Jake Grumbach at Slate has an original take on the Supreme Court voting rights horror. I think he’s on to something. He begins by discussing the obsession among many of the punditocracy with “polarization” as an explanation for all of our troubles. I’m sure I’ve done it myself. Grumbach thinks that’s part of what’s led us to this awful place:
The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 70 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.
The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.
The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.
He has a point. Seeing “polarization” as the cause of our problems elides the underlying reasons why we are polarized. And it gave this misbegotten court a nice little rationale for proclaiming that racism is no longer a problem, it’s partisanship and that, my friends, is perfectly legitimate.
When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.
Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.
The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.
They are acting in bad faith, of course. What else is new? They know very well that racism .(and any number of other cultural pathologies) are at the root of the stark differences between the two parties. It’s that they are either racists themselves or such pure partisans that they were determined to turn this into an advantage for their own team. Or both.
And they did. Shamelessly.
