Hillary's New Constituency

For a generation — perhaps longer — the liberals have been segregating Americans into smaller and smaller groups. Then they claim to be each group's unique champion. First they fragmentize America. Then they step forward and represent themselves as fragmented America's noblest defenders.

Last week, Hillary Clinton identified yet another of these fragmentized groups, and she promised to take up their cause in time for the 2016 election. Her cause is the voter who oversleeps, particularly the voter who oversleeps on Election Day. Hillary is coming to the aid of these drowsy voters by demanding at least a 20-day period for them to vote. Even a chronic oversleeper ought to be able to awaken at least one morning in 20. Hillary assures us that the 20-day period will include evenings and weekends and perhaps mood music. Possibly the Federal Election Commission will throw in an alarm clock and a cup of coffee. Voting rights advocates claim that as many as one-third of our fellow citizens suffer from this disability.

One would think that the Founding Fathers would have written into the Constitution an article ensuring that the citizenry had sufficient time to vote, certainly in national elections. During the New Deal could not some visionary speak out on behalf of this somnolent constituency? Had they all cast their vote, even in their pajamas, my guess is that the New Deal would have been even stronger. Possibly we would have had socialism by the mid-1930s and not have had to wait all these years for the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

Now Hillary and presumably Bernie are going to extend the presidential election for 20 days, maybe more. Why not the entire election year? There are an awful lot of distractions that keep people from voting, but it is a sacred right ... whenever they get around to exercising it. I admired Hillary's stridency in speaking out about this.

While we are on the subject, think of how the Democrats have broken down America into contending groups. On the Republicans' side there are the tycoons, followed by the white voters, mostly male and decidedly overweight. On the Democrats' side there are the women voters bravely casting their vote against the Republicans' grisly "War on Women." Next there are the African-Americans who thus far have resisted the temptations of the faux African-Americans such as Justice Clarence Thomas, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Utah Congresswoman Mia Love, U.S. Appeals Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown, and now candidate Ben Carson. There are also Latinos, Native-Americans, the gays, the gender metamorphosing, and so on.

America was not always like this. Back in the 1960s, when I was in college, I hardly knew what a Latino was. Nonetheless I went to school with plenty of Americans with Spanish surnames all of whom would now qualify as Latinos. I recall two fellow students who had very similar names. Their surname was Alvarez. They were middle class, possibly upper middle class. They were members of very good fraternities. They were both B-plus students. There was not a hint of ethnic chauvinism to them. About 10 years ago I came across one of them again. He had changed. Now he was a self-identified Latino. There was an unfamiliar edge to him. Somehow this son of the American middle class had "dis-assimilated" himself and become a Latino. How many middle-class women have "dis-assimilated" themselves and become feminists? How many other so-called minorities are spurning the vast American middle class and joining liberalism's clientele?

The late Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics wrote about liberalism's "suffering situations" years ago. He noted that the liberals look out across a relatively comfortable and prospering country, and they alight on "suffering." The liberals have no sound idea of how to relieve the suffering, but they are quick to realize how to put the suffering to their uses. The result today is the feminists, the African-Americans, the Latinos, the gays, and the LGBTs, and now the VWOSOEDs. You have not heard of the VWOSOEDs? That is the acronym for the "voter who oversleeps on Election Day." Hillary is going to make these poor souls a dynamic force in the 2016 election. Billionaire George Soros is going to fund their cause. They will hold rallies, presumably nighttime rallies. Then once the election is over we can all get a good night's rest.

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R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a political and cultural monthly, which has been published since 1967. He's also the author of several books.