What Went Wrong - Assessing Obama’s legacy

By David Bromwich

A political virtuoso . . . might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home — having spent a very pleasant evening.
— Kierkegaard, The Present Age

Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the man. He has spoken more words, perhaps, than any other president; but to an unusual extent, his words and actions float free of each other. He talks with unnerving ease on both sides of an issue: about the desirability, for example, of continuing large-scale investment in fossil fuels. Anyone who voted twice for Obama and was baffled twice by what followed — there must be millions of us — will feel that this president deserves a kind of criticism he has seldom received. Yet we are held back by an admonitory intuition. His predecessor was worse, and his successor most likely will also be worse.

Source: Harper' Magazine

Francis and the Nuns

Is the new Vatican all talk?

By Mary Gordon

Source: Harper’s Magazine

A year ago this month, Pope Francis gave a long interview to Antonio Spadaro, the editor in chief of an Italian Jesuit journal called La Civiltà Cattolica. Francis was just a few months into his papacy at the time, and the interview — published simultaneously by more than a dozen Jesuit outlets — was for many people around the world their introduction to the first Latin-American pontiff. The interview is long and complex, but a few words were quoted everywhere. “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods,” Francis told Spadaro. “When we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the Church . . . is clear and I am a son of the Church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” 

This may not sound like much — it was, after all, a shift in emphasis, not in doctrine — but coupled with subsequent statements about the evil of inequality, the pope’s words suggested the possibility of a new era for the Church, one in which economic justice would take precedence over divisive social issues. Perhaps the most important change was tonal: the punitive, absolutist cadences of John Paul II and Benedict XVI had been replaced by gentle, openhearted language. Progressives both in the Church and outside it celebrated the development. Suddenly, the world had a new apostolic heartthrob: Francis was Time magazine’s Person of the Year and the cover boy for Rolling Stone.

On Meeting Our Meat

Going undercover at a slaughterhouse in an age of agribusiness gag laws

By Ted Conover
Source: Harper’s Magazine

I eat meat. Always have. I’ve tried a couple of times to stop, but have never done more than cut back: I miss it too much.

Given its intimate connection to my body and my health, I’m interested in how meat is made. This seems natural enough in an age in which farmers and feedlots and meat companies fill animals with hormones and antibiotics, and grow animals in factories in order to maximize production.

But the producers of meat apparently worry that if we know how it’s made we’ll eat less of it. They make it all but impossible for journalists and members of the general public to visit production facilities, be they poultry plants, pork factories, or beef slaughterhouses. Animal-rights groups, dissatisfied with this secrecy, have made it their business to send operatives inside with hidden cameras, to devastating effect.

So I decided to find work in a beef slaughterhouse, an experience I write about in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine. Before I set out, I touched base with the Humane Society of the United States, PETA, and Mercy for Animals to learn about their investigations. I asked: How did you pick the farms or plants you went to? Had you heard complaints?

In each case, the answer was that they hadn’t targeted anyplace in particular; they’d just gone where they thought they could get hired. “We have never found a facility where there wasn’t abuse,” Nathan Runkle, the founder of Mercy For Animals, told me. “Finding it is not the issue. Our challenge is just to have a camera there when it happens.”

I thought I might gain a broader view by getting a job not simply as a company line worker but as a federal meat inspector. The Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) of the USDA oversees live slaughter, and it hires inspectors on the basis of either experience in the industry (often factory work, including quality control) or education, specifically a four-year college degree with sufficient math and science credits. After reviewing my transcript, the FSIS said I was short some credits, so I enrolled in a distance-learning math course at the University of Illinois, completed it five months later (B+!), and reapplied.

During the two years I waited to get a job, I watched with growing alarm the rise of so-called ag-gag laws. This class of laws, promoted by agribusiness in farm states, criminalizes the unauthorized recording of video or photographs inside a production facility. Their passage (in six states so far, with seven others considering them) has been accompanied by rhetoric denouncing the terrorism of  “extremist vegans” who would destroy the industry. In other words, in lieu of cleaning its house, the meat industry has elected to kill the messenger.

