[EL] George Will recycling old William F. Buckley arguments (plus a dash of Jeane Kirkpatrick for fun)

[Scarberry, Mark]

Safe journeys to Doug and to all the other list members who will be traveling for the holidays.

I continue to think that Doug's criticisms of George Will were completely unjustified - including the charge that Will was recycling arguments made by another, which sounds an awful lot like an intentional and somewhat mechanical borrowing. I will limit myself to three quick points.

First, I think a comparison of the two pieces will show, contrary to Doug's post, that Will's analysis is much more nuanced, not less nuanced, than Buckley's.

Second, Will is not saying that high turnout leads to election of Nazis or similar people. He is saying that when the stakes are very high, as they were in 1930s Germany, turnout will be very high. His point is that it can be good to live in a society in which the election stakes are not so high and in which, as a result, turnout is lower than it otherwise would be. I thought the stakes were fairly high in the recent presidential election, but I did not fear that the republic would be lost, whoever might win.

Third, maybe an important concept here is that democracy is not just self-governance but also submission to governance by others. When I submit to governance by others, I would like them to be at least minimally informed and have at least a minimal level of interest in the issues that are to be decided. Will's column makes a similar point in a calm and respectful way.

Mark

Mark S. Scarberry
Professor of Law
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law

From: Douglas R. Hess [mailto:douglasrhess at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 11:09 AM
To: Scarberry, Mark; law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: RE: [EL] George Will recycling old William F. Buckley arguments (plus a dash of Jeane Kirkpatrick for fun)

I appreciate Prof. Scarberry's offer to send Buckley's column around off list, and I'm happy to do so as well for those interested in this little debate. The version I have is from the Buffalo paper. I assume syndicated columns aren't/weren't edited much when they ran in different papers. (Does anybody know if that's true? Buckley's article ran in 1993, if that matters. If the columns were edited to fit in different papers, texts could vary.)

Regarding the response in the email below to my original email (also below), a few points while I pack for holiday travel:


1.       Please notice that I didn't accuse Will of plagiarism, and I suggest that Will's arguments differ from and amplify Buckley's (by amplify, perhaps poor word choice, I meant that Will spent more time on the points than Buckley). Still, the major theme is very much the same as Buckley's and it is not uncommon among some circles on the far right (even some on the far-far left, too). That theme is: Some barriers to voting are good as they weed out the rabble (people with political opinions of low "caliber" in Will's words).

This has scary implications for North Dakota where there is no voter registration. Things must be going horribly wrong there from all the easy access to voting and high turnout (and ditto for much of the Midwest which has high registration and turnout).



2.       Prof. Scarberry  thinks Will is being genteel about it, but it seems to me he holds non-voters in contempt. He also states something about heading towards mandatory voting, which I don't think is in the plans of anybody with any power and is certainly not in the link or quote Will provides (assuming the link on Holder remains the same, maybe Will gave the wrong link to the editors?).  Making such a charge to head off more moderate changes is itself not moderate debating. And quoting Hans von Spakovsky's poor reading of the NVRA doesn't help with a moderate image or tone either.

For another take on this, see Andrew Cohen's review of Will's column here: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/george-will-gets-almost-everything-wrong-about-voting-rights/266504/   Cohen makes an error or two of his own, in my opinion, but largely gets it right.



3.       Part of the problem with discussing Will's column is that it has several contradictions in it (notably Will argues that institutional design both does and does not cause low turnout). Nonetheless, he states "the fact [that] many people do not register to vote is not evidence that the franchise is restricted, other than by voters' inertia." That contradicts a lot of published, scientific research. Also, Will doesn't say he's against poll taxes, etc. Will says they have been removed and he thinks it made no difference. Two points about this:



a.       He uses the wrong measure of the difference such policy changes make, but it is still clear that the point of removing the barriers is lost on him.  Those changes did make a difference, especially for non-whites in the South

b.       Yes, Will refers to  "registration and residency requirements" as "burdensome," but he seems to think some kinds of burdens are ok (and, contradictory that they also don't matter).  NOTE:  I'm not saying he supports this or that restriction.  I'm just pointing out that he doesn't say anything against poll taxes, etc., which is how Prof. Scarberry interprets that part of the column. In short, Will doesn't state how much of a burden is allowable, but he supports some burden and that this is a "small" requirement for voting.



4.       Prof. Scarberry wrote: "On the Nazi election point, Will certainly does not say that high voter turnout is bad because it can lead to election of Nazis or similar people." That's exactly what Will is stating. What else is Will's reference to concentration camps about? Granted, he may have meant to make a more general point about percentages of turnout as a measure of quality in a democracy, but he (not moderately) makes the comparison to authoritarianism (although he doesn't use the term, the reference is distinct). Again, his point is clear: non-voters and the non-registered are lazy and uninformed, thus it is ok to keep them away...in fact, they can be dangerous.


In short, I find the whole column to be muddy and poorly reasoned. One may not agree with my interpretations, but they are not "completely unjustified."

