The Know Nothing (formerly Republican) Party's Voter Intimidation Project Isn't New
The history of voter intimidation was depicted in "Birth of a Nation"
We’ve been here before. The tactics of the MAGA anti-Republic Party to intimidate American citizens, particularly black and brown American citizens, to prevent them from voting that we are seeing in Arizona, Florida, and elsewhere are a page out of the parts of our nation’s history that they don’t want taught in our schools.
“The presence of armed vigilantes outside of voting places is,” as Heather Cox Richardson wrote on October 23, “a scene directly out of the 1876 ‘redemption’ of the South.”
The defenders of “white civilization” against democracy then wore white robes and hoods to play-act as the ghosts of fallen Confederate soldiers. Their counterparts today cosplay instead in tactical gear, but at both times they carried weapons to intimidate people and keep them from voting.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis came up with a more diabolical way to keep black citizens from voting. His “election police” arrested 20 people on charges of voting illegally. The images of black people being taken off in handcuffs for voting appears to be having the intended effect of scaring people of color enough that fewer of them are voting.
The prospect of intimidators at polling places in many precincts around the country on Election Day is high.
What the authoritarians who have seized the name of what was once the Party of Lincoln seek to do was depicted in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 cinematic masterpiece and historical monstrosity, Birth of a Nation. If you haven’t seen it, watch it now to understand the historical context of the threat the MAGA movement poses today.
As I wrote a decade ago,
Unwilling to accept the birth of a new multi-ethnic, "post-racial" American nation in which non-Hispanic whites will no longer be completely dominant—the nation whose birth was represented in the election of Barack Obama—elements of the old nation are making up, disseminating and believing ridiculous stories about President Obama and declaring that they want to get "him out of OUR white house" and "take back OUR nation."
It is their attempt to defend what Griffith termed "their Aryan birthright." Their objective is indeed to take the nation back—back to the one presented on movie screens in 1915.
A film on the Tea Party and anti-Obama propagandists could accurately be titled Re-Birth of a Nation.
That title also applies to what the right-wing extremists seek to accomplish in 2022 and beyond. The hatred and paranoia they were spreading in 2012 has grown exponentially in the years since.
The only way to stop them is to vote in massive numbers for the only party that currently believes in preserving the American Experiment in democracy and freedom. During the last existential threat to the United States, in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, the name of that party was Republican. In the current crisis, America’s party name is Democratic.
There is no acceptable excuse not to vote this year. If you don’t, you may never have another chance to participate in a genuine election.