Though recording video was not my goal, I was nevertheless concerned as a writer. Some of the laws go beyond video and photography: proposed legislation in Arkansas would have made it illegal for anyone but law-enforcement personnel to “collect evidence into alleged claims of criminal conduct involving an animal.” (Whether such laws would be constitutional or enforceable remains to be seen.)

Nebraska, where I was finally hired in October 2012, is considering an ag-gag law but has not yet passed one, so my research was unaffected. But what about the next journalist? What about the next activist? With the underlying problems at slaughterhouses left unaddressed, undercover investigations won’t stop, which means that before long some idealistic person will be charged with a felony and become a martyr to the cause of safe, humanely produced food. And that should very much focus meat-eating Americans on the question of what’s so wrong with our food that the industry would promote draconian laws to keep its practices hidden from view.

Obama’s Real Political Program

Source: Harper’s Magazine
 Vague talk about the middle class, and plenty for big business
By John R. MacArthur

You have to hand it to Barack Obama when it comes to having it both ways: He never stops serving the ruling class, yet the mainstream media, from right to left, continues to pretend that he’s some sort of reincarnation of Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully committed to the downtrodden and deeply hostile to the privileged and the rich.

The president’s double game was never more adroit than during his most recent State of the Union address. Reacting to the speech, the right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer spoke on Fox News of Obama’s “activist government” beliefs and his penchant for “painting the Republicans as the party of the rich” while portraying himself as the defender of the “middle class, Medicare and all this other stuff.” Meanwhile, the “liberal” New York Times praised his “broad second-term agenda” as “impressive” and blamed the G.O.P. for “standing in the way” of the many liberal reforms that the president supposedly wants to enact to help the poor and the middle class.

Yet the address contained hardly anything progressive: On the contrary, Obama’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to only $9 an hour — and not for two years — was a populist parody. Under the president’s proposal, a minimum-wage worker supporting a family of three (two parents, one child) would make $18,720 a year in 2015 — barely above today’s federal poverty line of $18,480 and well short of the 1968 peak, inflation-adjusted, of $21,840 a year, or $10.50 an hour. Combined with Obama’s mosquito bite of an increase in the top marginal income-tax rate to 39.6 percent — restoring Bill Clinton’s top rate would still put it at way less than the Eisenhower-era top rate of 91 percent — the minimum-wage bill insults the many millions of less fortunate people who voted for the incumbent. So much for “activist government” and an “impressive” agenda.

Of course, I don’t take this sort of hyperbolic commentary seriously anymore. If Obama ever had a “philosophy,” it’s about power sharing — that is, sharing parts of his plastic personality with the powers that be — from the Daley brothers in Chicago who advanced his career, to the bankers and hedge-fund mangers who financed his campaigns, to the lobbyists and party barons in Washington who write his legislative proposals. Never has a leading American Democrat (including the dean of “New Democrats,” Bill Clinton) done less to promote “activist government” in support of less-privileged people while getting so much undeserved credit for “trying” to help them.

But as a student of propaganda and politics, I can’t help but remark on how effective Obama has been at muzzling criticism, or even intelligent analysis, from the liberals who should be revolting against him. The other week I was reading the very pro-Obama Nation magazine when I happened upon “Defeatist Democrats.” It was uncharacteristically critical of the Democratic Party and the president. With no byline at the top of the article, I found myself wondering who (now that Alexander Cockburn is dead) in the left-wing weekly’s regular stable would write something as tough as this: “The decay of the Democratic Party can’t be better confirmed than by the actions of its leader.”

Noting that in the 2008 campaign Obama “championed” an increase in the minimum wage to $9.50 “but after winning fell silent” (even though the Democrats had solid majorities back then in both houses of Congress), the article went on to point out that after the 2012 election “Democrats privately blamed Obama for not running with the Congressional Democrats and refusing to share campaign money from the President’s $1 billion stash.” It quoted former Colorado senator Gary Hart as saying that “Democrats don’t know what the party stands for,” and predicted losses in the 2014 midterm elections if the Democrats pursued their strategy of “raising the money and taking care not to offend business interests by talking vaguely about the middle class and ignoring the growing poorer classes that are the Democratic Party’s natural constituency.”

