ACORN etc: Inoculating against Decency
Most Republicans would feel queasy at the thought of a mail sack full of Democratic votes being shredded at city hall. Most republicans also feel somewhat queasy about shows of overt, categorical racism.
Ordinary Americans, even some fairly crummy people, have a vague idealism about democracy and racial equality. We Americans are all indoctrinated in youth on those points as part of our over-all patriotic sensibility. Many Republicans are quite sentimental about those values as abstract ideals.
How do you get people to support things they would normally think of as wrong?
Dehumanization and a self-defense rationalization. They would do it to you if they could. They already have. They are taking what is yours.
All those years of bizarre fake claims of widespread Democratic voting fraud were laying the emotional groundwork for an average republican (or even average right-leaning independent) looking the other way when the Party tries to re-institute Jim Crow voting.
All it takes is for most people to look the other way.
In any year from 1976-2009 a few important Republicans would have called out the whole voter suppression movement. Not many, but enough that it would be a big mainstream 'bipartisan' issue with the conventional wisdom lined up against it.
But not this year.
And I look to things like the bizarre improv ACORN mockumentary. The new black panthers or whatever the heck they were. All that stuff being fed out through FOX (still the biggest and most influential cable news network) over the years. And for the last few years, with the constant subliminal question, "Is it plausible to you that Obama was elected President?"
Yeah, it's crummy, but they do it... we'd be fools not to.
