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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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I’d personally count the Trump travel bans, but I understand that’s contentious.

North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.

If you’re willing to go back a generation, the cadre of former Southern Democrats provided plenty of examples. Thurmond and Byrd held on into the 2000s, even!

So really nothing overt, and certainly not even close to the overt racism of Democrats historically and currently.

Overt racism has definitely gotten less acceptable. Opponents of civil rights have been fighting a defensive action since the 50s. Atwater probably said it best:

Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

So, sure. Republicans didn’t implement anything as racist as the Southern Democrats. They just fought a rearguard action for policies more extreme and immoral than anything in today’s Overton window. Every now and then, they’d try something on a large enough scale to get slapped down in the courts.

North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.

That's actually an interesting question. It's not clear to me from first principles (I understand Gingles makes it clear what SCOTUS thinks the VRA requires) whether packing minority voters into majority-minority districts or diluting them across other districts are both/either/neither to be found discriminatory.

I think you're right that some combination of pack/crack can be overtly discriminatory, but it just seems weird to me that the opposite actions are discriminatory. There's no clear 'arrow' nor is it manifest whether it's the voters in the packed or cracked districts are discriminated-against -- and surely it can't be both concurrently.

[ And as a normative factor that I think is irrelevant to the discussion, I think majority-minority districts are probably bad on net because to win them, politicians needs to take extreme positions which are (a) bad in themselves and (b) prevent those politicians from appealing to wider (e.g. statewide) office and are a kind of weird glass-ceiling kind of thing. ]

TBF to Byrd, the man turned it around so much he got a glowing eulogy from the NAACP, including mentioning his involvement in the VRA.

My mistake. I conflated him with Harry Byrd Sr., who never made such a pivot, but also died much earlier.

Harry Byrd Sr.

Huh, they don't seem to be related, especially since the name is because Robert was adopted, but Robert and Harry bear some resemblance IMO. Weird.

Being from West Virginia where 50% of buildings and public structures are named for Robert C. Byrd (citation needed), he's a memorable fella.

The Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia are not related. Strange but true.

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