If you had to narrow everything down to a sentence, what would you say the book is about?
Well, it would be a long sentence! I would say that the book is a plea for electoral reform based on careful demonstration of the many ways in which the Bush Republicans stole the last presidential election. My aim is not to challenge the outcome, because there's no constitutional way to do that. Rather, it is to get that scandal to reverberate, to provoke or inspire reform of our whole electoral system, which is a shambles.
Voter fraud existed yesterday and today. How do you see today's tactics as different from ones used in the past?
I'm not arguing that election fraud is something new. As Andrew Gumbel demonstrates in Steal This Vote, we've had this problem from the beginning and [from] both parties. The Democrats are hardly innocent. But there is something new that's happened here. This theft of votes was unprecedented in scale. I also think that the use of touch screen voting machines to commit fraud is unprecedented. We don't like to state the fact that we don't live in a democracy. And I think we don't like to say that we've made no progress. [But] what I argue is that the era of Jim Crow is back, with far more sophisticated methods, and with a far larger constituency to disenfranchise. I think that the Bush Republicans are quite racist and they are obsessed with disenfranchising black people. The old racist animus lives in that faction of that party now. But I also think that it only starts with people of color, but it includes everyone in this country who goes against the fanatical mission of Bush Republicans.
What audience did you have in mind when you wrote this book? Who do you hope will read it?
This is going to sound a bit grandiose, but I really wrote it for the people. I apologize for the sweep of that, but I think that the majority of voters in this country are rational and decent people, I think that most Americans believe in the system that was. The great thing about America is its basis in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. I think liberals and conservatives can ultimately agree on that much. The differences come from how we interpret those ideals, but we conservatives and liberals alike differ markedly from the theocrats who've hijacked the country because they do not believe in the ideals on which this country is based. They have a kind of racialist and religiously fanatical ideal in mind, and they want to police people's personal behavior. ‘Christian conservative' is a complete misnomer. This is a radical theocratic movement. In its way it's just about identical to the Islamist movement, which is why I call it Christianist in Fooled Again. Because it's not Christian in any way that I can see. [And] they're not conservatives, there's nothing conservative about them.
The subtitle of the book is “Why They'll Steal the Next One, Too.” Is it inevitable that the next election will be stolen, or is it possible that the balance of power has shifted in some meaningful way?
Whatever the reasons, I think that the great trauma of this presidency should help to shock us back onto the right track, toward the fulfillment of our constitutional ideals.
So you're an optimist.
If I weren't an optimist, I wouldn't have written the book. I mean, I'm known for the darkness of my work because I believe that we should just face facts, but the whole project is based on the assumption that people will make the right decision once they have all the facts. Roughly 20 percent of the American people now strongly support this president -- the same 20 or so percent who approved of the White House's and Congress's handling of the Terri Schiavo case. About a fifth of the electorate is theocratically inclined. And deeply un-American. And that to me is a source of great hope --
That it's only one-fifth?
Yeah. One-fifth of any population is demented. But we simply have to come to our senses and honor our enlightenment traditions, which have to do with reason, progress, science, all those good things.
Julia Gronnevet is a Prospect intern.
