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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25319 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.

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.

  • -10

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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