Disenfranchising Democracy

He drew a circle that shut me out ... We drew a circle and took him In!” These lines from Edwin Markham's iconic 1915 poem “Outwitted” capture the central thesis of this insightful book: that competing groups in democracies draw and redraw circles of exclusion and inclusion that define political communities and transform “the social foundations of the state” (p. xi). This process of “people-making” has “the potential of fragmenting any existing unity and replacing it with a new and recomposed one, a new ‘people’” (p. 330). These formations are more or less inclusive, depending upon how conflicts over the civic status of peoples are resolved. David A. Bateman persuasively develops his thesis by exploring the rise of a “white man's republic” in antebellum America and the reformulation of voting rights in nineteenth-century Britain and France. The strength of Bateman's book lies in its chapters on America's pre–Civil War transition from extrinsic qualifications for voting based on economic standing to intrinsic qualifications based on race (and gender). Alexander Keyssar, in his pathbreaking book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (revised edition, 2009), and my own The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present (2018) have studied this transformation of America's franchise. However, Bateman provides a particularly detailed and focused analysis. He shows that the new political order did not inevitably result from racial prejudice or the new race science. Rather, it required the development of a political coalition that united the interests of northern egalitarians and southern slave interests

Democracy · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term · Sociology · State (computer science · Voting · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Political Theory and Influence