George Will: "True Conservative"

by: Daniel De Groot

Sun Oct 05, 2008 at 15:15

One of the most often cited people held up as paragons of true conservativism is George F. Will.  Will wrote a column in this week's Newsweek which is pretty telling.  If this is true conservativism's champion, that's pretty sad.

The sentiment expressed by a sly bumper sticker this year (EVERY DISASTER IS A CHANGE) is a cousin of this axiom: Most improvements make matters worse. That axiom is pertinent to this election season because, for many years now, improvers have been toiling to perfect voting procedures.

Well this is boilerplate conservativism; change is bad.  Ok, tell us why George.

So what is wrong with early voting? Even leaving aside the large matter of increased potential for fraud in voting by absentee ballots, there are two costs to early voting.

First, for tens of millions of early voters, the campaign process of informing and persuading is effectively truncated. Now, there is evidence that early voters are more partisan and informed than other voters and hence are less likely than the rest of the electorate to be swayed by events late in an election season. Nevertheless, early voting increasingly affects the rhythms of campaigns, forcing the front-loading of arguments.

I am happy to "leave aside" the "potential" for fraud because I like dealing with actual problems, not fictional ones.  

Will's first objection here is true in a facile way, voting early means that the remainder of the campaign cannot affect your vote.  He doesn't explain why that is bad.  America is already on a campaign schedule that begins the morning after the previous election anyway.  I think voters have more than enough time to make up their minds early if they bother to pay attention.  He even admits most such voters already made up their minds (it would be weird to vote early if you were undecided anyway).

If he wanted an actual problem, he might worry about the impact early voting has on the veracity of exit-polling, which remains a strong systemic check against mass fraud.  Of course, for this to be a problem the early voters would have to be voting in significantly different proportion than the e-day voters.

I think the complaint about the "front-loading of arguments" is probably the unstated key here.  Will doesn't like that early voting blunts the effect of Republican campaign tricks and October surprises.  If people vote in September, it's hard for that last minute Osama tape or elevation of the terror threat level to alter their decisions.  People who vote early also don't face a variety of intimidation, disenfranchisement and misinformation tricks Republicans use to divert and defeat the vote on and near to election day.  

Otherwise it's hard to see why disrupting the "rhythms of campaigns" is a negative for society.  Maybe campaigns don't like it, but the system isn't supposed to serve their interests.

Ok, what else?  Will's coup de grace (h/t Stephen Colbert):

The second problem with early voting is that one of its supposed benefits is actually a subtraction from civic health. The benefit is that it makes voting easier-indeed, essentially effortless. But surely the quality of the electoral turnout declines when the quantity is increased by "convenience voting."

Whoa.  Read that again if you're just skimming this.  More people voting is a "subtraction" from civic health resulting in a decline in quality of the electorate.

I don't think I need to rebut that right?  It's a pretty despicable thing to write, and wearing an idiosyncratic bow tie does not make one less of an anti-democratic aristocrat when saying something like this.

What's more bizarre, is the preceding paragraph contains this item from Will:

Today, however, as John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute notes in his book "Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils," the academic consensus is that mail and absentee-ballot voting "has little or no effect on voter turnout except in low-turnout elections."

I hadn't actually figured Will for being an authoritarian, but here he is exhibiting the contradictory double think that is common among them:  "Early voting doesn't affect turn out.  Early voting is bad because it increases turn out and waters down the quality of the electorate!"

Actually though, the two statements are not totally in contradiction, since Fortier's quote does admit that early voting materially affects turn out in low-turnout elections (which will typically favour conservatives).  Also, Fortier is only talking about "mail and absentee" voting.  What about early voting polling stations?  I don't have that book, but the specificity of the statement makes me suspicious of Will's decision to quote it.

And now we get into typical rich white man obdurate cluelessness about how the other half lives:

A word describes most of the people who will vote only if a ballot is shoved through their mail slot: "slothful." What kind of people will not bestir themselves to exercise their franchise if doing so requires them to get off their couches and visit neighborhood polling places? People who are barely interested, and hence probably are barely informed.

Yes, George.  "Slothful."  The people who work multiple jobs and are too exhausted to line up for hours on election day are "slothful."  So are the ones who were disenfranchised by registering to vote on paper that was the wrong thickness as Ohio SoS Blackwell once famously rejected registrations for.  Or how about those sloths who can't afford photo ID in the handful of states that now require it.  The single mothers who can't leave their children unattended and for whom babysitting is a luxury.  What wastrels.  

I'm pretty privileged myself, so I bet I'm only scratching the surface of reasons why people who would like to vote may find it too difficult.  People with sick relatives, disabilities, the mentally ill, those with felonies who can't navigate the system well enough to get a pardon.  It could go on and on.

All these people are simply "slothful" to Will.  This lack of simple compassion and empathy says more about Will (and most conservatives who tend to share such sentiments) than it does about voters who don't vote.  It also reveals his actual revulsion of democracy.  Voting is okay in conservative books as long as only the right people get to vote.