. But decades of research show that the type of fraud photo ID laws are designed to prevent - in-person voter impersonation - is really rare. We’re talking about scattered cases out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast. There is no problem that needs to be fixed.

They also argue that without ID checks at the polls “anybody can vote.” That’s just wrong. Americans have to register to vote before they go to the polls. And registration requires identifying information that election officials verify. So by the time we get to the voting booth, our eligibility has already been determined.

So if there’s no real issue, why are Republicans trying to change things?

Strict photo ID laws disproportionately affect people who tend to lean Democratic: lower-income Americans, the elderly, students, people who move frequently, and some minority voters. Less than half of Americans, for example, have a passport and the ones who do tend to be wealthier and white. And they tend to vote Republican.

Now, some argue: Why not just create a national ID like Germany has?

It’s true that many democracies have national ID systems. But the U.S. has a long tradition of resisting them. Civil libertarians on the left and small-government conservatives on the right hate the idea of a centralized identity card that you have to carry with you. Americans have always been deeply suspicious of anything that smells of central government/big brother oversight.

And here’s the key point: if you’re genuinely pro-democracy, your default position should be to make it easier for citizens to vote, not harder. The last thing you want to do is turn people away. Unless, of course, that’s what you wanted all along.

“Why are you picking on white men?”

This is another question I sometimes get. Lots of white Americans vote Democratic. Aren’t the threats to our democracy really about class? About billionaires versus everyone else?

Nope. Let’s look at the data.

Today, the Republican Party is overwhelmingly white - roughly 75–80%. That includes wealthy whites, working-class whites, and poor whites. Race, more than income, is the strongest predictor of how whites will vote. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is.

But here’s the broader historical pattern.

When you look globally at which groups tend to try to dismantle or weaken democracy, it’s often the group that’s losing their demographic dominance. Groups that were once the majority of the population, and therefore enjoyed most of the political power, often grow anxious when their status erodes. The rich are not losing their dominance - white men are.

White Americans are on track to become a minority within the next few decades. At the same time, white men are losing the economic and political dominance they’ve held for generations. For a group that’s controlled American politics since the beginning, that’s an existential threat to everything they’ve taken for granted. And history tells us that once-privileged groups don’t go down without a fight.

I’m not picking on white men just because. I’m picking on them because they have the most to gain if democracy goes away and they’re the ones pushing for all this nonsense. (White women also deserve blame, but that will be the subject of another column.)

“But aren’t Democrats just as bad?”

This one also deserves a serious answer.

Yes, Democrats benefit from big money. Since Citizens United in 2010, corporate and billionaire money has flooded into both parties. Democratic leaders have resisted structural reforms (i.e., Schumer and Jeffries) because the system that funds their opponents also funds them.

But there’s a big difference in scale and mission between what the 2 parties are doing.

One party is actively working to make voting harder, undermine confidence in elections, politicize election administration, and challenge election results it doesn’t like. The other party, for all its problems, isn’t trying to dismantle competitive elections or concentrate power with the President.

Democrats may be timid. They may be self-interested. They may be too slow to confront institutional decay. But they’re not trying to end democracy as we know it.

Still, fuck them. Democracies rarely die because of one party. They die because the opposition fails to push back hard enough or early enough to stop them.

In a crisis, the sin of omission is still a sin.

So the current Democrats are bad, but they are not nearly as bad as the Republicans.

Still have questions? Please send them.

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