The Electoral College’s Racist Origins

Having been born in New York State and living there through high school, many in the South will never consider me a Southerner despite my maternal grandmother being a New Orleans belle. Nonetheless, I have lived in Virginia the majority of my life (I arrived not long after the Supreme Court's final ruling in Loving v. Virginia) and as a history major I am well aware of Virginia's conflicting legacy of on the one hand of having been the home of many of the Founding Fathers who espoused liberty and equality while on the other hand always time protecting white power/privilege and later serving as architect of the Jim Crow laws. A piece in The Atlantic by a legal scholar that I seemingly missed at the time looks at the Electoral College and how, when examined in the light of history, it has a racist origin originally aimed at maintaining the political power of southern slave holding states such as Virginia. As numerous posts on this blog have argued, the Electoral College needs to be eliminated. This article and the facts presented further bolster why that elimination needs to occur sooner as opposed to later. Here are article highlights: 

Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the [U.S. Supreme Court's] Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then. 

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

 

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

 

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

 

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

 

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

 

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. 

 

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

White Evangelicals: Ignorance, Racism and Trump

A piece in Vanity Fair by a former evangelical looks at three themes that run through today's white evangelicals.  The first two are racism and an embrace of ignorance and the third, which stems from the first two is a strong support for Donald Trump, a man who embodies everything a true Christian ought to find abhorrent. As the piece correctly notes, evangelicals' involvement in politics arose for one purpose: to oppose desegregation and the consequences of the enactment of civil rights laws to end legal discrimination against blacks and other non-white minorities. As for embracing ignorance, be it the so-called purity movement or denial of climate change or modern knowledge of sexual orientation, it all boils down to one thing: anything that challenges 12th century knowledge based beliefs must be rejected and denied. The GOP long played to evangelicals through racist dog whistle messaging and opposition to civil rights for those evangelicals deemed "other." With Trump, these two pillars of GOP pandering to evangelicals has reached its peak with calls to deport non-whites, efforts to fully legalize anti-LGBT discrimination, and the firing of government scientists who refuse to distort scientific data.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

On its face, evangelical purity culture and American racism overlap only insofar as white people are the dominant participants in both. About two thirds of evangelicals are white (although Latinos make up a growing share), and more than 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Evangelical Christians have long made up the Republican Party’s base, a fact that was front of mind for Trump when he selected Mike Pence as his vice president. Still, evangelicals have long professed to value traditional sexual mores; it was telling to see them largely put those aside to support a thrice-married adulterer. It was telling to see evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. claim not just that Trump was a vehicle to achieve certain policy goals, but that he was a fellow traveler.

But that assumes that sexual morality is the primary organizing force for evangelicals. Historically it hasn’t been. Indeed, the origins of evangelicalism as a modern political movement have more to do with opposition to Brown v. Board of Education than Roe v. Wade. American evangelicalism cannot be disentangled from racism—particularly as it becomes further intertwined with the larger religious right.

There’s also a deep psychological overlap between evangelical purity culture and Trumpism. Making America great again and forgoing kissing for courtship both promise an easy route to a glorified past. Both come from a fear of the unknown, an aversion to new experiences, a deep disgust at a perceived other attaining equal footing. (Though in theory purity culture mandates that both men and women remain chaste, in practice the burden falls almost entirely on women.)

In no other pivotal area of life do we insist on the total mindless fidelity that the “send her back” crowd demands. Similarly, for no life-shaping decision do we believe it’s healthy to have the total lack of experience that the “save yourself until marriage” brigade mandates. Team Love It or Leave It also hews to the bizarre theory that less information makes for better decision-making. Both movements are fundamentally invested in embracing ignorance.

Adherents would rather know less, and as a result risk stagnation and decline, than come into contact with information that complicates their view of America as a red, white, and blue “We’re #1!” foam finger. Virginity-until-marriage proponents offer a similar promise: If you don’t know any better, you’ll never want anything more.

Much has rightly been written about the racism at the heart of Trumpism. The fact that Trump voters are motivated by racial animus is backed up by a wealth of research. In the chants of “send her back,” in the fear of an “invasion,” the bigotry is loud and clear. But I also hear the same fear that echoed in the anti-experimentation, anti-sex warnings repeated to me as an adolescent.

