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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25331 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

To satisfy the second and third preconditions—politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority—the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation, showing that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.

In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.

I am a bit of two minds about this. The Voting Rights Act seems like a band-aid solution, and if this SCOTUS is fond of one thing, it is ripping off liberal band-aids.

But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.

Democracy works pretty well compared to other political systems by convincing people dissatisfied with the status quo that that they can change things within the system, but it requires a widespread belief that the playing field is at least somewhat level. If you tell a peasant in an absolute monarchy 'if you have policy suggestions, simply become a great knight, accomplish heroic deeds until the king offers you the hand of his daughter and you inherit the kingdom', he will object that this seems very unlikely to work outside fairy tales and decide to try to use pitchforks to campaign for policy changes instead.

As an intuition pump, consider states worth 300 EC votes using state legislatures to pool their electors and award them to the winner of the overall popular vote over these states, effectively forming a single superstate for the purpose of presidential elections. Suppose Louisiana is not part of that block. How would Louisianans feel about this arrangement? Would they go "How other states assign their EC votes does not affect Louisiana", or would they declare "With this setup, the votes of us will never affect the outcome of presidential elections, ergo whoever gets elected is not our president".

I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."

Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."

If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.

It's zero-sum. If you maximize the representation of black voters, you minimize those of non-black voters. Maximizing the representation of black voters does not make the playing field level, it tilts it in their direction (and, in practice, towards the Democratic party). So you can't get a widespread belief that the playing field is level by doing that; instead, you get the (accurate) belief among the non-blacks that the playing field is skewed towards the blacks. In the recent past and in most analysis this sort of thing is discarded; only the feelings of the minorities count. But there's no good reason for that to be true.

It might be zero-sum, but with an obvious Schelling point. The Schelling point is proportional representation (PR), where you basically just round the vote to the reciprocal of the number of representatives. If your state has five representatives and with a vote of R: 63%, D: 37%, you would end up with three seats for the GOP and two for the Dems. Anyone who prefers another distribution (2-3, 4-1 and 5-0 could all be gerrymandered) will have a hell of a time arguing that their system is actually fairer.

This is similar to how 'one man (or adult citizen of whatever gender identity, these days), one vote' is an obvious Schelling point. Sure, you can argue that instead voting power should be weighted according to some characteristic, perhaps income tax or education attainment or score on a civics test or the voters ability to fight in a civil war or number of children not dependent on social security, but the chance of convincing most of the others that any of these is actually a fairer way to assign voting power is basically nil.

I would be surprised if the VRA had actually lead to red states being gerrymandered in a way which favored the Dems beyond PR, though it certainly led to limits on how much the state could be gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. The obvious move would be to say 'okay, the VRA says the Blacks get two majority districts, so we will make districts where the majority is Black and the rest is university towns full of pinko liberals'.

Personally, I see gerrymandering as an injustice, and there is no right to equality in injustice. If the VRA limits gerrymandering all of your ethnic minorities into a single district, the GOP could push for federal legislation prohibiting putting all of your religious minorities (e.g. Evangelicals) into a single district.

I would be surprised if the VRA had actually lead to red states being gerrymandered in a way which favored the Dems beyond PR, though it certainly led to limits on how much the state could be gerrymandered in favor of the GOP.

Even if this is true, this means blue states could be gerrymandered in a way which favored the Democrats (as with Massachusetts, 9 Democratic representatives to 0 GOP in a state that's about 30% Republican) while red states could not be gerrymandered in a way which favored the GOP.

Personally, I see gerrymandering as an injustice, and there is no right to equality in injustice.

Equality in injustice is better than inequality in injustice favoring one side... from the viewpoint of the other side.

Is Massachusetts gerrymandered? If the distribution of Rs is even enough, it's basically impossible to create a reasonably contiguous district with enough Rs. A cursory look at the map doesn't reveal any obvious ways to carve out an R district, and it seems that few state republicans complained about the last redistricting..

https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/09/02/massachusetts-trump-gerrymander-texas-california-democrats

Ultimately we should just get rid of single member districts.

It’s only zero-sum because everything else is gerrymandered now. Which ya gerrymandering probably is bad. You can’t be carving out black districts in Southern states from a fairness perspective if you’re not also forcing California to carve out districts for their farming communities (or basically anyone inland).

I guess it’s fine if Blacks never fully assimilate and the probably aren’t capable of it, but future immigration we really do not want more groups that can’t just blend in. City-rural differences are just going to happen.

But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.

I can understand this perspective somewhat, but I struggle to see how to decide which groups are considered important for this purpose doesn't either end up a complete clusterfuck or worse, vindicates the ethnonationalists' fears of the inevitability of multicultural spoils systems. There is also even plenty of examples where it works out the other way around - special interest minorities who care a lot about an issue and coordinate well reliably outcompete even much larger majorities if those don't care enough, through a combination of lawfare, lobbying and (local) special elections.

I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."

Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."

If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.

I think a large problem is also the centralisation of power in most western countries. Politics is often better the more local it is since the problems of one place are rarely the problems of another. Europe is, as usual, even worse on this account, since a lot of power got shifted into the EU which is at best difficult to understand for the average citizen, and at worst employs committees and courts that are entirely out of the citizens reach. Not that central politics is entirely bad, it has an important place especially for large-scale international trading, warfare or diplomacy. But this is often piggybacked unto for much more general power, and nobody ever lets go once granted.

They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

This is like saying that if I ban my employees from wearing turbans during work then I'm not discriminating against Sikh Men, even though Sikh Men are the ones who are going to be hit by the change almost exclusively. All I've done is laundered religious prejudice through an apparently neutral criteria. Shame on the 6 ideological justices.

  • -21

I think your example is more than simply disparate impact. If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.

A better comparison would be an accounting firm which only hires hot women. Then some Muslims complain that this is a discrimination against Muslims, because in traditional Muslim families, it is the husband who works outside the house and earns money. The employer does not give a damn about the religious affiliations of his employees, as long as there is enough cleavage for him to leer at. Is the employer guilty of religious discrimination?

Southern Republicans don't care about the skin color of the voters, they would happily win with the votes of the Blacks if the Blacks were voting for them. However, they care about the Republicans winning the maximum amount of seats, and Blacks tend to vote for Democrats, so they gerrymander to constrain the voting power of them, just like they try to constrain the voting power of urban communities or furries.

If Republicans were on record that they would rather lose than win with Black votes, things would be clear, it would be straightforward racial discrimination. This way, it seems much less clear, but I would argue that partisan gerrymandering is bad in itself.

Obviously FPTP is to blame, and the US should just adopt a better voting system. Or they should do recursive gerrymandering. (7% voted for candidate A, but due to communal gerrymandering, candidate A won 13% of the communities. Due to the gerrymandering of the communities, this won him 26% of the districts. Due to the distribution of states, this this won him 51% percent of the EC vote, so welcome your new president.)

