Today in Great Ideas

In yesterday's LA Times, Jonah Goldberg had an op-ed arguing that since a " very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by 'qualified' you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges," perhaps we ought to start restricting voting only to the well-informed.

Amusingly, he presents this idea as if it's new (see Mustang Bobby at his place and David Neiwert for the history lesson you probably don't need but Jonah evidently does about Jim Crow laws, which included such things as "literacy tests" to disenfranchise "undesirable" voters) and wraps his argument around this pithy puzzler: "Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?" Of course, immigrants don't have to pass a test to vote; they have to pass a test to become citizens, at which time they are granted the right to vote irrespective of their grasp of the issues, which is what really makes one a truly "qualified" voter; knowing there are two Senators given each state is great, but understanding Senatorial candidates' positions is even better.

Nevertheless, Jonah states as if it's fact immigrants must pass a test to vote, either signaling his own ignorance of how our government works, or, more likely, depending on the ignorance of readers to nod their heads at his sagacity—by gum, he's right; we should make people pass a test to vote!—convincing the ignorant via their ignorance to rescind voting rights from the ignorant. And there, in a nutshell, is how conservatives get people to vote against their own best interests.

I could probably spend an inordinate amount of time fisking the rest of the prattling twaddle he submitted to the Times and they inexplicably printed, and point out all the ways he is a racist, xenophobic, classist gobshite, but I shant. Instead, I will simply respond to his chief recommendation: "Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people about the basic functions of government?"

Clearly, Jonah wouldn't suggest a voting test if he weren't convinced it would help the Republicans—and, on its face, it might seem like it would, given that access to education generally correlates with an informed citizenry. Surely, the wealthy and powerful and privately educated, who are disproportionately Republican, would score off the charts!

Yeah, well, maybe they would. But those folks aren't called the One-Percenters for nothing.

So let's go ahead and put voting to a test across the land. Let's see how the Republican base—the Fox News watchers, the Bush supporters, the Saddam-Did-So-Have-WMDs-and-Was-Behind-9/11-Believers—stacks up against the Democratic base, against The Daily Show viewers (who "know more about election issues than people who regularly read newspapers or watch television news, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey"), PBS watchers, NPR listeners. Let's see how those can't-spell, can't-string-a-coherent-sentence-together, can't-form-a-logical-thought conservatives that troll in my comments do on a voting test next to the Shakers. Let's go.

I'm all a-twitter to see how it turns out.