David Michael Miller
Right-wing candidates and their supporters have been spewing a lot of bile about various groups of voters lately. Whether it’s Rebecca Bradley or Donald Trump making headlines with attacks on gay people, women, Mexicans, Muslims and the “politically correct,” you have to wonder how all this helps the Republican brand.
Being the party of bigotry doesn’t look like a smart electoral strategy.
Hence the apologies and disavowals from Bradley and Scott Walker after One Wisconsin Now unearthed Bradley’s disgusting rants about “degenerates” and the “abnormal sexual preference” of gay people during her campus bomb-thrower days, as well as the national GOP establishment’s convulsions over the rise of Donald Trump.
This nastiness didn’t come out of nowhere, though. The Republicans have been slyly stoking racism and bigotry for a long, long time. As E.J. Dionne pointed out when he was in Madison recently talking about his new book, Why the Right Went Wrong, the GOP’s Southern strategy was built on the backlash against civil rights. More recently, obstructing and disrespecting the first African American president has been a big part of the Republican Party’s pitch to its base.
One thing Bradley’s campus screeds reveal is how commonplace a certain brand of titillating ugliness was among campus right-wingers back in the 1980s and 1990s.
I remember those days well. The Dartmouth Review, which was nurtured, supported, and funded by national right-wing groups, specialized in the sorts of shock-value attacks on vulnerable people that later made Ann Coulter rich.
The Review continually attacked affirmative action, including in an article headlined “This Sho Ain’t No Jive Bro” in 1984. It called Native Americans “drunken, ignorant, and culturally lost.” And it outed gay students to their families and faculty by publishing confidential information about members of the campus Gay Straight Alliance, pushing one young man to the brink of suicide.
Those are the good old days Donald Trump talks about, when Rebecca Bradley was writing her screeds for The Marquette Tribune.
It’s a sign of progress that Bradley’s hatefulness is an embarrassment in 2016.
A whole generation now sees gay rights as a no-brainer, and voting patterns are shifting as the country becomes less white. That poses a problem for Republicans, especially this year. The tone of the 2016 Republican primary is repelling pretty much everyone apart from the enraged Trump supporters who have been physically assaulting protesters at their candidate’s rallies.
How do the Republicans compete for votes in the age of Rebecca Bradley and Donald Trump? One simple answer is, they don’t. They focus, instead, on preventing a lot of people from voting at all—especially people of color and the young.
Stringent new voter ID laws, including the one here in Wisconsin, are part of that strategy.
I spoke with one target of voter suppression—a thoughtful, politically aware UW freshman—when he came out to see E.J. Dionne speak in Madison. Sebastian van Bastelaer is Dionne’s daughter’s boyfriend. He moved here from Maryland last year.
In February, as he wrote this week in The Daily Cardinal, he headed over to the Red Gym to cast his vote in the state Supreme Court primary. He had registered to vote in Wisconsin because, he explained, “my home state of Maryland is so blue that continuing to vote there wouldn’t make nearly as much of a difference as my vote here.”
He brought his Maryland driver’s license to the polls, and, since he had heard about the new voter ID law, he says, “I also brought my school ID, figuring that since UW is state-sponsored, it would count as state-issued ID.”
Wrong.
Poll workers told Sebastian they could only accept a Wisconsin driver’s license (which he doesn’t have), his passport (which he’d left at home in Maryland) or separate UW student voter ID card (not the regular student ID).
He was out of luck.
“I wasn’t overly upset about it,” van Bastelaer says. “It was, after all, a state Supreme Court primary, and I have since gotten one of the new cards. But I’m sure dozens of out-of-state students will be turned away in April, and November, too, because of the law. They’re clearly trying to make it very difficult for us to vote.”
That’s why Dane County has declared March “Voter ID Month.”
Volunteers are reaching out to help voters get ID, and Union Cab has been offering free rides to the DMV.
A big turnout on April 5, when both Bradley and Trump are on the ballot, could turn the election into a referendum on both voter suppression and hate.
Ruth Conniff is editor of The Progressive magazine.