Who was this mystery writer and why wasn’t his name on the magazine’s cover? At the end of the piece I found the answer, and the byline: Ralph Nader, who is among the last national political figures who will call something what it really is. His name wasn’t on the cover because for liberals the Obama dream dies hard.

Lately, besides talking up “deficit reduction” and creating a “thriving middle class,” Obama is pushing an even more ambitious and destructive “free trade” agenda certain to weaken the middle class even more. The ultra-realistic Financial Times reported last month that Obama had put “trade at the heart of” his agenda. This means we will no doubt see lovely bipartisan cooperation between the two enemy parties when there’s real money on the table for their big donors.

Of the proposed deals, the most damaging for American manufacturing and decent factory wages would be the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which if signed would follow on Obama’s 2011 job-killing trifecta — the “free-trade” agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. More Japanese and other Asian imports would result, but Obama’s cheerleaders in the media blur the debate by touting a supposed manufacturing revival they cutely call “insourcing.” The insourcing “boom” is another administration fraud (see anything written by Alan Tonelson), but it neatly distracts people from the ever-increasing foreign-trade deficit.

Preposterous though it may seem, Republican leaders in Congress, despite their simple-minded obsession with spending cuts, come off like straight shooters by comparison with Obama. As for Obama, well, as one of the president’s former supporters put it to me, “He’s one of them!” But if liberals like the odds for 2014, by all means, they should stay the course. They might well wind up with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

America Is Having the Wrong Fiscal Argument

The question should be whether to cut the deficit right now, not how
By Jeff Madrick
Source: The Harper's Magazine

This week’s agreement on the fiscal cliff is disappointing. Although President Obama can claim victory on such important measures as extending unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed, he agreed to raise the income threshold for the tax hikes he sought from $250,000 to $450,000. Most important, he failed to secure an agreement to mitigate future social-spending cuts, meaning Social Security and Medicare will still be on the table in the next few months. This leaves the Republicans in a position to once again employ brinksmanship when it comes time to raise the debt ceiling, which could be as soon as mid-February. At that time, they may well succeed in their demands for serious and unnecessary social-spending cuts.

It’s more than a little unfortunate that the United States was boxed into the fiscal-cliff situation in the first place. That the nation is adopting a contractionary policy with an unemployment rate of nearly 8 percent is absurd. And that there is such a widespread consensus — accepted by the media as simple common sense — that substantial deficit reductions must be made in 2013 to solve a deficit problem that won’t begin seriously until in the 2020s, is a question for future historians and maybe psychologists. Even the current compromise, which rescinds the payroll tax cut and includes significant tax breaks for others, takes significant spending power out of an economy that is too weak withstand the move.
The fiscal cliff, recall, was effectively imposed on America by Republicans who in 2011 threatened to cause an unprecedented default on U.S. debt by not raising the legal debt limit. At the time, an agreement to reduce sharply the budget deficit across ten years was put in place, intensifying the pressure to cut social-program (and military) spending. The central battle now is whether deficit-cutting should be weighted toward higher taxes or sharp cuts in social spending — but it should be about whether deficit reductions of $4 trillion to $5 trillion over ten years are necessary at all, especially if they’re to start now. We have already seen caps placed on valuable social programs, including on the National Institutes of Health, on subsidies for low-income housing, and on college loans, which all told amount to about $1.5 trillion in future spending reductions.

Deficit-cutting under the current circumstances is bad economics, according both to theory and to historical precedent. Austerity economics are palpably and tragically failing in Europe, yet the same types who urge austerity on Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and even France — not to mention the non-Eurozone giant, Britain — are also urging it in broad consensus in America. And they are succeeding. Dedicated to their polite even-handedness, meanwhile, the media have tended to blame both sides and to assume unquestioningly that deficit reduction is required, rather than identifying the clear culprits responsible for sustaining our economic mess. These culprits are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum. In order of importance, they are:

First and foremost, the small-government, tea-party Republicans who have been working for an economic policy driven by ideology and a hatred of most social policies. True, small-government ideologues — there are a few — would also seek to cut the military, but this group’s target is solely what it thinks of as the nanny state.

