No doubt some true believers among the base would beg to differ, but elites making strategy for the far-right Republican Party recognize that there is no majoritarian support for their agenda of mass immiseration, apocalypse, and theocratic patriarchy. Undaunted, right-wing activists nonetheless think they can stay in power over the long term by making it harder for working-class Americans, especially black Americans, to vote. Whether or not they’re right, the Left can’t afford to wait and find out: it needs to fight back, including by pressuring the president.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when men without property, black men, and women got the vote, each of these victories signaled a societal rejection of cruel exclusions and hierarchies, an expanded idea of who counted as a full human, an enlarged definition of the body politic. Republicans would like to arrest any further advances of this kind and rewind to a simpler and less civilized time.

To that end, Texas reactionaries, facing demographic and political changes that could profoundly threaten the ability of future reactionaries to hold power, have just passed a law that attempts to shrivel the franchise by making voting more complicated. The Texas legislation renders mail-in voting more difficult, empowers partisan “poll watchers,” bans twenty-four-hour and drive-through voting (which were excellent pandemic innovations by Houston), and creates new ways for citizens to be arrested for the crime of voting or even helping others to vote. This year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, thirty other states have passed similar laws, and more are in the works. It’s obvious that much of this is directly targeted at black voters in effect and intention.