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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12456 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.

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.

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