Second are the self-appointed “common sense” centrists, who agree that the federal deficit is our biggest problem, and thereby lend credibility to the right-wing extremists. These are the seemingly serious and purportedly moralistic practitioners of the anti-Keynesian austerity economics that are failing so badly in Europe. They include the powerful Campaign to Fix the Debt, which has aggressively signed up supporters across political and racial spectrums, and the Concord Coalition, as well as the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget, which is financed by investment-banking billionaire Pete Peterson. But it is dominated by CEOs, almost all of whom have massive retirement funds and health-care benefits, yet demand cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Their great public-relations tool is the budget-balancing committee appointed by President Obama and led by Clinton Administration official Erskine Bowles and Republican former senator Alan Simpson. With heavy support from the groups mentioned above, the conservative document this group produced has come to be seen as the common-sense middle ground. Alarmingly, it calls for federal spending to be capped at 21 percent of GDP, the average since the 1970s, in order to control the deficit. Such an average cannot accommodate an aging population, rising health-care costs, and new public investments. It would require sharp cuts in social spending. The press nevertheless seems to trust the document and Simpson and Bowels are paid handsomely by deficit hawks, reportedly led by Peterson, to make speeches around the country in support of their views.

Third is the Congressional Budget Office, which is almost never mentioned as a partisan in the debate because it is legally bipartisan, answerable both to Democrats and Republicans. This distinction is almost meaningless. The CBO’s economics are utterly neoclassical, which means it is conservative, in that it almost always favors less government spending.

Its projections generally assume that high budget deficits will crowd out private investment and slow economic growth. This is simply biased economics. It also presumes that higher taxes reduce the incentive to work — a dubious conjecture at current levels of taxation, to say the least.

Guided by such assumptions, the office frequently arrives at questionable conclusions. For example, its long-term projections have suggested broadly that it would have been better to go over the fiscal cliff than to arrive at the sort of compromise reached this week. In its long-term outlook, the CBO claims that had the drastic spending cuts and tax hikes of the fiscal cliff gone into force, the economy would have bounced back robustly from an ensuing modest recession with 9 percent unemployment. Unemployment would thereafter have fallen to nearly 5 percent, and that federal deficits as a percentage of GDP would have fallen sharply, to 2 percent or so between the late 2010s and 2022. (The CBO’s assumption here is that the recession would lead to lower interest rates and rapid capital investment — that economies are basically self-adjusting, a profoundly conservative notion.)

The fiscal-cliff compromise, by contrast, will in the CBO’s eyes lead to bigger deficits and ultimately higher taxes, therefore robbing the economy of growth. Deficits would rise to 4 or 5 percent, and debt as a percent of GDP will soar. This is austerity economics, pure and simple. If you read the fine print, the CBO provides alternative projections based on milder assumptions about the impact of deficits — assumptions that in my view are much closer to the truth. But the “central’ projections, which are alarmist about the size of the deficit, are the ones the office publishes, and the ones Congress, fiscal hawks, and most of the media take at face value. Economic absurdity, as I say. America badly needs a shadow CBO that publishes more realistic projections, unconstrained by neoclassicism.

President Obama may have been able to make a better deal, but the Republicans are formidable enemies thanks to their numbers and their refusal to compromise. Obama made a mistake when he joined the deficit hawks so enthusiastically back in 2009. It is probably too late to change course — the great social programs inspired by the New Deal are now at stake.

The Coming Fiscal Bluffs

 Will President Obama stand tough in budget negotiations?
By Jeff Madrick posted on Harper’s Magazine 

 The “fiscal cliff” must be very confusing to most Americans. Largely ignored during the presidential campaign, it suddenly seems to be Washington’s sole focus. But know this: it is quite a problem.

In the absence of a new budget deal, a variety of temporary tax cuts will end beginning in 2013, as will a major spending program that extends unemployment insurance. The resulting higher taxes and reduce unemployment insurance will reduce people’s ability to spend. At the same time, Congress will be required to begin cutting government spending, thanks to the failure of the famous “supercommittee” to agree on a reduction of about $900 billion in federal spending over ten years. Half of the cuts will come from defense, Homeland Security and other security programs; the other half from social programs, excluding Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. These cuts, too, will dampen the economy. (Indeed, every dollar of spending cuts does more damage than higher taxes, on balance.)

