THEY CAN'T BE REPLACED FAST ENOUGH:

Fear is the common denominator: fear of losing their place atop the social hierarchy, of their culture being replaced by something that feels foreign, of their children seeing through the self-serving narratives they've told themselves for generations. The same fear that justifies misleading students about the history of their country justifies a zero-sum politics that views democracy as the enemy of (their) liberty. 

These purposes intersect. By minimizing the legacy of the Black experience, by imagining the past is dead, conservatives can sever modern voter suppression efforts from their Jim Crow forerunners. The old version was racist; version 2.0 is about "ballot security" -- or, if they're honest, raw power. They design laws to disadvantage Democrats; it's not their fault those Democrats are Black. 

But there's an irony here. Laws that limit ballot access and gerrymander white conservatives into an outsize share of congressional and legislative seats rest on a fundamental, if unacknowledged, belief that some votes matter more than others. The same, of course, was also true for poll taxes and literacy tests. But connecting those dots requires seeing American history as more than a series of dates and facts -- history that asks how and why as much as who and when. 

The kind of history Ron DeSantis is eager to eliminate. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd