Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of April 5

National Review comes out against democracy, explicitly

In the last week-plus, the nominally intellectual right-wing publication National Review has run three separate articles arguing that voting shouldn’t be easier to do, because if it is, stupid, ill-informed people will do too much of it. What?

National Review authors Andrew McCarthy, Dan McLaughlin, and Kevin Williamson, however, moved beyond the entire framework of election security. Instead, they suggested, it is good when restrictions make it harder for people to vote, because people should be discouraged from voting unless they’re really motivated to do it.

Here is the nut of McCarthy’s argument:

It would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people, hypnotized by the flimflam that a great nation needs to be fundamentally transformed rather than competently governed. Left to their own devices, many such people would not even take note of elections, much less go through the effort to register and vote.

The National Review’s current writers, contorting themselves to prove this is not another Jim Crow–apartheid thing, are forced to argue that making it more time-consuming to register and cast a ballot is important because it selects for literate and civic-minded voters, as if free time on a given Tuesday, and the ability to navigate paperwork-heavy bureaucracy, are traits with an ethical valence. (Is it clear that someone who votes by default on the customary day is necessarily more civically engaged and informed than someone who has gone to the trouble of figuring out how to take advantage of expanded voting options like drop boxes and early voting days?)