If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.

Unironically, not so! If I’m running a machine shop, I don’t want turbans anywhere near my lathes. Other headwear doesn’t present nearly as much of a scalping risk.

That is fair. If you ban shawls, turbans and neckties, (or even better, impose upper limits on the tensile strength of anything rope-y worn around above the belt line), I would call that very reasonable.

(Of course, for the SJ left, that is still disparate impact. And the fact that you are running a machine shop instead of an ad agency in the first place is just further evidence that you are in the enemy class.)

I prefer to keep my head as far away from the spindle as possible when I'm operating a lathe, personally.

This is just disparate impact. I agree with Gail / Richard here that any possible standard you can think of has a disparate impact, and that its bad and dumb and makes no sense.

Try to think of a way of hiring or promoting people that does not benefit one group at the expense of another.

Simple: give up on meritocracy and equal protection, and set a quota by race/sex/etc. If you can't tune it perfectly (e.g. 5/10 board members can be women, but other areas don't have strict categories or nice numbers), then be sure to err against non-protected groups.

It's not good, but it is almost as simple as figuring out what the criteria is and then following it.

Politically I am fine with disparate impact when the country was 85/15 white/black. But it doesn’t work at all after the migration of last 40 years.

That being said VRA has always been unconstitutional allow with all racial discrimination.

IIRC a number of noisy affirmative-action opponents have said they would be willing to hold noses and support a compromise where affirmative action (and laws like disparate impact that de facto mandate it) was credibly restricted to ADOS blacks and tribally enrolled native Americans.

This isn't going to happen because

  • Machine politicians of other ethnicities are a key element of the Democratic coalition that could punish politicians for doing the deal.
  • White anti-black racists are a key element of the Republican coalition likewise
  • The vast majority of the problems caused by low-human-capital sub-populations in the US are caused by ADOS blacks anyway.

But affirmative action in favour of poorly assimilated immigrant-descended sub-populations is one of the most socially corrosive things you can do.

This seems like a deeper explanation of what I said works for me. Logically the two groups are different. Natives and blacks aren’t here by choice so finding a way to get them to have special representation that they couldn’t earn on their own makes some sense.

The reason you left out is the ratio we would have today with more groups claiming they need special accommodations. You can have functional institutions when 15% of the people have special status but the other 85% are assimilated whites who would still have comfortable governing majorities. It would be like 60-40 today. You lose the comfortable majority to govern today. The less the ratio is “meritocratic” and the more it is “special privilege” the worse the system becomes.

It would be like 60-40 today.

Worse than that because women are affirmative-action eligible.

This runs into a very basic question: if a general rule has a disparate impact should you eliminate the general rule.

The historic proposition was that you can have the general rule but allow for reasonable accommodations (eg if you are fired for refusing to work the sabbath, then that isn’t quitting for unemployment purposes but if you claimed every day was the sabbath that would be quitting).

Here, there doesn’t seem to be an easy accommodation.

if a general rule has a disparate impact should you eliminate the general rule.

If you look closely enough (and I've never seen a specific proposed amount of "acceptable" impact here), all general rules have a disparate impact at some form. I think it'd be difficult to come up with an example of two statistical variables that are absolutely uncorrelated for any sample size in the wild.

ETA: For a rather concrete example, any tax regime almost certainly has some degree of disparate impact. If income is correlated with race [citation left to reader], the burden of income taxation is as well, presenting a disparate impact on high earners (especially for a progressive taxation regime).

In order to stop conspiracy theory disparate impact racism you're advocating for explicit racism.

The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.

It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?

The solution here would be an arms length neutral body made up of experts from non-political backgrounds which deicdes on districts and isn't subject to the executive in who's on it. A bit like how the Judicial Appointments Comission decides on who to appoint as judges in the UK completely independent from whoever is in government at the time. All the gerrymandered angular districts would disappear in one fell swoop and things would look a lot more reasonable.

  • -13

That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.

But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics. I know the left generally hates States Rights because it limits their power more but we do have regional economies. You can only have a few SuperStar high margin based economies. Most do not work in those fields. Most people build a widget for $4 and sell it for $5. A lot of people have seen a huge QOL improvement being able to move out of California. Somewhat housing related but the tax regime Apple or Jane St can bear is not the same tax regime a small moat manufacturer can bear.

Perhaps you could just pass an Amendment limiting it to congressional districts but it would be a slippery slope.

Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.

That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.

It is a solved problem in every other democracy with single-member districts, despite the stakes being even higher in Parliamentary systems. I agree that the level of partisan rancour in the US right now is that it couldn't be done from scratch, with the possible exception where a non-partisan populist governor in a purple state like Jesse Ventura decided to make ending gerrymandering in the state part of his legacy. In the US context, proportional representation within states (or large multi-member districts in the largest states - NY could have separate lists for NYC+LI and upstate, for example) is the obviously correct approach.

But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics.

This is a good rhetorical point for conservatives to make to each other, but the moral logic of States' Rights doesn't include a state's right to organise its government in a sufficiently non-democratic way. There isn't a Chesterton's Fence here - the general principle is in the Constitution (the "republican form of government" clause) and there is a history of successful federal interventions against insufficiently internally democratic states during the civil rights era. (Under current SCOTUS doctrine there are no grounds for intervention, but "current SCOTUS doctrine" is not a moral argument, and in a world where "everyone knows" that SCOTUS is a partisan institution that doesn't really believe in the rule of law it isn't a legal argument either.)

There are some purple states (notably North Carolina and Wisconsin) where the state legislature is so gerrymandered (and has the power to continue to gerrymander itself in perpetuity) that state legislators are no longer meaningfully accountable to voters. In the current year there is no federal authority that could intervene as anything other than a blatant partisan flex, but if SCOTUS still had the credibility it did in 1964 then intervening would be very much within the tradition of American constitutionalism.

Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.

Federal election gerrymandering ultimately destroys state-level politics by making state elections proxy federal elections. This is a large part of why the OG Progressives supported the 17th amendment. (The other was that US senate elections in state legislatures were a bribe magnet). This is an old problem - the 1858 state legislative elections in Illinois are famous for a series of debates between US Senate candidates who were not on the ballot.

Perhaps nice compact districts like this.

Anyway, we lack angels in the form of neutral experts to redistrict us.

My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.

The key thing that makes the difference in the UK (and, AFIAK, other Commonwealth countries) is that there is a small amount of wiggle-room on equal electorates, allowing most districts to align with local government boundaries that change a lot less often than the redistricting cycle.

If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.

When the UK Boundary Commission consults on map changes, they get two types of response:

  • Responses organised by political parties for partisan purposes, where the actual arguments made are specious.
  • Responses saying that they should tolerate even more population inequality than we already do to better align district boundaries with natural boundaries (which are usually, but not always, municipal boundaries).

