Prison for Thee, Not for Me

Now there are three Black people who tried to vote or register to vote because they were misinformed about their status, relative to their probationary status — two in Texas and one in Tennesee. All three have been sentenced to substantial sentences. The latest is Pamela Moses of Memphis, who just got six years.

Meanwhile, there are at least four white men who knowingly cast ballots on behalf of dead relatives — that were counted! — for Trump in 2020 and three of them got no time at all and one got three days. 

I mentioned the Nevada example earlier. The others are in Pennsylvania (two of them) and Ohio. They each requested absentee ballots for the dead (or in one case, extremely cognitively impaired), forged their relative's signature, and sent in the ballots. The Ohio cheater is a town trustee.

I keep thinking about the point many have made that for the Right it's not about morality or legitimacy in the sense of right and wrong, but about who did it, and whether it serves "us" and harms "them." As Dave Roberts put this argument in a recent Twitter thread, it's a rejection of a universalist conception of moral principle. And if there is no universalism, then there is no hypocrisy: conservatives are inherently good and deserve to get their way and be in charge (and vote twice, in this case).

Roberts goes to say this:

...people who are, by virtue of the size of their amygdala or their personality or their socialization (pick your explanation), inclined to think [like this] are strongly inclined to believe that everyone does. From that perspective, nobody really feels bound by universalist principles. No one will really sacrifice the immediate interests of their [group] out of fealty to abstract principle. The whole language of universalism is a kind of effete liberal game of pretend, a pretense. The language of universalism is just how you're supposed to talk in elite circles — it's "virtue signaling." 

The fact that our country's founding documents are premised on univeralist principles doesn't matter, I guess, in this world view. They were just a con put on by the powerful, which I guess was true to some extent, but I, among many others, took them at their word and have worked to make them reality. 

As Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the essay that opened the New York Times' 1619 Project, Black people were the ones who made this country begin to live up to its founding ideals of liberty and equality. "Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all."

Which is why the Right hates the 1619 Project, as if we didn't know that already.