CT Blue

I am currently reading a biography of John Quincy Adams, by Fred Kaplan. Both of the Presidents Adams have gained in stature recently. JQ Adams, like his father, had some admirable qualities, mixed in with some faults that truly make the mind boggle. Franklin’s quote about the father seems applicable to the son. But that’s not what this post is about.

One thing Kaplan keeps returning to is something that receives far too little attention in most histories of the time: the pernicious working of the three fifths rule. It goes almost unmentioned in high school history, of course, or if it is mentioned at all it is passed off as a necessary compromise. Each slave was counted as three fifths of a person, thereby increasing the number of slave state congressmen and slave state electoral votes. Needless to say it never crossed the minds of those congressmen that they should take any note of the actual interests of these non-voting constituents. As a result, the two Adams presidents may have been the only presidents prior to Lincoln who were not creatures of the slave power in one form or another, and that includes the shame of my alma mater, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. Had each slave counted as zero people, the slave power would have had less power, the North would have predominated politically, and, ironically, the interests of the slaves themselves would have been better represented. Whether we could have avoided civil war is another matter.

This is all history of course, except we are now in the process of reinstituting a version of the three fifths clause for the second time in our history. The first time was after the civil war, when the South gained even more political power because each former slave now counted as a full person, meaning the South got yet more representatives and electoral votes, but since blacks were not allowed to vote they still went not only unrepresented, but repressed by their nominal representatives. That sort of ended with the Voting Rights Act, but we are bringing a variant back with the various voter suppression statutes that are being passed, all of which, I predict, will withstand Supreme Court “scrutiny”. I suppose one could argue that this particular variant of the three fifths rule is not as racist as its forebears, as it sweeps up not only the minorities against whom it is primarily aimed, but some poor whites as well. Whether that’s a virtue or a vice is pretty much beside the point.

So, throughout most of our history, the equal representation that we are taught is a prerequisite to representative democracy has been a myth, and that’s before you take the equally pernicious effects of gerrymandering into account. In all that time, the beneficiaries of the various devices I’ve mentioned above were, without exception, the slave power, the racists and the rich. Nowadays, of course, the Koch corporate types benefit as well. The issue really is the defining one of our times. Unless we can stop the voter suppression movement (and it may already be too late), we will lose any legitimate claim we might have to being a functioning representative democracy. For all intents and purposes, the country will be littered with rotten boroughs, all of them in the hands of the right wing.