-Doug


From: Scarberry, Mark [mailto:Mark.Scarberry at pepperdine.edu]
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2012 3:56 PM
To: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election at department-lists.uci.edu>
Subject: Re: [EL] George Will recycling old William F. Buckley arguments (plus a dash of Jeane Kirkpatrick for fun)

This is really a completely unjustified attack on George Will. Will's comment is moderate in tone and thoughtful. The two columns - Will's and Buckley's - are quite different. Some of the points made thoughtfully by Will are similar to those made vehemently by Buckley, but Will's are more developed and largely respond to events and public statements (e.g., by Eric Holder and Thomas Perez) postdating publication of Buckley's column.

It is difficult for me to see how Buckley's arguments could be seen as more nuanced than Will's. (I would have to see the statement made by Jeanne Kirkpatrick to judge her level of nuance.) Will, for example, says that many potential voters make a rational decision not to be informed and not to vote, because of the time and effort involved in being an informed voter and because of the unlikelihood that the individual's vote would make a difference. Will points out that there are few states that are competitive in presidential elections and that gerrymandering makes participation in elections for other offices less meaningful. None of this is discussed in Buckley's column.

Buckley's column is much more vehement. For example, Buckley wrote:

"The motive behind the law is so obvious as to be truly contemptible. It is a way of saying: 'Our guess is that more lazy non-voters, who don't show up on election day, would vote, if they did show up, the Democratic ticket.' So let's register those voters if necessary by sending them a registration form on Valentine's Day."

And Buckley accused President Clinton of having a "vested interest in public ignorance" as shown by Motor Voter (and also by repeal of a George H.W. Bush administration labor law regulation that required posting of signs informing union members of their rights under the Supreme Court's decision in Beck).

On the Nazi election point, Will certainly does not say that high voter turnout is bad because it can lead to election of Nazis or similar people. (Actually, I doubt that Kirkpatrick said that; Buckley said, without mentioning Nazis, that a high turnout doesn't necessarily indicate civic health.) Will does say that the high voter turnout in the German elections in the 1930s was not an indicator of civic health (one point that is quite similar to Buckley's) and that it was due to the very high stakes (a point that Buckley did not make with respect to the level of turnout). Will writes that

"Those who think high voter turnout indicates civic health should note that in three German elections, 1932-33, turnout averaged more than 86 percent, reflecting the terrible stakes: The elections decided which mobs would rule the streets and who would inhabit concentration camps."

We can be thankful that the stakes in our elections are not so great (at least not at this point). As Will says, "the stakes of politics are agreeably low because constitutional rights and other essential elements of happiness are not menaced by elections."

Will agrees with Holder that long lines at polling places are a problem, but disagrees with Holder about the idea that voting should occur at times other than on election day.

Will does not repeat Buckley's complaint about elimination of literacy requirements for voting; instead, Will pretty obviously approves of removal of serious "impediments" to voting, like "poll taxes, literacy tests, [and] burdensome registration and residency requirements."

Will does make the point that lower overall turnout rates since the 1960 presidential election have "coincided with the removal of [those] impediment to voting."

Will does say that it is not bad that people have to register in order to vote, as long as it is not a real impediment to voting (but only a "small ... requirement") :

"A small voting requirement such as registration, which calls for the individual voter's initiative, acts to filter potential voters with the weakest motivations. They are apt to invest minimal effort in civic competence."

Buckley makes a similar point, though much more vehemently. I don't think that this general point - that a non-burdensome registration requirement is a filter for a minimal level of motivation - was original with Buckley or that Will got it from Buckley.

I have Buckley's column and would be happy to forward it individually it to anyone who wants to confirm that Dr. Hess has treated Will unfairly. It's quite short, but due to copyright concerns I haven't reproduced it here.

I will confess that I read Will's columns regularly and that his participation is the only reason I watch the round table hosted by George Stephanopoulos. (I certainly enjoyed the Sandburg anecdote that Will recounts at the beginning of his column.)

Mark S. Scarberry
Professor of Law
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> [mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Douglas R. Hess
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 6:23 PM
To: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu<mailto:law-election at department-lists.uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] George Will recycling old William F. Buckley arguments (plus a dash of Jeane Kirkpatrick for fun)

George Will has a really strange (I mean a Glen-Beck-strange kind of strange) column out today on the NVRA (see link below). As I read it, the column seemed rather familiar. Took me a while to find it, but the column largely repeats and amplifies arguments that William F. Buckley, Jr. made against the NVRA in a column titled "Motor Voter Legislation Vitiates States Rights" that ran on February 12, 1993 (likely ran several places through Universal Press Syndicate).

I couldn't find a link to the Buckley column that was free (but I could get it through the campus LexisNexis subscription where it was stored via The Buffalo News (City Edition) 02/12/1993). However, the article can be bought, apparently, through High Beam (the second link below) if you don't have Lexis/Nexis.

Anyway, for good measure Will also tosses in a reference to Nazi electoral victories as the result of high turnout...which also seemed familiar to me. Yep, it's been trotted out by folks like Jeane Kirkpatrick whenever they wanted to argue that elections aren't a guarantee of democracy, or candidates they backed.  Of course, Kirkpatrick's and Buckley's points are more nuanced than Will's, but that's not saying much.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-federal-voting-drive-makes-a-mountain-out-of-a-molehill/2012/12/19/461e17c4-494c-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-22492872.html


Douglas R. Hess, PhD
Washington, DC
202-277-6400
douglasrhess at gmail.com<mailto:douglasrhess at gmail.com>

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