America Firsters demand liberal critics leave because those of us suggesting improvements threaten to shatter a closely held narrative. We all search for identity and tribe, but for hypernationalists, their sense of self is firmly rooted in being the tough guy on the winning team. If you’re a member of the long-dominant group in a particular place, your identity may well hinge on an assumption that the place in question is fair, and your dominance therefore justified. Recognizing potential truths in critical appraisals would force much harder, potentially devastating reflections.

Today’s Trumpism also puts the interests of white men front and center, and makes others—women, people of color, and especially women of color—responsible for their dissatisfaction. Trump and his chanting fans have zeroed in on four female congresswomen of color because they rightly see that a multi-tonal sea of Americans is rising to contest their long-held grip on power. The fear that this rise will strip away unearned advantages from whites is just as well founded as the virginity-men’s anxiety that sexual experience would make women more romantically discerning.

Purity proponents, like Team Love It or Leave It, assuage their fears with a demand that everyone else keep their life small—a promise that if they do they’ll benefit, and if they don’t they’ll be punished. The promise-ring peddlers of my youth were afraid for a reason. If girls grew into women who recognized, validated, and acted on their desires, what would happen? We probably wouldn’t marry Trevor from church at 18, for one. We would demand more: a marriage in which sexual satisfaction was a cornerstone; an end to family structures in which men dominate and women serve.

[A]s white evangelicalism has dovetailed with Trumpism, it’s gotten collectively meaner and less subtle, more about explicit dominance and less about promises of happiness and prosperity. What were once racist and misogynist dog whistles have been turned up to ear-splitting decibels.

The racist misogyny that animates the “send her back” hordes is tied to the same underlying values and anxieties that led adults to tell preteens that ignorance and smallness were the secrets to happiness. The same adolescents who heard these messages in high school gymnasiums are now, as adults, grasping at a similar, dimming hope: that if they are effective enough at shaming, threatening, and insulting those of us who want more, we may shrink. And maybe then they can maintain their slipping grip on power.

The Damaging GOP Quest for a White Republic

A piece in Time Magazine looks at what has in many ways become the driving agenda of the Republican Party: restoring a mythic white republic.  Yes, empowering corporate greed and polluters are sub-agenda items, but increasingly a desire to restore racial superiority (at least in the minds of Republicans) is the most important issue of all.  Meanwhile, much of the wold looks on aghast at what has happened to America as noted by a piece at CNN:

What happens to a country that is an idea, when that idea turns ugly? Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the United States has been the leader of the free world economically, militarily, but also -- as communism and fascism fell by the wayside -- as an idea. . . . . But America was supposed to know better -- to lead us forward, not backward, to know the way.

Winston Churchill said you could always count on the Americans to do the right thing once they had tried everything else. Now, it's not clear who would know what the right thing is when it happens.

We watch the downward spiral helpless, trying not to be dragged in. America's ugly obsession with guns and mass shootings blended this month predictably with the far extremes of anti-immigrant sentiment.

The intense cruelty of US Customs and Border Protection facilities, separating children and parents, and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, all fall foul of the rosy-eyed view outsiders have of America as a place where anyone can come and make it. The huddled masses were always the point of the United States, but now they seem to have become the enemy within.

What comes next? Does it lead the free world again, or allow China's alien authoritarianism to fill the vacuum? Has America peaked? Will it eventually do the right thing, and who will be left to know when it does?

Foreigners are not the only ones shocked by what is happening to America.  Equally shocking is the willingness of Republicans to weaken the nation in exchange for increased white privilege/political power.  Like some church denominations that prefer to shrink in size to maintain "purity," today's Republicans ignore the tearing of the social safety net, a weakened economy and military so that they can feel racially privileged.  Here are highlights from the Time piece that looks at the manner the Trump/GOP quest for a white republic is harming America: 

When in a recent tweetstorm Donald Trump suggested that four Congresswomen of color leave the U.S. and “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” social media exploded. Outrage. Even some news outlets finally let go of the euphemisms and called the tweets “racist.” The Republicans, on the other hand, were quiet. As well they would be. The ideological demographics of the party dictated it.