But why the sudden tension in the wake of the election, especially on Wall Street, where stock prices have fallen sharply? Because President Obama’s win makes an easy compromise less likely, if more sensible in its particulars than one Romney might have forged.

Obama gave a brief talk about the fiscal cliff this afternoon. He looked more decisive and relaxed than he has in a long time, perhaps thanks to his electoral victory. He was adamant that he wants taxes raised for the rich—those who make more than $250,000, about 2 percent of Americans. This has long been the president’s line, of course.

The House Republicans, who are in the majority again, remain firm that they will not allow taxes to be raised for the rich, though they have made one mild concession: House speaker John Boehner has said he is willing to look at closing loopholes to raise tax revenues. This isn’t likely to provide a successful path to compromise, but it is at least a crack in the barrier.

So let’s say no agreement is reached before December 31. At that point, taxes will rise by about $450 billion. These tax increases include all the Bush tax cuts, about $190 billion worth. Of that, $56 billion will come from the rich. The 2 percentage-point payroll tax cut that Obama put in place in 2011, and that was extended into 2012, would also likely be allowed to expire, accounting for more than $100 billion in tax increases. Taxes would also be raised on those who pay the alternative minimum tax (which is in need of an updating). This would mean about $100 billion more in taxes next year. The extension of unemployment insurance would also end—there’s about $40 billion.

As for government spending, the scheduled cuts amount to only about $80 billion in 2013, according to Goldman Sachs.

Thus, without an agreement, up to $600 billion in spending power will be taken out of the economy, or 4 percent of GDP. That’s one big number. It would lead to outright recession and a jump in unemployment of well more than 1 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Such a recession could easily deepen, as recessions often do, its component parts feeding on each other—unemployment leading to less demand, less demand leading to less profit, and less profit leading to more job cuts. Unemployment could return to 10 percent. Given that Europe is already in a worsening recession, the risks are profoundly worrying.

Grounds do exist for compromise to reduce the potential $600 billion bite. Taxes for the other 98 percent will not be raised, and the alternative minimum tax increase could be eliminated, thus substantially reducing the tax increases. There would then only be a roughly $200 billion increase when payroll tax cuts expire and taxes on the well-off are raised. Modest new tax hikes are already built into the Affordable Care Act. Meantime, unemployment insurance could be extended, and only half of the automatic spending cuts could come into force.

These moves would reduce the consequences of the fiscal cliff by more than half, removing only $200 to $250 billion in spending power from the economy, as opposed to $600 billion. Catastrophe would be averted. But here is a key point: The removal of even 2 percent of GDP, though it would not lead to outright recession, would still mean slow growth. Add European unknowns to this, and we would have 8 percent unemployment to look forward to for a long time.

A further threat is that Obama will agree to cut Social Security and Medicare in order to convince Republicans to accept a tax hike on the 2 percent. For example, he could consent, disastrously, to raise the eligibility age of Medicare. Imagine trying to buy a health care policy at age sixty-six, while you’re retired?
Some bright Washington observers think Obama will hang much tougher, given his victory and the Democrats’ Senate gains. If so, he would be gambling that Republicans cannot tolerate a big tax increase or major cuts from the national-security budget.

But I don’t think Obama is that kind of gunslinger, even given his electoral advantage. He has shown himself to be open to cuts when it comes to entitlement programs, and he also wants to avoid panic in the financial markets, which could come about if the Republicans again go to the wire and refuse to raise the debt ceiling in early 2013.

Instead, Obama will again seek some kind of “bipartisan” solution, which may mean taking a bite out of Social Security and Medicare in return for a tax hike on the rich. Too bad. What we need is more stimulus, more public investment, and the maintenance of our cherished entitlements programs. It is hard to see those things happening next year.

The Democratic Argument for Compulsory Vot

By Simon Liem
© 2012 Harper’s Magazine

In an essay selected for the Readings section of our October issue, Victoria Bassetti writes about the lack of constitutional protection for voting—an important issue right now, as some states have passed voter-identification laws that civil-rights groups believe could discourage millions of people from voting in the upcoming general election. Since 2003, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and a handful of other states have passed laws that require voters to present photo identification at polling stations to cast a ballot, with the stated aim of preventing voter-impersonation fraud, and the actual aim of placing obstacles to voting in front of poor people and minorities, who happen to traditionally support Democrats.

