Rebecca Solnit: 20 Million Missing People Could Save America

This is a story about 20 million missing people, and the world they would have made and how different it might have been from the one we are living in here in the USA. They were shut out a year ago and in the years before, when they would have chosen other stories of who we are and what we want and value and even who “we” mean by “we.” We are trapped in the current story because they are missing, and they remain silenced—and because we have not made their erasure the enormous issue it should be and done the work to recover their rights to participate. There’s an important parallel right now between voter suppression and what for lack of a better name we’re calling the #metoo movement.

Most new ideas begin in the margins or shadows and move toward the center. They are often something that a few people thought, something that seemed radical or edgy or a bit too much, or just something hardly anyone noticed or felt strongly about. If they were ideas about justice, they were considered extreme or unrealistic. Then the idea kept traveling, and by the end of the journey it was what everyone always thought. Or rather that they thought they had always thought, because it’s convenient to ignore that they used to not even pay attention or thought something completely different that now looks like discrimination or cluelessness. A new idea is like a new species: it evolves; it expands its habitat; it changes the ecosystem around it and then it fits in as though it was always there, as though we as a nation always condemned slavery or believed women deserved the vote or thought the queer community was entitled to the same rights as straight people.

A big new idea this year is that we should pay attention to how violence, hate, discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got. This was a key part of the analysis of what the gendered violence of Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men in Hollywood had accomplished. Rebecca Traister was one of the people to say it early, when she wrote in October:

The accused are men who help to determine what art gets seen and appreciated—and, crucially, paid for. They decide whose stories get brought to screens. They are also the men with the most power to determine what messages get sent about politicians to a country that then chooses between those politicians in elections. We cannot retroactively resituate the women who left jobs, who left their whole careers because the navigation of the risks, these daily diminutions and abuses, drove them out. Nor can we retroactively see the movies they would have made or the art they would have promoted, or read the news as they might have reported it.

Many people, including Traister and Jill Filipovic, noted that some of the most powerful men in US media had been exposed as serial sexual harassers, and that these men—including Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and Mark Halperin—shaped the hostile narrative around Hillary Clinton. The idea that had begun with the men who decided who would make movies and what stories we would hear moved on to the men who decided how we would know politicians and what would be emphasized (her emails) and what wouldn’t (his mob ties, lies, bankruptcies, lawsuits, sexual assaults). It shaped an election; you can imagine another outcome had other people been in charge of framing it.

By the end of 2017, Richard Brody in the New Yorker found this way of framing our current situation so compelling he foregrounded it in his write-up of the year’s best movies, not usually a place for suggesting radical political reform. That the idea arrived there is a sign of how far it traveled, and how fast, this fall. He declared that “any list of the year’s best movies has gaps—of the movies, performances, and other creations that are missing because they are unrealized, unrealized because the women (and, yes, also some men) who were working their way up to directing, producing, or other notable activities in the world of movies, who were already acting or writing or fulfilling other creative positions, had their careers derailed when they were threatened, intimidated, silenced, or otherwise detached from the industry by powerful men abusing their power for their own pleasure and advantage.” The absence had become present in a lot of minds.

But who is missing? It’s not only the women directors, the black screenwriters, the not-so-misogynist lead journalists in the mainstream.

It’s voters.

Voting is a form of speech, a way you say who you believe in, what kind of world you want to see. Having a voice doesn’t just mean literally being able to say things; it means having a role, having agency, being able to say things that have an impact whether it’s I witnessed this police brutality, or no I don’t want to have sex with you, or this is my vision of society.

As far as I can estimate, about 20 million voters were disenfranchised in the last election. Voter ID laws, the cross-check system, purging voter rolls, the undermining of the Voting Rights Act, making sure there were not enough polling stations or cutting back polling hours, harassing people when they showed up at those stations, taking the vote away from ex-felons—the means are many, and the consequences are that a lot of people have been denied their rights, so much so that it’s the other new Jim Crow. (There is no clear tally of how many voters are missing, and it’s also complicated by the fact that some populations—more than six million Americans with felony convictions, for example—are prevented outright from voting, some face obstacles and harassment—via voter ID laws, for example—that thin out their numbers.)