At least in the UK, real normie voters would rather be mildly under-represented than have an unnatural constituency drawn based on a size criterion. The textbook example is the Isle of Wight where the locals insisted on having a single constituency with 113k voters (vs a national target of 73k) rather than having 40k of them share an MP with part of the mainland. In my own mis-spent youth as a local politician when I was in grad school in Cambridge, Cambridge residents similarly felt that the City of Cambridge (c. 90k voters) should be a single constituency with an aligned boundary, although the Boundary Commission ignored them and drew right-size constituencies that put one ward into the adjacent rural seat. Uncontroversially, the whole county of Cambridgeshire got exactly 8 constituencies (with no constituency crossing the county line) despite an electorate that would justify about 8.2.

If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.

There can be a knowable optimum answer under those conditions, but in much of the US such a map would "pack" Democrats, giving Republicans a significant advantage -- that's why I posted the Florida map, which does pretty much that.

My trolling solution is to randomly assign voters to districts: "look ma, no consideration at all of race, creed, or anything". Except that it's definitionally the worst possible gerrymander.

Honestly, I think geographic districting is a lost cause and proportional statewide representation would at least give easy answers to these problems.

I'm pretty sure this one of the Supreme Court partisan gerrymandering cases had this exact fact-pattern. They wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of possible maps that all comply with "traditional districting criteria", then picked the map that had the most Republican seats.

Precisely. And of course the only acceptably neutral, arms-length body of experts from non-political backgrounds and isn't subject to the executive is the one that I personally select.

It's amazing how many things turn out to work this way.

Would you say the black person who says, "I don't want to be assumed to vote Democrat just because I'm black" is more sympathetic to this SCOTUS decision than one who's fine with that assumption?

It's outdated by now, but exit polling of the 2016 election had Black voters favoring Clinton more than Republicans favored Trump. It was literally more true than "I don't want to be assumed to vote Republican just because I'm a Republican" in that case.

The entire idea of section 2 applied this way has always been rather silly, it takes the collectivist view around race that people are better represented as a class based off their skin color rather than their ability to choose based off their own individual beliefs and preferences. There's a lot to complain about with voting, partisan gerrymandering is still messed up both federally and state election wise, the structure of the Senate explicitly having a bunch of low population states over less high population ones, and the electoral college works in a similar way.

But those are problems by changing the very value of a person's representation, by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency. It's not an issue because they fail to make the assumption that black people need some explicit maps drawn out for them "as a class".

by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency.

The Electoral College prevents a small number of influential and high population urban centers with views that may be broadly considered alien from running a country most of the size of a continent. It is likely responsible for quite a bit of US stability.

Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.

It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.

The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.

The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.

The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.

We know what the founding fathers were trying to do with the Electoral College because they tell us in their writings, and it had nothing to do with any of the modern arguments for using the Electoral College to count a partisan election. The whole point of the Electoral College according to the people who set it up was to avoid a partisan election for the President. It failed, demonstrating that the genius of the founding fathers was finite and necessitating the 12th amendment as a bugfix.

Something like the modern partisan Electoral College makes sense in a world where states run their own elections, because it means a fully corrupt one-party state can't steal any more Presidential votes than it already has, but it isn't a technology invented by the framers except accidentally.

Can you extrapolate on why the EC wasn’t designed specifically for our current political climate?

This seems like a novel opinion and I doubt many people have any idea why you are referencing.

The Electoral College prevents a small number of influential and high population urban centers with views that may be broadly considered alien from running a country most of the size of a continent. It is likely responsible for quite a bit of US stability.

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system, so I'm gonna have to doubt this claim. Maybe the size does make a difference, but there's not too much evidence for it that counteracts the examples in other nations.

Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.

Completely fictional story, you might as well point to hunger games as proof for why Marx was right as well.

It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.

Texas is the second largest state population wise! Texas is literally one of the victims of EC small state bias.

The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.

Now maybe if we don't give rurals disproportionate influence and instead only power proportionate to the population they will turn violent, but that says a lot about the rural population IMO.

The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.

That's true, but they were not perfect and even knew this pretty well themselves and it's why they have processed like constitutional amendments to begin with. It's especially useful to understand the time period they were working in as well, the electoral college makes more sense in a world where organizing and communicating things took a lot more effort.

Voting for people to serve as your representatives that go to the big meeting and give your state's votes makes way more sense back then. Now we can easily collect everyone's votes and know who people actually want.

What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother. Did you know California has the largest Republican party in the country? Doesn't matter, they don't get a vote in the presidential elections. They are disenfranchised because the EC says so, and that means California Republicans have to rely entirely on other state Republicans. This means any interests and beliefs that California Repiblicans might want that aren't supported by say, Mississippi Republicans goes nowhere. They have no say, no influence, no sway. They have no voice, no one to speak for any interests unique to California Republicans.

The same way how Mississippi Democrats just have to go along with whatever the California Democrats want. It pushes our country towards extremism on both sides because the more statistically likely to be moderate people, the reds in blue states and the blues in red states, literally don't get a say. Republicans are only the reddest of red and Democrats are only the bluest of blues because everyone else has no vote and no influence thanks to the EC. Imagine if a Democrat candidate had to bother to appeal to the more moderate Dems in Texas?

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system

The average democracy is only about 60 years old at this point. The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.

What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother.

That's more a consequence of FPTP (and in Westminster systems, whipping votes) than anything else. Again, other countries have political parties that manage to pull this kind of voter suppression off just fine.

Separation and/or a more confederated system starts to make more sense here simply because it encourages political competition and innovation in the areas that break off. Otherwise you start to run into certain failure modes of democracy, like "intentionally fail to enforce immigration laws, let the illegals vote, then swing elections that way", or letting the cities merge together politically into one globally homogeneous patchwork rather than retaining solutions tailored to/coupled with that area's unique circumstances (perhaps as a reaction to not being able to get their reforms through).

The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.

While this is a valuable myth for Americans, it is false. The Civil War is fairly obviously a total failure of the OG Constitution and the worst outbreak of political violence in the history of the English-speaking world. The Reconstruction amendments were passed by force, not by using the Article V amendment process in the way the framers intended. I think Redemption was also an important de facto amendment of the Constitution (namely de facto repeal of the 15th amendment) achieved by political violence.

It is conventional wisdom on the right (and, in my view, correct) that the New Deal and Civil Rights Era represent irregular changes to the small-c constitution, but they were achieved with broad democratic legitimacy and with very limited political violence, so I don't think they count as a break in continuity. So I would say the US has gone for about 140 years since the last violent regime change, which is still a good run, though no longer outstanding for English-speaking countries.

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system

Can you think of another heterogeneous democracy that has operated for at least a hundred years and hasn't had a region or subset of its population declare independence? Sure, the South tried to leave, but you can't exactly point at France (new Republic every two generations!) or Britain (see Ireland, or India) either.

