Vice President Kamala Harris claimed in a speech on race relations in Selma last week that "we are witnessing a full-on attack on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms, starting with the freedom that unlocks all others, the freedom to vote."
More specifically, according to The Associated Press report, she said the nation was at a "crossroad" because of racism-inspired efforts to restrict voting rights, rather peculiarly defined as limits on early voting and mail-in ballots.
You know it's an election year when Democrats go full demagogue on race, about which, I have several observations:
First, the rationale for expanded early voting, mass mail-in ballots and other novel procedures was a pandemic. The idea that we should go at least some way back toward pre-pandemic voting procedures is thus inherent in the acknowledgment that the pandemic is over, as it surely one day would be.
Race has nothing to do with that logic.
Implicit in Harris' comments, and similar demagoguery coming from her boss ("Jim Crow on steroids"), is also a difficult-to-miss inference: that any elections that predated 2020, due to having pre-pandemic voting procedures, were inherently illegitimate.
The Democrats who claim to "saving democracy" apparently believe it didn't exist until Joe Biden won the presidency.
That Black Americans lacked sufficient opportunity to vote might come as news to all those who joined lots of white Americans in making Barack Obama president in 2008, and re-electing him again four years later, under voting procedures that were considerably more "restrictive" (that deliberately loaded term!) than those which Harris now defines as racist.
But finding racism where it doesn't exist has become something of a specialty of Democrats since identity politics became their ideological core. Once you begin to see everything through the lens of race, everything, by definition, becomes racist.
Harris is herself the most obvious and distressing manifestation of this tendency; she was put on the ticket only because Joe Biden, in ultimate identity-politics pandering mode, promised to select a Black woman as his running mate. That choice now rates as perhaps the worst in history, because it makes it exceedingly difficult for a fading Biden to halt his misbegotten re-election campaign without making the unpopular Harris the Democratic nominee.
Most Americans, who already feel Biden has no business seeking a second term, will also assume that he will give way to Harris sometime not too far into that term; that it isn't Biden-Trump but Harris-Trump that will really be on the ballot in November, to Trump's obvious advantage.
Thus, the Biden problem--his seeking re-election when only a tiny percentage of the electorate thinks he's up to the job--is really the Kamala problem. In a rational political world, sidelining her wouldn't be all that difficult, except that the reasons she was chosen are the same reasons Democrats can't easily do it.
Bad decisions made on the basis of skin color aren't easy to correct because of skin color.
At the least, it is interesting to see a woman for whom the sole qualification for the office she holds is race complain about racism in America.
In the identity-politics world, decisions are dictated largely by race and anyone pointing this out is accused of racism. By such smears are critics casually dismissed and the race racket preserved.
This is, however, merely a hint of things to come, as we can expect the Democrats to try to stoke racial grievances to a greater extent than ever in the next eight months, what with the polls showing Trump doing vastly better and Biden vastly worse than customary among Black voters, in particular Black males.
It isn't just Black turnout that has Democrats worried, but the prospect that an historic high percentage of that turnout might vote for a guy Democrats have been claiming for years is incorrigibly racist.
To paraphrase Biden, if you vote for Trump you're not Black, or something to that effect.
How this message, with its implicit assumption that Black people can't think for themselves and will forever be dependent wards of the Democratic party, cannot fail to offend Black voters continues to befuddle.
The thought even strikes that if one sought to desperately search for a reason to consider voting for Trump that one might find it out of opposition to such Democrat racial demagoguery and the ugly assumptions about Black Americans that undergird it.
America would be a better place, in part because race relations would be better, if Democrats could somehow be disabused of these tactics. Indeed, electoral setbacks due to increasing Black defection might be the only way to lure Democrats out of their identity-politics wallowing and racial fearmongering.
At a minimum, it would give incentives to Republicans to come up with proposals that appeal to Black Americans instead of just writing them off come election time.
And it would force Democrats to finally come up with ideas to improve the quality of life for all those Black Americans who live in cities egregiously misgoverned by Democratic mayors and city councils, rather than trying to win elections by accusing the other side of wanting to put them back in chains.
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.