Don’t Be Fooled By Liberalism’s Modesty – The New Republic

A state engaged in institutionalized assault on social freedom will produce only a cheap, counterfeit, and cosmetic form of democracy that becomes psychologically and politically unsustainable for the population. This is why the struggle for freedom against oppression, like Jim Crow segregation, almost always doubles as a struggle for voting rights, responsive democracy, and popular control over government.

Theres an old saying, commonly attributed to John Dewey, that the only cure to the ills of democracy is more democracy, and what we are suffering from today is not democracy but all the structural impediments to it, like gerrymandering, voter suppression, right-wing judicial activism, the filibuster, and the antiquated, anti-democratic, and manipulable Electoral College system. The system of anti-democracy, the GOPs bulging bag of tricks, thwarts our democracy and our freedom at the same time.

The struggle for democracy has always been a freedom struggle. When Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee went farm-to-farm and door-to-door in Jim Crow Mississippi in the early 1960s, registering voters in the face of every form of brutal violence and intimidation, they coined the expression one man, one vote, which became not only the aspirational statement of moral and political equality at the heart of the civil rights movements beloved community, but the radical equation that transformed the Supreme Courts equal protection jurisprudence in the Warren courtand which, of course, has grown to become one person, one vote, as Moses said it would. This belief in the freedom and equality of every man and, eventually, every woman remains the commanding impulse of progressive liberalism in America: the determination that every person, every voice, must count and count equally, which is why the next great wave of liberal democracy will insist on ranked-choice voting and other forms of proportional representation to replace winner-take-all elections and empower the whole electorate.

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Don't Be Fooled By Liberalism's Modesty - The New Republic