ALWAYS BE OTHERING

Even if they win a trifecta in 2024, Republicans won't really do this, but it's disturbing that so many of them think it's a good idea:

Twitter owner Elon Musk had an interesting reaction to a tweet arguing that only parents should have voting rights in America.

He appeared to support the idea with an all-caps "YUP."

User "datahazard" got the positive response on Saturday when he argued in a tweet that "democracy is probably unworkable long term without limiting suffrage to parents."

Datahazard was responding to an earlier tweet from Musk declaring: "The childless have little stake in the future."

They can't do it at a national level because that would require a constitutional amendment, which would need to be ratified by legislatures in 38 out of 50 states. An effort to do this in a state or locality would lead to serious legal challenges and send a massive signal to the young and other childless people that the Republican Party hates them. It would be political suicide for the GOP -- you wouldn't have to be a liberal or a moderate or a member of an oppressed group to feel targeted. So it won't happen, at least not until we're much further along the road to totalitarianism.

The value of this is that it others Democratic voters along lines other than race and sexual orientation. Propaganda that lengthens the list of ways Democrats aren't truly American, or fully human, builds solidarity on the right, and reinforces the notion that conservatism is the proper American ideology, at least if we're talking about real Americans.

Musk isn't the first prominent figure to go natalist. Here's a clip from just after the 2022 midterms in which Jesse Watters -- the guy who just won Tucker Carlson's timeslot on Fox -- argues that single women are a menace to society and need to be (forcibly?) married off and impregnated:

... single women are breaking for Democrats by 30 points. And this makes sense when you think about how Democrat policies are designed to keep women single. But once women get married, they vote Republican. Married women, married men, go for Republicans by double digits. But single women and voters under 40 have been captured by Democrats. So we need these ladies to get married.... They're also teaching our children in schools. So you have hardcore Democrat females in school with your kids for eight hours a day. So there's a brainwashing pipeline that runs through women and children, and it's starting to show up on Election Day.

J.D. Vance won an Ohio Senate seat last year after this nasty pronouncement in 2021 (on, naturally, Tucker Carlson's show):

"We are run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too," Vance said.

"It's just a basic fact," Vance continued. "You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats are controlled by people without children."

(Vance said this before Buttigieg and his husband adopted twins.)

Vance proposed giving parents extra votes:

“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds,” Vance noted. “Let’s do this instead. Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children.” He continued, asking, “Doesn’t this mean that nonparents don’t have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions?” He answered with a simple “yes” ...

But there's no legislation attached to this. No one in Congress is floating the text of a bill or a constitutional amendment, not even Vance. It's just trash talk meant to stir up hate in a new way, as if Republican voters don't hate the rest of us in enough ways already.

The GOP establishment isn't ready to propose radical restrictions on voting by Democratic groups. As I said a few days ago, establishment Republicans want to keep boiling the frog slowly, manipulating democracy primarily in ways that won't enrage ordinary Americans. Most Americans' eyes would glaze over if you tried to talk to them about state legislative gerrymandering or alterations in voter ID requirements. So that's the level of manipulation establishment Republicans prefer.

Also, I suspect that playing the long game on democracy is good for the players' careers. Look at how powerful Leonard Leo became in the decades it took or the GOP to overturn Roe v. Wade. Seizing control of elections and throwing millions of people off the voter rolls, or turning millions into second-class voters, virtually overnight at this moment would probably end the careers of quite a few Leonard Leo types whose work it is to propose new voter bills every legislative year, and collect billionaire dollars to promote them.

So no one is likely to take childless people's votes away anytime soon. But the demonization of childless people will continue.