What Caught My Eye forApril 29 - May 6 (#14)

What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white.

The Jim Crow South repeated.

In other words: Discriminating against Black voters is okay because they vote for Democrats. Many Democrats in the 19th century, when Black people overwhelmingly voted Republican, would have enthusiastically agreed with Alito’s assessment. But if you apply Alito’s logic to those white-supremacist Democrats, they weren’t racist either. They just, you know, wanted to win elections or something, and Black people were in the way. The fact that discriminating against Black voters would give Republicans an advantage today is not exculpatory; it only establishes a motive for discrimination.

Why adjust your policies to be more in line with what the people want, when you can just make it more difficult for them to have a voice in the halls of power?

Congress had specifically wanted to close the loophole that the Roberts Court has now pried back open to destroy the VRA almost entirely. The decision does not simply turn the clock back to 1980. It’s worse than that: Many Republican lawmakers may interpret the decision as permission to limit the voting power of troublesome minority voters. For all Alito’s moralizing about the risk of the VRA being “cynically used as a tool for advancing a partisan end,” that is exactly what he and the other five right-wing justices are doing.

Congressional will be damned.

Diminishing the power of minority voters may also allow the Republican Party to continue on its path from reactionary color-blindness to more overt racism, safe in the assumption that it will not have to answer to constituents who oppose such racism because they are its targets. There is little risk in attacking people who lack the power to remove you from office.

Gerrymandering will make sure of that.

Strip away the corporate-academic language and you’re left with a very old, very problematic argument: certain cultures — and we all know which ones they are claiming are supposedly the “middling” and “regressive” ones — are inferior, and the pursuit of inclusivity has been a civilizational error. That framing — some cultures produce wonders, others are regressive and harmful, pluralism is a civilizational threat — has been used to justify exclusion, hierarchy, and far worse for over a century. And while internet fascists like to think of it as edge lord contrarianism today, to most people it just comes across as a shiny coat of paint on historical bigotries and ignorance.

This is the publicly endorsed worldview of a company that is rapidly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance and enforcement apparatus, and it contains arguments that would be at home in a white nationalist pamphlet.