Why are France and Britain a problem? The transition from 4th to 5th Republic was not a violent revolution; discounting the period of foreign occupation during WW2, France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870. Britain's separatist rebellions came out of disenfranchised subject territories; as well say the US has a discontinuity because it no longer owns the Philippines.

France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870

Several declared-integral parts of France, most notably Algeria have felt otherwise about this statement. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had to change its name because most, but not all, of Ireland felt otherwise. Even when it's done peacefully and democratically (see hypothetical Scotland referendum), a decision to change the definition of the polity seems anathema to the requested "stability" of a heterogeneous democratic government.

Admittedly the US has also divested several territories in that time (Cuba, the Philippines), but none of those examples have been self-declared as "integral" (states) except for that one time in 1861-1865 (and arguably Reconstruction effectively treating those as colonies for at least a while). There's certainly room to contest the relevance of integral-ness, but it seems important to my reading of "stability".

Canada has not seen an irregular change to its constitution or boundaries or large-scale political violence since Confederation in 1867. That makes the current Canadian order about the same age as the (post-Civil War) American one, or significantly older if you consider any or all of Redemption, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era as irregular and/or violent constitutional changes.

Australia likewise since Federation in 1901.

The UK has not seen an irregular change to the constitution since 1688, or a violent one since 1660. There has been political violence due to Irish secessionist movements, but Irish Home Rule would have been handled peacefully if WW1 hadn't happened at the wrong time.

As a separate issue, the main reason why the Anglosphere has so much democratic continuity compared to continental Europe is a lack of foreign invasions, not a lack of revolutions.

How heterogeneous to count? Finland has two official languages with a 5% population of Fennoswedes. The Sami also haven't seceded from any of the Nordics despite obnoxious activism.

Can you think of another heterogeneous democracy that has operated for at least a hundred years and hasn't had a region or subset of its population declare independence?

This isn't even true of the US, so I don't know what you mean by "another".

Sure, the South tried to leave, but you can't exactly point at France (new Republic every two generations!) or Britain (see Ireland, or India) either.

Even you're aware that your ask isn't true of the US. But yes I can, Switzerland. In fact it's even more heterogenous, 40% of the population has a migrant background and there's two different main languages spoken in both German and French.

by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency

Yes, and that's a good thing.

Let's take a look at where that isn't true: Canada. This country has the politics you say you want, where the only relevant voters reside in one of 3 cities (legislature is de facto unicameral, though on paper it is something else). Naturally, they all vote as a bloc, and their policies are not only alien to the rest of the country, but increasingly oppressive in the sense that they prevent anywhere else from developing.

As a direct result, Canada has had active separation movements since roughly the late 1800s. These weren't as much of a problem between 1910 and 1950 for obvious reasons, but it's been a continual threat since 1970, and the referendum in QC in the mid-'90s had majority support except for the city on the QC/ON border (as in, the vote for QC to secede would have succeeded without Montreal). Even then, it was defeated on a razor thin margin. And the next Provincial election in QC is likely going to the separatists.

Serious attempts at Western separatism are newer. The province is a natural seat of government for a separated West due to where it is and what it sits on, and there's a bigger barrier with respect to the fact it needs to win referenda in 4 provinces to be a viable country- but Ottawa (and Vancouver) become more and more foreign, and grow more and more hostile, to the rest of the nation every single day. The rest of the country won't have the chance to get any political representation for 15 years, the sitting government exists completely contrary to the results of the election, and everyone knows it.

Most of the movement on the issue has been cooler than it would be in the US- Canada is a much poorer country thanks to difficult land and high latitude so there's a lot less to fight over and a lack of social cohesion is therefore costlier. Were this same situation true for the US (even in its original 13-colony form) it just straight up wouldn't have survived.

TL;DR Consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed, and the cities depend on the country for raw resources and soldiers- which are two things cities require for continual survival they cannot create on their own. (Not that it's a law of nature for a city to fail to field soldiers; that's a new incapacity revealed over the latter half of the 20th century, and specifically for Western cities.)

It is wise to limit the power of larger states to run roughshod over smaller states to ensure the larger states are limited to mining/colonizing the rest of the country in a sustainable manner, and not one that doesn't just end up with the country folks shooting up the power lines and oil pipelines (or seceding completely -> reserving the right to wage what is technically a civil war at some time in the future).

Yes, and that's a good thing.

If it wasn't, you'd get the problem Canada has where the only relevant voters are all in 3 cities.

That's not true, in a one vote power per person system, rural voters are relevant too. They're just only as relevant as their actual population size.

Naturally, they all vote the same way.

Not true, but even if they do so what? More citizens live in the cities therefore doing pro city stuff means benefiting more citizens than pro rural stuff then.

Since consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed, and the cities depend on the country for resources and soldiers,

And the rural country doesn't likewise depend on the cities? They benefit from all the wonderful intentions, financing, and other stuff that comes out of the cities. Farming and resources are valuable, but rural life has electricity, cars, far more stable crops from advances in science (bad harvests are so much less common), medical inventions, internet, smart phones, TV, cheap good looking clothes, and basically anything else that comes from urban workers.

Rural life benefits immensely from the economic and technological growth that the cities are responsible for.

country folks shooting up the power lines and oil pipelines (or seceding completely, then waging war at some time in the future).

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

This is essentially the core thesis of the The Federalist Papers.

You believe in gaining the consent of the governed don't you?

rural voters are relevant too. They're just only as relevant as their actual population size.

Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".

Not true.

Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.

More citizens live in the cities therefore doing pro city stuff

This doesn't actually preclude them from doing their city thing in that city. In fact, a significant chunk of power comes from the city people being able to do this- which is balanced against the below.

And the rural country doesn't likewise depend on the cities?

The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city. Thus the power the city derives from centralization is dependent on the rest of the country, not the other way around.

This is much like how a man's job is to bring home the food and the woman's job is to cook it.
If the woman doesn't do her job, they're unhappy. If the man doesn't do his, they're dead.
So it is for city and country, and why the country outranks the city.

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

Yes.

Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.

One party in the US two-party system was based on an (admittedly corrupt) alliance between the northern urban political machines and the rural south from about 1910 to about 1980, which is a third of America's history. For much of the other two thirds politics was sectional (New England and friends vs the South and friends) with cities and their hinterlands voting together. AFAIK the only period "urban vs rural" has been the best simple model of national politics in the US was the last twenty years, and it has been a 50-50 split with suburbs as swing territory. [I think you can make an argument for rural Jacksonians vs urban Whigs as a model for the 1820-1840 period, but it isn't the standard one]

In the rest of the democratic world, big-tent centre-right parties which consistently win the countryside and are competitive in the cities are dominant in most countries most of the time. In the UK specifically, the Tories are competitive in the big industrial cities until Thatcher, and in London until Brexit - in both cases until they stopped trying. (Labour's heartland was the coal-mining areas, not the cities) For example, the last time Manchester elected a Tory-majority council was 1967-1971, and 1982-1984 for Birmingham.