The GOP’s membership is nearly 90 percent white and can only envision carnage and extinction as it looks upon a rights-based, religious, racial and ideologically diverse America. Or, as Lindsey Graham had noted as early as 2012, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

In short, the United States of America is not really their America. They yearn for a white republic. That’s why they are fighting to recreate the days when, as Archie Bunker sang, “Guys like us, we had it made.” That’s why they’ve willingly gone along with and participated in a sustained attack on the country itself, allowing it to grow weaker so that they could feel stronger.

Already, Trump and the Republicans have severely harmed the institutional heft of checks-and-balances. But they’re not done. America’s international reputation and influence rest on enormous economic and military strength, as well as the intangible but all-important “soft power” brought on by a robust democracy. All three pillars are necessary to sustain America’s nearly global respect and position, yet — and this was the rub — all three are increasingly dependent on more than just whites in the United States to build and sustain. For white America to exist, America must die. And the Republicans have made their choice.

In their effort to restore a white America, the GOP had to wound the kind of multiracial democracy that not only elected Barack Obama to the presidency but enhanced America’s global reputation. Republicans, therefore, set out to create an electorate that was disproportionately white and conservative. In Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Alabama, North Carolina and more than 20 additional states GOP policies targeted African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, Native Americans, the young and the poor to keep them away from the ballot box. Republican governors and GOP-majority state legislatures deployed an array of voter-suppression tactics, including closing hundreds of polling stations in minority and low-income precincts, slashing early voting hours, reinstating poll taxes, mandating discriminatory voter ID laws and purging millions from the voter rolls. Meanwhile, before his death, Republican legislative mapmaker Thomas Hofeller set in place another key foundation for a white republic. He crafted extreme gerrymandered Congressional districts across the United States that violated the basic Constitutional concept of “one person, one vote.” His legislative maps diluted the electoral strength of large, racially diverse cities, and magnified the power of overwhelmingly white suburbs and sparsely populated rural areas. The dismantling of a robust, multiracial democracy requires not only acts of commission, such as the 5-4 Shelby County v. Holder decision by the conservatives on the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, but sins of omission as well. Mitch McConnell’s flat-out refusal to even engage legislation that would protect the nation’s electoral infrastructure from hacking and foreign interference, despite solid evidence that it occurred in 2016, sends a clear signal that for his ilk this is not an American democracy worth protecting or saving. The dangerous quest for a white republic is also undermining the U.S. military. When Trump came to power, there were more than 40,000 immigrants in uniform willing to fight and die for the United States. About 5,000 joined every year. The Department of Defense under this Administration, however, has either proposed or implemented policies that renege on promises of citizenship for immigrants in the armed services, issued directives that ban immigrants, even those with special language and medical skills, from serving and threatened to deport the families of those who are currently in the armed forces. . . . . Not surprisingly, in 2018, the Army missed its recruiting goals and then had to lower its expectations for 2019, to avoid two consecutive years of failure. The economic might of the United States has not been spared either. While much of the discussion on the economy and immigration has focused on the impact on the agricultural sector, the GOP’s xenophobic policies are also taking a direct hit on higher education and the nation’s capacity for and leadership in technological and scientific innovation. A 2013 report notes that international students enrolled in American universities accounted for “70.3 percent of all full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 63.2 percent in computer science, 60.4 percent in industrial engineering, and more than 50 percent in chemical, materials and mechanical engineering, as well as in economics (a non-STEM field).” Those students bring the brainpower to innovation, research and technology. . . . Yet, with the rise of Trump and his policies and rhetoric, U.S. higher education, which fuels this STEM growth, is simply not as attractive as it had been. The determination to build MAGA Land explains why what should be obvious tripwires – disrespecting military heroes; engaging in widespread corruption; cavorting with a communist dictator in North Korea and a journalist-killing authoritarian in Saudi Arabia; dodging multiple allegations of sexual assault, including rape; creating horrific scenes of White House-sponsored cruelty on the border; and believing Putin over our own intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the 2016 election – have all failed to dislodge one of the most unpopular presidents in recorded history. Put simply, because Trump promises Republicans a return to white dominance, he is more important to the GOP and its base than the country those in power took an oath to support and defend. The scurrilous attack on Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib was just part and parcel of a larger assault on America and the rich diversity and rights culture that are essential for true greatness.

The GOP Effort to Maintain A White Man’s Republic

Trump, Pence and Ross.

