cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13129195
cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.ml/t/894692
The false notion that undocumented immigrants affect federal elections has a long history. But this year, due in part to rising migration at the U.S. southern border, the idea could have new potency.
You could say conservative fear mongering about non-citizens voting in the US with no actual substance to the fear has a “long history”.
It is more accurate to say however that conservative ideology is the same handful of hateful, fearful narratives used by the rich to turn the poor against one another, repeated ad naseum over and over again throughout history, with no evolution nor critical evaluation of the validity of the ideas employed to scare and manipulate people.
When you go back in time and read the words of hateful conservative ideologies at different points in history its all the same old dumb shit modern conservatism says while pretending its ideas are new, novel or just haven’t been given a chance to truly work yet (the reason austerity for the poor didn’t work in the past was it wasn’t cruel enough!!).
“Long history” is precisely the wrong phrase to use here as it suggests a long complex story of ideas evolving, interacting, cross pollinating and splitting into new perspectives and concepts. It is rather more accurate to say that fear mongering about non-citizens voting has an extremely “short history” that has been endlessly repeated with no reflection from conservatives about the accuracy or validity of those ideas or how effective the resulting policies were to address the perceived “problem”.
You wouldn’t say a broken record left to skip and repeat the same section of a song over and over again has a “long history” of being played on the record player but rather that the record is broken…
The long history is that conservatives everywhere have a long history of lying to promote racism.