Running against urbanism and cities is a choice made by some right-wing parties for their own internal reasons. If right-wing parties choose to do that, they don't get to say that urbanites hating them back is an unfairness that needs to be remedied with malapportionment.

The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city. Thus the power the city derives from centralization is dependent on the rest of the country, not the other way around.

Coastal cities are built around ports, usually at river mouths (which gives you access to fresh water). Rich cities relying on food and raw materials imported by sea because they didn't control a large enough rural hinterland to feed themselves goes at least as far back as ancient Athens - Rome was fed from the Nile Delta. And higher value raw materials come from even further afield. The archaeology is ambiguous, but it is likely that Athenian hoplites were going into battle wearing bronze armour where the tin in the alloy came from Cornwall.

New York City doesn't need Idaho because they have Elizabeth, and Elizabeth plus cash gives them the world. If you look at the blue/red state map, every blue state has blue-or-Canadian-controlled access to the sea. (I agree that there are blue cities in red states which don't). Technically all red states have red-controlled access to the sea via the Gulf coast, but in practice using that access would overwhelm the capacity of the Gulf coast ports, and also require the use of railway junctions in blue states. So in the case of a peaceful-but-hostile split, the reds would run out of raw materials first.

There have been times and places where the economy of the city is based on a threat to shoot up the country - see Rome passim. (Urbanites make much better soldiers than yokels, it's just that they have sufficiently good alternative employment opportunities that they don't volunteer for peacetime garrison duty). The modern US is not one of them - rural America is subsidy-dependent, and the largest paypig in the system is Big Tech.

Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".

No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.

Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.

Even in the most one sided cities, they still tend to be around 70/30 Dem vs GOP. Which is what I assume you actually mean rather than "vote for themselves".

This doesn't actually preclude them from doing their city thing in that city. In fact, a significant chunk of power comes from the city people being able to do this- which is balanced against the below.

Actually it can, look at North Carolina! The state legislature is extremely gerrymandered into a basically permanent veto proof GOP majority despite being a swing state that routinely votes Dem leaders and they constantly use this to try to limit and control Charlotte and Raleigh's ability to self govern. Like that famous "bathroom bill" a decade ago came out explicitly in response to Charlotte passing an inclusive ordinance within city borders. This is not uncommon.

Cities are in fact often precluded from doing what they want because of gerrymandering.

The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city.

Yes those are quite important, but cities are needed too. Try defending the country without the technology and logistics that urban wealth helps create and provide. Much of those are raw materials and natural resources are practically useless without the urbanites inventing things to do with them.

This is much like how a man's job is to bring home the food and the woman's job is to cook it. If the woman doesn't do her job, they're unhappy. If the man doesn't do his, they're dead.

So it is for city and country, and why the country outranks the city.

If the woman doesn't do her job in this scenario, they get sick and die from eating raw meat. Just like how the rurals would be squashed by our enemies without the wealth and intelligence of the city.

But it's also an ahistorical example, women did tons of work in the past. Most people were far too poor to be letting someone get away with not being productive! When famines are frequent and the Lord demands his pay, you don't get to sit on your ass. Even the young children had to go out and till the fields.

Only the nobles and chieftains could have such a fancy life of not needing everyone working hard. Women milked cattle, tilled fields, managed crops, kept chickens, cleaned (also known as sanitizing things), make clothing (especially necessary at the time where minor scratches and infections could kill and no A/C or heating), hauled water, picked fruits and vegetables and various other tasks.

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

Yes.

So what you're saying is that the cities should just start threatening their supreme economic and technological superiority back. Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.

Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".

No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.

Speaking generally, I don't know that I have a useful definition of being "relevant" or "irrelevant". I'm hearing very similar claims that, after Callais, gerrymandering can or will make many black voters "irrelevant". One could pithily retort that they are just as relevant as any other individual voter, but I don't think that would be satisfying to the person making the claim.

So what you're saying is that the cities should just start threatening their supreme economic and technological superiority back. Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.

But in your view, this would make the Urbanites the bad guys, would it not?

Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.

So, The Hunger Games?

A proportionate response to an explicit threat of "We will destroy democracy if we can't rig it" is not what happened in the hunger games. The hunger games government was a dictatorship police state, kinda like the Russia and North Korea that Trump so admires.

That framing seems to ignore that we're a republic, and the senate is the body representing the constituent members of our republic, the states.

Without the Great Compromise between proportional to population representation and equal representation per state (as it had been in the Articles of Confederation) there likely would have been no union.

The hunger games government was a dictatorship police state.

Dictatorship police state of the 'urban elite', the Great Compromise is the protection against this failure mode and ensures the states / districts are represented in Congress and the mode of electing the President.

I think most blocs are cultural in at least some sense. It’s just like anything else. Rural Americans have been conservative for a long time now. Evangelicals in many churches would consider a vote for a democrat to be sinful. Is that a sober analysis of political positions? It’s part of the culture.

As to the ridiculous division of power in the country, honestly I think our current system is too flawed to work. It really seems to solidify the ideas of some blocks over others. Yes the individual voter in a large state is disempowered in the senate, but he’s also overpowered in the House and the presidential elections. California has 54 electoral votes. Pennsylvania has 20+. Those states have outsized influence over national politics. If you lose all of the big population states, you lose. Heck, if you lose the northwest corridor you have an uphill battle, especially if you’re a Republican who won’t have the 54 electoral votes CA brings.

Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.

What does "overpowered" mean? Populous states explicitly punch below their weight relative to their actual proportion of the electorate in all federal elections. The US already has a number of countermajoritarian and outright minoritarian institutions, and the argument is that actually we need the federal government to be less representative?

Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.

Why not just have a direct popular vote for President? Or abolish the Presidency and have Congress select the chief executive?

I’m mostly thinking of the House and the electoral college. In both cases, California gets 50 votes, and thus can have a large influence on how things will happen. If you live in a less populated state, say Idaho with a whopping 4 electoral votes and 2 members of the House, you, for most practical purposes do not matter. No one looks at a piece of legislation and worries about pissing off Idaho. If something would harm a large state like CA, NY, PA, FL, it’s going to be hard to get the party to agree to do it. Most of the cultural issues are issues because they play in the urban core and big coastal states. If it were backward, and trans issues were viewed negatively in California but positively in Idaho, no one would be forcing the issue of things like bathroom bills.

I do think electoral votes ought to go by district with the overall state popular vote winner getting the bonus 2 votes.

by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency

The Senate does not represent people, it represents States. You may think that States do not deserve representation at all, but that's a different argument. California and Mississippi are equally represented in the Senate, as intended. The people of California and Mississippi are more-or-less equally represented in the House, mostly as intended except we need 3-10x as many seats as we do now. At least they're equally treated in their gargantuan districts.