Numerous studies have shown that despite the myth that economic angst motivated whites to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, the real motivation was racial and a desire to protect white privilege and white political power.  Under Trump, the GOP has moved from dog whistle racism to overt and express calls to white racism and has emboldened white supremacists across the country.  Having spent last weekend in Charlottesville with family and attending my college reunion, that community remains traumatized over the actions of Trump emboldened white supremacists and Neo-Nazis - those who Trump called "very good people."  Sadly, as a piece in The Atlantic argues, the GOP agenda is to uphold white political power and domination at the expense of racial minorities. Now, the looming question is whether the Supreme Court will validate this effort by allowing the Trump/Pence regime to add a citizenship question to the U.S. census to skew the results to increase white representation.  Here are article highlights:

The disparate approaches taken by two of the Court’s conservatives to the Voting Rights Act reflect the right’s dueling impulses toward civil-rights laws. Where Scalia rejected the very effort to guarantee black people the same right to cast a ballot as white people as a “racial entitlement,” Roberts insisted that he agreed with the law’s underlying premises, but that the statute now did more harm than good.

Lingering beneath the surface was a defining question for the American right: Does it agree with Roberts that “any discrimination in voting is too much”? Or with Scalia, who saw ensuring equal participation in the polity as a black “racial entitlement”?

The Supreme Court’s looming decision over the addition of the citizenship question on the U.S. census will hinge on the answer to that question. The census provides the basis for congressional apportionment and the distribution of federal resources. Empirical studies of the impact of adding the question have determined that it would result in a dramatic undercount of Latinos and immigrants—exactly contrary to one of the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationales, that it would provide a more accurate count.

Since the rise of Trump, the American right has been offered a stark choice between the democratic ideals it has long claimed to believe in, and the sectarian ethno-nationalism of the president, which privileges white identity and right-wing Christianity over all. Scalia didn’t quite have it right: The fundamental question for American democracy since the founding has indeed been whether it is a “racial entitlement,” but only because of those who have tried for centuries to ensure that white people alone are entitled to it.

The Roberts Court has already taken steps in this direction. Last year it endorsed Trump’s travel ban, despite the president’s public statements identifying Muslims as the ban’s target, on the basis that the order itself did not mention religion, a blueprint for allowing further discriminatory efforts to pass constitutional muster as long as the high court’s conservatives retain control. Later that year, the conservative justices, self-styled champions of the freedom of religion, denied a request by a Muslim death-row inmate to have an imam present for his execution, forcing the condemned man to make do with the prison’s Christian chaplain. In both cases, the Court’s conservatives could hide behind the letter of the law in dismissing the government’s official disapproval of Islam. But recent revelations in the census case will force the Roberts Court to decide whether America is a nation for all of its citizens, or a white man’s republic.

On the surface, State of New York v. United States Department of Commerce appears to be a dry question of administrative and constitutional law. In January 2017, the news leaked that the Trump administration wanted to add a question asking census respondents whether they were American citizens. The Trump administration enlisted the acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, John Gore, to state that the question should be included to improve enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Wilbur Ross, the head of the Department of Commerce, which administers the census, insisted to Congress that this was the reason for the addition of the question. In fact, Ross had sought the addition of the question long before this rationale was provided.

A recent Court filing by groups challenging the addition of the citizenship question shows what the administration really had in mind. The filing shows that Thomas Hofeller, the late Republican redistricting expert, concluded that adding the citizenship question would, in his words, “be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.” That analysis was offered in a 2015 memo, as Hofeller was helping Republicans draw redistricting lines that they believed would cement a majority in Congress. That memo, along with a 2017 document written by Hofeller on the subject, which contains some language identical to a later Justice Department memo on the matter, was turned over to the liberal group Common Cause by Hofeller’s daughter after his death.

Voting districts are typically drawn using total population. A switch to using the voting-age citizen population would, Hofeller concluded in his 2015 memo, expand white political power at the expense of people of color, and thereby increase Republican advantage. But, Hofeller wrote, that shift could only occur with the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which would provide the federal government with data necessary for that switch.

In other words, long before Trump was even elected, Republican Party insiders were plotting to increase white political power at the expense of people of color. After Trump was elected, they implemented this plan by insisting that their actual goal was the protection of minority voting rights. As with the Voting Rights Act, there was the real reason and the stated reason, the truth and the pretext. . . . . “No one believes that anyone in this administration has any intention of enforcing the Voting Rights Act.”

