Reply #11: What's new is that they're willing to throw democracy under the bus

[starroute]

As long as they were comfortably in the majority, it was easy for them to pay lip service to the democratic principle of majority rule.

But now that the prospect of not being in the majority is staring them in the face, they're frantically trying to come up with ways to disenfranchise as many voters as possible.

Their particular targets are precisely those things that we were all taught in school were the greatest achievements of the expansion of democracy. The 14th amendment. Popular election of senators. The abolition of literacy tests.

And I suspect there's one other element in play -- a fear that if they lose control, a new non-white majority will bully and exploit them as mercilessly as they exploited minorities when they had the upper hand.

I think that's their own feelings of guilt speaking. I don't see any likelihood of it actually happening. But if they're projecting their own sins onto others, it would go a long way to explaining their absolute terror of seeing those others gain any share in real power.