The Senate does not represent people, it represents States. You may think that States do not deserve representation at all, but that's a different argument. California and Mississippi are equally represented in the Senate, as intended.

Yeah it's a rather silly system that hasn't scaled well. States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly and the current Senate system doesn't do that. It explicitly gives smaller less populated areas far more influence.

States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly

Taking this consistently, we must conclude that Russia should get to conquer Ukraine, by a vote on the order of 130M to 30M.

Recall that originally state meant, well, "state", not "prefecture".

Whether it's silly or not is a matter of opinion (I don't think it's silly at all), but it is factually incorrect to say that the Senate gives smaller states more influence than larger ones. It gives them the same influence.

States are collective entities made up of, wait for it.... people. The Senate gives smaller states disproportionate influence because states with less people have the same swing as states with more people.

When we say a state, past all the abstraction we really just mean "the people there in that region".

No, that's not true. You don't get to hand wave a state as being equivalent to the people within it and then claim that it's disproportionate influence on that basis. States are coherent entities by themselves, and are not the same thing as the people living within them. Your argument is like saying that if two families own a business together (split 50/50), the family with fewer children somehow has a disproportionate influence over the business. It is a poor argument.

The founders believed states would have much more power and guard it jealously. The Gettysburg address was the tipping point between "The United States are..." and "The United States is". Then the depression and the war ensured federal dominance.

The Gettysburg address may have been the tipping point, but the writing was on the wall with the railroad and telegraph.

"These United States..." used to be a thing too.

Far more influence over the country as a whole != far more influence in actual fact, especially on the local level.

The large city/states have more than enough ways to throw their weight around, including the mere fact they're city/states. They don't need the ability to pass the "Loot the Rest of the Country Forever Because Fuck You Act".

I am very fond of Alito's framing in the summary:

The key concept is “less opportunity than other members of the electorate,” which sets a baseline against which to as sess the opportunity of minority voters. That baseline—the oppor tunity that any given group of voters has to elect their candidate of choice—depends on the voting preferences of other voters in the dis trict. For example, in a district where most voters prefer Democratic candidates, a Republican voter in that district will have a low chance of securing the election of his or her preferred candidate. The roster of voters who end up in a given district depends, in turn, on the district ing criteria the State uses to draw a legislative map. Thus, the “oppor tunity” of these “members of the electorate” to contribute their votes to a winning cause is whatever opportunity results from the application of the State’s combination of permissible districting criteria. That is what a randomly selected individual voter and group of voters can ex pect regarding their opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. Under §2, a minority voter is entitled to nothing less and nothing more. Pp. 19–22.

Why are Southern black voters so uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party? Did something happen? I was led to understand that race relations in the South were actually great and reports of interracial discord were Yankee propaganda.

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Are southern blacks more dem than blacks nationally? Everything I've seen is that they're about the same and this is machine politics all the way down.

I didn't say that they were. It is merely that the South is where efforts to disenfranchise black voters have been most vigorously pursued. And in case it's not clear, I think the suggestion that persistent efforts to disenfranchise black voters have transitioned seamlessly from white supremacist to merely partisan motives should be viewed as totally laughable with extreme skepticism.

Sarcasm is unbecoming. Speak plainly.

If nothing else, I would argue that the people who are racist against blacks are more likely to be found in the Republican Party and less likely to be actively criticized. In addition, if the Republican Party keeps discriminating against them as a group for the reason that they are usually Dem, it doesn't exactly endear them to the Republicans even if said discrimination would go away if they became solidly Republican.

Race relations in the South are pretty good, they're about as good as they are anywhere in the country, which ranks with the best in the world.

Mainly, they do it because it works. Blacks exercise inordinate power in the Democratic party, and probably will into the immediate future even as their relative power is eroded by immigration. Republicans are mostly too scared to actually campaign for Blacks -- Trump's appearances at say the National Association of Black Journalists was so remarkable because it was so unusual. Moreover, the Democratic Party offers Black voters visible patronage and money and public works that Republicans mostly don't want to give. And if that isn't sufficient explanation, it probably is the case that urban city political machines harvest black voters to vote at rates and percentages higher than what they might otherwise naturally produce.

A part of me would love to see Republicans run a race- and gender-swapped version of the Harris campaign's "He'll never know who you voted for" ad targeting Black men.

Speaking of that campaign, it’s pretty crazy how abortion just completely dropped off the map as a hot topic immediately after the election was over.

Did it?

HBD can completely explain this. If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution. The prior system could be 100% fair in a meritocratic way, but because you have less human capital you would prefer more free stuff from the government even if it means more taxes (which you largely don’t pay).

It’s mostly just because they are poor and compete poorly in a free market/meritocratic environment. You don’t need racism to explain this result.

No?

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”? Okay, maybe angsty channers. But it’s really not the normal mindset.

Also, this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”?

Of course they don't phrase it like that, in much the same way approximately no one considers themselves evil, but yeah I do think resentment about relative value does play a significant role in the expectation of welfare.

this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.

But it was true for a long time before that, before Dem stances on gun control and other social issues, combined with weakening union influence, caused them to flip. And one could fairly argue there's a certain... hmm... something akin to hypocrisy in regards to what kinds of welfare should be allowed, and why, and who gets it. Consider attitudes on disability versus, perhaps, Section 8.

Other cultural factors presumably explain why blacks stayed Dem despite being overwhelmingly more conservative than the average white Dem.

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”? Okay, maybe angsty channers. But it’s really not the normal mindset.

No! The best part about black scam culture is they think they are geniuses and we are all the idiots for working regular jobs while they can lie and scheme and the only real consequences ever are a low credit score or a felony conviction here or there. And they don't even really internalize thinking about the felony, "oh that was uncle Thad, I'm smarter than him and wont get caught."

Are you trying to imply that this sort of attitude is somehow unique to the black underclass? In my experience it is endemic.

Unique, no. Overrepresented, likely. PPP loan scams would be one of the notable, recent examples.

Though I think "don't be the chump" scam culture has increased in other social and racial classes, like with getting various diagnoses for extra time on college tests and assignments cuts across those lines.

And "why am I a fucking chump" perception of, say, net taxpayers continues to generate a lot of resentment as we burn the stored goodwill.

"Don't be the chump" is downstream of cheaters prospering.

It is certainly not endemic, or at least was not until recently. I went to a majority white, mostly middle class, some high some low, high school with a sizeable Mexican minority population. The activities you describe would never have occurred in any of the classes amongst the white students. And since our school was intellectually segregated, it was also functionally racially segregated, so I don't know what the Mexicans were doing. I did experience some "cheating culture" as I got to engineering school and the racial makeup included more Asians. Cheating culture is bad, but is different from scam culture. None of the engineering students were ever shoplifting with abandon. Perhaps from time to time someone games the food court by bringing a laptop and working there from 9am to 10pm only swiping in once, thats like the biggest scam.

