The Wrong Rights

Campus Report ^ | August 18, 2009 | Mytheos Holt

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The Wrong Rights

by: Mytheos Holt, August 18, 2009

This July, the Heritage Foundation hosted a talk by Abigail Thernstrom, the author of the newly released book Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections, to discuss the findings of the book and explore its implications for current Constitutional/political discourse.

Thernstrom began her talk with the warning that she “[had] not written a book that can be reduced to soundbytes.” Moreover, Thernstrom said, “I thought I’d focus on a few interconnected points that challenge conservative thinking in the hopes of getting a discussion going.”

For many conservative thinkers, including William F. Buckley Jr, the Founder of National Review, the Voting Rights Act was suspect even at the time of its passage, and large segments of the movement, Heritage scholars included, have argued that the Act is completely unconstitutional in the present day. Heritage Foundation Legal Scholar Hans Von Spakovsky recently wrote a brief commentary calling the Act an “extraordinary and unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.”

Thernstrom took pains in the initial part of her speech to distance herself from those critics who thought the Act should never have been passed, citing the grip which white supremacist thinking had on the South at the time of its passage. “It was dangerous work registering black voters in the South and particularly in Mississippi. Not only dangerous, but particularly futile,” Thernstrom said.

Thernstrom also cited the impossibility of enforcing Constitutional requirements using conventional methods:

“The Southern racist establishment fully understood that its apartheid regime could last only as long as blacks were denied the vote and it did not intend to go quietly into the night....