Politics is how we tell the stories we live by, how we decide if we value the health and well-being of children or not, the autonomy of women’s bodies and equality of our lives, or not, if we protect the Dreamers who came here as small children, or not, if we act on climate change, or not. Voting is far from the only way, but is a key way we decide on what story to base our actions on. We choose a story about who and what matters; we act on that story to rearrange the world around it—and then there are tax cuts to billionaires and children kicked off healthcare, or there are climate agreements and millions of acres of federal land protected and support for universities. We live inside what, during postmodernism’s heyday, we’d call master narratives—so there’s always a question of who’s telling the story, who is in charge of the narrative, and what happens if that changes.

Sometimes when journalists like Ari Berman at Mother Jones—the best voice on this issue—write about the suppression of the votes, people assume they’re saying Hillary Clinton should have won the last presidential election. If you changed who had access to the ballot in 2016, that might be the outcome, but the story is so much bigger than that, and the potential outcomes are so much more radical than that. The Republican Party has maintained a toehold on national power by systematically, strategically, increasingly suppressing the votes of people of color over decades. They are a minority party. They could never win a fair election nationally with their current platform of white grievance and misogyny and favors for the one percent, so they’ve set about to have unfair elections. (And they have also gerrymandered the daylights out of a lot of states to hang onto majorities at the state and national level; in 2012, they took the majority of seats in the lower house of Congress with a minority of overall votes.)

Imagine that those 20 million votes were not suppressed. The Republican Party would be defunct or be unrecognizably different from what it is today. But the Democratic Party would be different too. Imagine that the Democratic Party had to answer to more young people, more poor people, more nonwhite people, more people who believe in strengthening human rights and social service safety nets, economic justice, stronger action on climate change. Imagine a country where Democrats weren’t competing for moderate-to-conservative voters because the electorate was far more progressive—as it would be if all those people who lost their voting rights actually had them (and yeah, more younger people showed up). It wouldn’t change something as small as the outcome of the 2016 election. It would mean different political parties with different platforms and different candidates, different news coverage, different outcomes. It would change the story. It would change who gets to tell the story.

We are a country that is increasingly nonwhite, and nonwhite voters are, overall, more committed to social, economic, and environmental justice. I believe that we are a country full of generous-minded progressive people, the people who voted in eight trans candidates in the November elections, who voted in moderate Doug Jones over lunatic-right Roy Moore in Alabama earlier this month. A friend noted that without suppression of the black vote, Jones would not have won by less than two points, but by several points. But had those votes not been suppressed one way or another since, basically, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote in 1870 and the 19th gave all women that right, who’s to say that two white men, Moore and Jones, would have been voters’ only choice or that Alabama would be what it is today?

Teen Vogue’s Sarah Mucha reports, “Deuel Ross, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund […] estimates that 118,000 registered voters in Alabama were unable to vote in Tuesday’s election because they do not possess the proper photo identification required by Alabama law.” That’s about 10 percent of the vote in December’s election. The game was changed by their absence, as it was by the enforced absence of huge numbers of legitimate voters in states like Wisconsin in 2016 (one study estimates that about 200,000 more voters would have participated in Wisconsin’s election had voting conditions in 2016 been what they were as recently as 2012). It was widely noted that black Alabamans struggled heroically to overcome the obstacles against their participation, but they should not have to.

There is good work being done, mostly on a state-by-state level, by grassroots groups and civil-rights organizations, but it should be far more visible, far more passionately talked about, far more present in our imaginations. Reenfranchising the missing should be one of the great struggles of our moment. We should do it on principle, because it’s about righting a grave injustice. We should also do it because these voters are, overall, people with beautiful dreams of justice, inclusion, equality, because these voters will write a different story of what the United States of America is and can be and should be. A different story of who and what matters.

When you change your trajectory by even a few degrees at the outset, it can take you someplace completely different by the time you’ve walked a few miles, let alone gone along for decades, or a century and a half. Stripping citizens of their voting rights has steadily pushed us to the right, and we have ended up someplace we should have never been. Many lives have been crushed along the way, voices have been suppressed, wars have broken out, the urgent crisis of climate change has been denied and neglected. We can’t undo what has been. The story has been told, the line has been walked. But we can correct course. We can start by telling a story that millions of missing votes matter and by working to get those voters back in the game. We can add this story of missing voices to the other story of the missing we’re telling this cold winter, and work toward to a spring when the change begins to set in.