And going back to my hometown, if you were caught by a neighbor using EBT you'd be socially ostracized, the rare section 8 housing person would not be invited to block parties. There were no Learing centers. If you did that you'd be charged with felonies. Heck, the police spent like 6 months investigating a "meth ring" where their seizure was 5 grams hidden under a table at a bar. Where I currently live, 5 grams is barely considered chargeable unless the fellow was picked up doing something else WORSE and the meth charge is just a kicker to get a plea deal.

And the opposite is true in the full on scam culture. These people make facebook videos and tutorials on scamming. The Learing centers all follow a business model propagated from some grey market scam culture NGOs. People sell EBT cards for booze. Its all very different from the normal world of 2000, and scam culture (unlike cheating culture) isn't new. It goes way back to before I was borne. Welfare queens wasn't Reagan slander, it was real life.

Hell, I just was in court. As I was waiting for my order from the clerk the next case was called. Child support case. Male, 20, convicted felon, on pretrial release for domestic violence, somehow drives a Tesla despite no documented employment. On EBT and S8. Female, 19, mother of one (alleged father is the male), currently pregnant (allegedly also his). No documented employment. Lives in a neighborhood where average rents are 3k a month with just herself and the baby. Then I get to leave before things finish. But still. Scam culture is its whole own level.

And going back to my hometown, if you were caught by a neighbor using EBT you'd be socially ostracized, the rare section 8 housing person would not be invited to block parties.

Maybe I am dumb, so these people are on SNAP or something and they're poor so it's automatically assumed they are leeches on society and must be shun?

Maybe I am dumb, so these people are on SNAP or something and they're poor so it's automatically assumed they are leeches on society and must be shun?

Why wouldn't you come to that conclusion. Not only are they objectively leeches on society, their move when being poor was not to build a social network that would help support them, instead they went and got other people's money through forcible taxation so they can buy chips and soda.

More that if you can't or won't support yourself, and your friends, family, and church are unwilling to help you, you're almost certainly some kind of fuckup likely to cause problems for others.

If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.

Not necessarily. As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it. Whether your odds are actually good is an entirely different matter. People who are poorly off don't necessarily run on cold logic, and even if they do, they may be unable to see how redistribution helps them more than it hurts.

As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it.

Why would you believe this when you see your group failing more in the market?

It occurs to me that smart people often can't even imagine what it's like to be dumb.

Once you see it, it's impossible to miss how much internet discourse is dominated by people who never interact with the bottom quintile/decile and have zero idea how those groups think or act.

Because hope is not rational, and it is easy to believe yourself better than your peers. Even if said belief is an illusion.

Yeah, that's a pretty hard sell given that manifestly it is considered a problem in the community and even rich blacks line up behind Democrats as a result.

If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.

Support for socialism increases with education and SES, no?

Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?

Currently the demographic most likely to say US national spending on welfare is "too little" is people with "less than high school" education (vs high school graduates and college graduates), and this is the case far more often than not, although the correlation with education seems surprisingly weak in general - high school graduates' and college graduates' responses are pretty much neck-and-neck.

That's not an apples-to-apples question, I admit. Might there be people who think we should overthrow capitalism altogether and perfect the New Soviet Man or whatever but who also don't want any more money going to today's lumpenproles? It still seems like a good indicator.

Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?

Zohran Mandami argues otherwise.

Yeah, "handful" was grossly wrong. 30% for "more welfare", geographically non-uniform, means there's probably going to be somewhere you can get a plurality to vote for seizing the means of production ... grocery retail? really? ...

But my point is just that, if loud vocal support for more welfare seems to be coming disproportionally from college students, that's because of a disproportionality in "loud" and "vocal", not in "support".

My understanding is that it is more a Urban vs Rural issue than a race issue, with the current status quo being that the urban populations of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte are distributed across congressional districts in such a way that it allows the Democrats to be competitive across multiple seats. Where as in an alternate map where the urban core was one district and the surrounding suburbs to the east and west were two others, the Democrats would essentially gain a "safe" seat at the expense of no longer being competitive in the others.

See this proposed map that has been making the rounds on X.

https://x.com/NewsWire_US/status/1978495533229428823/photo/1

That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party - e.g. in 2023 Brandon Presely got 22% of the white vote in MS, which was an exceptionally good performance (Biden got 17% in 2020 and Obama got even less in 2012).

(It must also be noted that the Deep South has a large rural black population - appealing to rural/urban splits doesn't resolve the problem)

I feel like you are starting from a conclusion and looking for supporting evidence, rather than sincerely seeking the answer to a question.

Yes there is an alignment, but I do not think it is as strong or as uniform as you seem to be treating it. Per the 2020 census there are 94 majority Black counties in the United States. Of those 94, Trump won 11 in the 2024 election, and was seems to have been competitive in maybe 20 others. That's not a lot, but it's not nothing either, and when you look at those majority black counties where Trump won or came close to winning, the common thread seems to be a lack of proximity to major urban centers.

My working theory is that rural and working class blacks largely mirror rural and working class whites in that they tend to be more socially conservative and anti-immigration than their urban counterparts. And that while the power of the various "political machines" that run cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Et Al may be famous, the power of those machines does not project into "the boondocks".

Southern Whites vote strongly republican due to the moral majority- this is the moment when the Southern White vote actually became disproportionately republican. We don't see it because Reagan won everywhere but the south was still a dem stronghold into the late eighties.

That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party

Both are explained by Democratic policy preferences being to favor blacks and disfavor whites.

I mean, blacks shifted to overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic Party well before the Civil Rights movement and the supposed "party switch". 75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example. The charitable view is that blacks migrating to cities etc. supported the dems because they had greater support for unions and worker's rights etc. A less charitable view is that blacks supported dems because they saw it as a way to get handouts from the government.

Or, as Lyndon B. Johnson (allegedly) said about his welfare initiatives: "I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years." (Even if Johnson didn't actually say that, he is confirmed to have used "nigger" on several occasions).

75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.

75% of blacks who could vote. In 1936 most blacks lived in the Jim Crow South and couldn't vote.

My rough model is that in the New Deal era Northeast and Midwest, the Republicans were the party of monied elites plus rural and small town voters and the Democrats were the party of the big city political machines. In that model Northern blacks vote Dem because they live in the cities and benefit from the political machines.

75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.

Wiki claims "two-thirds of black voters", not much more than his 60.8% of voters as a whole. You have to cut down demographics more finely to get to "76 percent of Blacks in northern cities" specifically.

