Earlier this year pro-life activist and increasingly unhinged social media Trump surrogate Abby Johnson advocated returning to "household voting" that "in a Godly household" would be exercised by the husband in an extremely cursed Twitter exchange. Last week, writer Michael Warren Davis expanded on this idea in a full-scale diatribe against women's suffrage in Crisis magazine. (Perhaps fortunately, his sense of the political landscape is so disconnected from reality that he seems to believe it's not only a mainstream view but the consensus view that American law and government worked better in the age of Lochner and eugenics than they do now.)
I had never seen this before; I was under the impression that women's right to vote was the very definition of a settled issue and that any extremists who felt otherwise would keep their dissent to themselves. However, I've since been informed that this is in fact a position one has occasionally encountered for a while now in far-flung religious countercultures like Quiverfull families and some Hasidic Jews--and, evidently, the extreme edge of Traditionalist Catholicism as well.
What to make of this? Is this position actually gaining visibility in an age of massive gendered voting gaps and an increasingly normalized sensibility that unfriendly demographics should have their votes suppressed, or are the wingnuts just happening to sound off now because it's the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment? Is it possible that women's suffrage will enter the general stock of hard-right gripes with the Constitution along with the income tax and the direct election of senators, or is that a bridge too far? I open the floor to anybody who's masochistic enough to join me in thinking about this topic.
Essentially, Republicans know that politics in today’s America divides almost perfectly along the lines of who could vote before the
Fifteenth Amendment. Those who could vote before the Fifteenth Amendment vote Republican and those who could not vote Democratic.
There is, of course, no accident to this. Before
The Communist Manifesto,
all philosophers,
including the Founding Fathers of the United States, outright rejected anything approaching what we today think of as “democracy”. Natural law, it was believed, excluded women, people of color, and urban dwellers from participation in politics. More strikingly, natural law was viewed as excluding females, people of color, and urbanites for
precisely the same reason the Republicans want them excluded today: because they would demand public goods and services without paying for them and make the white rural men who have small requirement for them pay the price.
This philosophy has remained intact amongst rural and lower-class white Americans to a degree unseen anywhere else in the world, probably because so much rural white settlement in America was from highly conservative religious groups trying to avoid persecution in Europe, and because these groups can maintain a comfortable low-input lifestyle due to high soil fertility that is impossible in Australia or South Africa.
So, to answer your question, “Away, haul away, we'll haul away, Joe!”, the Nineteenth Amendment is at least as much in the sights of “hard-right gripes with the Constitution” as the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments. So is – to an even greater degree – the Fifteenth Amendment, which has been in the sights of these people ever since it was ratified 151 years ago.