Even without such efforts, turnout will be abysmally low, as it always is. Presidential-election voting peaked in the twentieth century in 1960, when nearly two-thirds of eligible voters came out to the polls, and reached its nadir in 1996, when just over half did. The most recent two presidential elections were better, with each turning out over 60 percent, but the most recent midterm elections managed only 40. Given that it has become a struggle to get half of Americans to the polls, it’s quite incredible that anyone would do anything to discourage voting.

This has become a particular problem for Democrats, who, if they were wise, would be targeting nonvoters with more than just get-out-the-vote drives. In August, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed that unregistered voters, if they had to choose, would pick Obama over Romney at a rate of nearly two to one, while registered voters who said they weren’t sure if they would cast a ballot also heavily favored Obama. The pool of 90 to 95 million nonvoters represent a significant missed opportunity for Democrats, one they might someday capitalize on by pushing to aggressively reform voting laws around the country, a strategic goal that happens to coincide with increased participation in the democratic process. Allowing same-day registration and a variety of acceptable identifications at the voting booths helped Minnesota achieve the highest turnout of any state in the 2008 presidential election, at 77 percent, while Democrats in California have passed laws that allow for online registration in the upcoming election, resulting in promising early numbers. But to really push people to the polls would require much more.

The most obvious and effective reform would be a compulsory voting system. While such a move would invoke the rage of tea partiers and those who see compulsory anything as inimical to the American notion of freedom, the concept isn’t foreign to U.S. politics. In the seventeenth century, several American colonies required eligible voters to participate in elections. (In Virginia, the fine for not voting was at one point two hundred pounds of tobacco, while Georgia wrote into its first constitution a fine of five pounds for anyone who absented himself from an election without valid reason.) More recently, many delegates to Massachusetts 1917 constitutional convention supported amending the state’s constitution to permit compulsory voting. Turnout had been backsliding in the United States from its highest historic participation rates in the late nineteenth century, and was heading for its all-time low in the 1920 presidential elections. One of the Massachusetts delegates argued that “when these men find it obligatory on them to go and vote they are going to give this question thought, and they will study it over, and they will talk it over in the market-places and in the grocery stores and with the folks at home, and the result is they get more light and are better able to vote.” Another complained that 28 percent of registered voters had not voted in state elections that year, and that primaries regularly drew less than one-quarter of voters—turnouts that would be nothing short of miraculous today. The trends were troubling enough for drafters of the constitution to add the amendment permitting the government to require voting, though no law has yet been passed to test it.

Other countries have shown that mandatory voting works. In 1924, Australia legislated a mandatory-voting system after its turnout dipped below 60 percent in its most recent federal elections. Its next ones, in 1925, saw the participation rate rise to 91 percent; and it has never dipped below that figure since. Opinion polls consistently show that the majority of Australians support obligatory voting. Similar systems in Italy and Belgium, which has had a compulsory vote since the nineteenth century, regularly produce turnouts of over 90 percent. Notably, the few who do refuse to vote in these countries face relatively mild punishments. Nonvoting Australians are fined up to about $50. Nonvoting Italians can encounter a few extra bureaucratic hurdles when trying to register for state services.

It would be in the Democrats’ interest to push in that direction—and at relatively low cost, as reform would first have to happen slowly on a state level, where, if other systems are any example, the success and popularity of compulsory voting would serve as a model that could spread through the country. The biggest challenges would most likely be legal ones—because, as Bassetti points out, the lack of a federal constitutional right to vote makes standards flexible and essentially subject to the whims of state courts.

Of course, Democrats legislating voters to the polls strictly for their benefit would be no less cynical than Republican voter-registration efforts, nor earlier efforts to remove property requirements, for example, to ensure that more white men could vote, thus preserving slavery. But a compulsory vote would represent the expansion of electoral engagement; the Democrats would potentially reap political gain while advocating for a just and proven form of democratic process. That they aren’t taking the initiative is their own loss.