The charitable view is that blacks migrating to cities etc. supported the dems because they had greater support for unions and worker's rights etc. A less charitable view is that blacks supported dems because they saw it as a way to get handouts from the government.

Neither of these views is logically inconsistent with the corrected numbers, but Bayes would note that our relative credence in the view with "migrating to cities" in it should increase after we learn that the data shows an effect specifically focused on migrant-targeted cities. (you'd otherwise think "Northern" would push in the other direction; Southerners also went 76% for LBJ)

I don’t get why LBJ would say that but I am not a politician. Do you want power or do you want to improve America? Pulling in 85% of the black vote helps the Democrats. But you would still need to view your policies as good on their own or modestly bad but their votes will give you power to do other things you think are good.

And sure I probably answered my own question. He either likes being politically powerful or thought it was a good trade off.

But you would still need to view your policies as good

I've never met any politician who sincerely believed that their proposed policies has to be "good" in and of themselves. Not trying to be insulting to you personally, but believing that anything more than 1% of politicians (especially at the national level) care about doing good with their power is a quokka belief.

Trump of course is narcissistic and an egomaniac and has used government to enrich himself but I still believe he desires to work for me and wants to leave a legacy of America as a better place. So yes I believe more than 1% of politicians have good intentions.

Having good intentions and believing their policies are especially good are not necessarily the same thing. They may believe, for example, that they're doing good simply by holding a given office, taking up space that could have gone to that bastard who ran against them.

Is LBJ using the word particularly notable? He was born in 1908. My dad was born in the late 40s and the word was regularly used in school rhymes and whatnot in his youth, so the overton window was still well over that way throughout most of LBJ's life

Not necessarily, but it weighs a bit in favor of the alleged quote being real. Or rather it's points against people eho think the use of the word makes the quote more likely to be fake.

LBJ was notoriously foul-mouthed, and definitely would have used the n-word. But as with Trump, it's easy to make up a plausible "LBJ-sounding" quote.

Whether he said it or not, the prediction contained within that someone made looks pretty true for the 60-year period anyway.

This is something anyone can answer, but I'll ask a different question: why does no other ethnic group align at even remotely the same level?

Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree. It wasn't that long ago that ~1/3rd of the US was run by explicit white supremacists and rendered black Americans explicitly second-class citizens (on top of a raft of informal but no less severe forms of discrimination). One of the consequences of prolonged, intensive discrimination was to forge African-Americans into a much more cohesive, organized identity group than pretty much anyone else.

By contrast, "White", "Hispanic", or "Asian" are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests, e.g. you could probably justify dividing white voters regionally and Hispanic/Asian voters by country of ancestral origin.

Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree.

Disagree. It appears that the only group capable of being robustly non-leftist over time, worldwide, is American whites. Everything else is just fluff. American whites, particularly married ones, are a super unique set of individuals that keep the country, and thereby the world from descending into leftist decline.

I'm not sure, blacks are more religious, more anti-LGBT, there is certainly a strong foundation in which they could be the core of the right. Anyway, what @Skibboleth was saying is to explain why black people moves more generally as a voting bloc instead of splintering.

My counterpoint would be that those cultural beliefs are window dressing. Without core beliefs for personal responsibility and skepticism about the long-term effects of the welfare state, it's worthless. Black voters choose the side that promises the most spoils and reparations-lite for them.

To be clear, this is probably true for all voters. I've run the data analysis to split voting blocs among racial and gender segments. Their support for student loan forgiveness had an R of .89 to the amount they typically owe:

Strongest Correlation: Groups that would benefit most financially show the highest support:
Black Women: $18,950 net benefit → 76% support
Black Men: $14,400 net benefit → 68% support
Hispanic Women: $11,400 net benefit → 72% support

Negative Net Benefit Groups show predictably lower support:

Asian Men: -$2,300 net cost → 30% support
White Men: -$250 net cost → 32% support

Likewise, my philosophy now is to always vote for lower taxes, regardless of the future implications to the national debt, since it's become unworkable to cut spending.

generally push minorities left

For certain narrow, idiosyncratic definitions of "left," at least.

The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.

are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests

Given the organized project of generating Black (capitalization here intended to signify ADOS, not the NYT's bullshit) identity, there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.

It'll be interesting to see if Asians group more or shift over the next several years as the parties realign somewhat. One could see they'd be more consistently Democratic as the "higher education" party, but inter-minority discrimination issues weaken that somewhat.

The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.

What is your point? Not agreeing with all of the political goals of candidates they support is not a distinctive feature of black voters (e.g. not all Republican voters are anti-LGBT, but they still support anti-LGBT politicians).

A question of interest might be why the GOP is so incredibly bad at capturing these socially conservative black voters. They're certainly capable of getting votes from extremely poor, socially conservative white voters, often despite openly promising policies detrimental to their welfare. I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights, that post-CRM these people concentrated in the Republican Party, and that black voters are acutely aware of this. The result is that even though there are a lot of socially conservative black voters and even though poor social conservatives may prioritize their social beliefs over economic interests, the GOP does extraordinarily poorly with black voters.

there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.

If you are talking purely about progressive spaces, I find it hard to deny this, but I also find it hard to escape the conclusion that this is because basically every attempt to construct a shared white interest group has been unsubtle white supremacism/white nationalism. Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition, and by and large black political organization has been organized around civil rights issue; there is no comparable set of issues for white voters.

If you are talking about the full American political spectrum, no. Virtually every conservative space is extremely skeptical of the idea that racism against minorities is a live issue (unless they can find a way to blame the liberals, who are the real racists) while being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.

What is your point?

My point is that it's ridiculous to say they're pushed to the left in any meaningful way. They're not doctrinaire socialists, they're absolutely not social progressives, saying black people are pushed to the left is just an example of the oversimplified spectrum.

I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights

Reading a history book I'd find it hard to disagree, but I would find it hard to read modernity and decide that they're opposed to civil rights and not the way civil rights get gerrymandered.

Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition

I disagree; I think the bulk of evidence suggests that every racial group except white people have a considerable amount of in-group preference. Black identity might be strengthened by the outside effect, but it's absolutely not the sole cause, nor do I think the primary one.

being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.

It's not like there's piles of evidence for that from every major university, major publishing company, written directly into the law in the non-US Anglosphere, etc.

Anti-black racism is an interpersonal issue, no longer a legibly systematic one. Here I wish for a word that distinguishes between "systematic as in black-letter regulation" and "systematic as in rooted in historical discrimination continuing to echo down the generations," but alas, I don't know of one.

Jews and Muslims are not that far off. The same way, which has been presenting a dilemma for the Democrats... which they seem to be resolving in favor of Muslims.

AFAIK a lot of Black voting organizational infrastructure tends to come through the churches, and being able to tap into a religious network when trying to get people out and voting is always going to make things a lot easier than doing it with other groups that don't have as strong a community gathering point.

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