The Fight to Vote — It’s at the Heart of American History

Politics may be messy, but, as the Brennan Center’s Michael Waldman argues, the struggle for the right to vote is never over

By Michael Waldman December 23, 2022

Carnegie Reporter Winter 2022 Voting

On November 3, 2022, Dr. Brenda Williams casts her ballot during early voting in Sumter, South Carolina. Williams and her husband, Dr. Joseph Williams, registered hundreds of their patients as new voters. Credit: © 2022 Sue Dorfman

The fight for the vote has been driven, above all, by the aspirations of those who seek to make their voices heard. It has never been a smooth glide. At every step of the way, entrenched groups, fearing change, have fought back and tried to reduce the opportunity for political participation and power.

Until recently, simmering anger did not translate into a full mobilization for action across society. At other times in American history, such as the Progressive Era or the civil rights movement, millions of citizens came together in a profusion of efforts at the local, state, and eventually the national level. They formed organizations, filed lawsuits, wrote books, staged marches, raised funds, even went to jail.

Now once again a growing number of Americans realize that the very tenets of our democracy are at stake. The Roman Republic lasted for four centuries, longer than our own government. It was battered in 133 BC by Tiberius Gracchus, a wealthy, bumptious populist who proposed greater economic and political equality but stirred violence among his supporters and overrode the republic’s norms and election rules. For Gracchus, it ended poorly: he was murdered during a riot. But the damage had been done. Ever more brazen attacks on the republic’s institutions, often in the name of the people, followed for decades. Julius Caesar was smarter than Gracchus, and when it came his time to seize power, more ruthless. His successor, Augustus, ended the republic.

And yet the convulsions of our time may be labor pains for a new, more hopeful, more equal, and diverse country. Few nations undergo demographic change of such velocity without disruption. The 2020 census not just showed that Latinos now are nearly 19 percent of the population, with Asians doubling their share over two decades to nearly 6 percent, but that the number of people only identifying as white in the United States actually fell, something that had never happened since the first census in 1790. These changes have produced a backlash, of course. But they also point toward a renewed America, a multiracial democracy held together by commitment to common ideals.

One positive sign comes from the rise in participation itself. For years, American voting rates stubbornly remained among the lowest in the democratic world. In 2016, in the first edition of my book The Fight to Vote, I surmised that our social forces — television saturated, isolated, with millions “bowling alone,” even the secret ballot itself — all dampened turnouts. (Imagine a rule that said you could root for any sports team of your choice— but only in private, without heading to a bar, watching a game with friends, tailgating at a stadium, or cheering in the stands. Active support for teams would wither.) One great task for this generation, I wrote, was to find a way to make political engagement as celebratory and compelling for those who rarely see thousands of other like-minded people in the flesh at a rally or parade. That was all before the Trump explosions of 2016, the women’s march of 2017, the surge of suburban women to the polls in 2018, producing a Democratic sweep, or the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, and the extraordinary jump in participation in both parties. Once again Americans are holding the equivalent of torchlight parades.

And as in earlier eras, democracy itself has become not just the means for expression but a cherished value and urgent goal. In 2020, the election was saved by businesses and judges and journalists and public health experts, by community activists by the thousands, and by hundreds of thousands of citizens who scrambled and improvised to make sure a safe election took place. Our democracy will only sustain if that mobilization continues. As during the American Revolution and other times when the push for representation became a public creed, the ideal of our founding — that government is legitimate only when it rests on the “consent of the governed” — must remain a fighting faith for millions. Two centuries of activists, from Ben Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Alice Paul and John Lewis, found joy and purpose in doing so.

American politics can be dispiriting — it’s a messy, jarring, jumbled patchwork of candidates, causes, and elections. But at stake is more than just an effort to craft a workable self-governing republic. Democracy has embedded within it a moral sense — that every individual is of equal worth and has the agency to shape the most important institutions affecting his or her life.

If the American creed is to mean anything, it is that the basic glue holding the country together is the aspiration set out by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. The fight for the vote over the years has been more than a clash of classes, parties, factions, races, and interests. It has been a long drive, stumbling, retreating, but ultimately in one direction: toward fulfilling that ideal. So we should all regard it as not just wrong but fundamentally illegitimate, indeed un-American, for anyone to try to make it harder for another American to vote. This fight over first principles should no longer surprise us. In fact, it is typical, and understandable.

It turns out John Adams was right in 1776: “there will be no end of it.” Once again the story of American democracy is being written. The fight to vote is at the heart of American history. It is up to all of us to advance that fight and keep it at the center of debate today, where it belongs.

Michael Waldman is president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

This is an edited excerpt from Michael Waldman’s book The Fight to Vote (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2022).