The use of the Civil Rights Division, which was established to protect Americans’ fundamental rights, to undermine those very rights is a perversion of justice. But it also illustrates that Trumpism merely traveled a few stops down the road from where the Republican Party leadership had been. The risk with Trump was not that the GOP would become a vehicle for the preservation of white political and cultural hegemony; it was that he would discredit that project by making its agenda explicit, by saying, as Scalia did, the quiet part loud.

That the Republican effort to increase white political power might be motivated by partisanship rather than racism is little solace. . . . Whether motivated by partisanship or racism, though, the result is the same. If the Roberts Court does not draw a line here, this will not be the last step toward reestablishing a white man’s government it will be asked to take.

The census case does not hinge on whether the citizenship question is discriminatory. Rather, as a matter of administrative law, the executive branch must follow certain procedures before making decisions. The Trump administration’s blatant dishonesty settles the question of whether it followed procedure definitively: It did not.

“This kind of smoking-gun evidence of what the real illicit reason is behind a government action is incredibly rare. Court decisions don’t require it, and it’s really quite shocking to read it so explicitly,” Wendy Weiser, a voting-rights expert at the Brennan Center, told me. “Every procedural constraint on agency decisions was violated in this case, and the reason that was provided, every lower court found, was not the real reason that the secretary of commerce added the citizenship question.”

The census case is not ultimately about administrative procedure; it is, more fundamentally, about whether the Trump administration can use the federal government for the explicit purpose of increasing white political power. The Trump administration, and by extension, the conservative masses, are already on board, convinced by years of right-wing propaganda that all the opposition’s victories at the ballot box are suspect. Those elements of the Republican establishment that funded and conceived of the census scheme are all in, as well. The only remaining question is whether, and to what extent, the high court is willing to ratify this step toward white man’s government. It is not the first time it has been asked to do so.

Trump’s victory settled the question of whether the GOP would seek to expand its base by diversifying it, or rely on the imposition of white political hegemony over a changing electorate. This is a counter-majoritarian strategy that, in the long run, relies on abandoning the pretense of liberal democracy in favor of something else: A white man’s republic, if they can keep it.

The Far Right's White-Extinction Conspiracy Myth

In addition to depicting racial minorities as a physical threat to whites - e.g., Trump repeatedly saying that Hispanics are rapists and criminals - the far right and white supremacist politicians are sending a message, in some cases overtly and in others through dog whistle messaging, that whites in the USA and Europe face extinction and that drastic action is needed to stop the decline of the white race.  This was certainly true of the mass murderer in New Zealand who even cited Trump approvingly.   It was also the message of white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017 who chanted "you will not replace us." A column in the New York Times looks at this false and dangerous myth being utilized to inflame hatred and to bolster support for Republican candidates.  Ironically, outside of the Old South where whiteness gave status to those deemed "poor white trash," this myth plays best in regions with few minorities and, of course, among white Christofascists who almost by definition are anti-minority. Here are column excerpts:

“The Great Replacement” is a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that holds that white people face existential decline, even extinction, because of rising immigration in the West and falling birthrates among white women (caused, of course, by feminism).

That’s pretty much the whole argument; as a bit of rhetoric, the theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat-earthers, though without that group’s scientific rigor. White people are not going extinct. As a group, they are only maybe, possibly, becoming a smaller share of the population in the United States and Europe — but how much smaller is a wide-open question among demographers, because the future is unknowable and demography is an imprecise science.

But what “The Great Replacement” lacks in any factual basis it makes up for in digital branding appeal. The white-extinction theory plays well online. It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).

The theory has also found a foothold in more mainstream political circles. Donald Trump has flirted with Twitter users who espouse white-extinction theory, Tucker Carlson caresses it lovingly every now and then, and Steve King grabs it by the baby.

For white supremacists, the new term {Great Replacement] offers several branding advantages. First, it sounds kinda smart. The phrase was coined in 2012, as “le grand remplacement,” by the French writer Renaud Camus, giving the whole movement a patina of ivory tower intellectualism. “Replacement” is also more polite than “genocide,” which fits with a long-term effort among white supremacists to craft a cleaner-cut image for themselves. . . 

[W]hen a man killed 50 people in a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, he called his loopy manifesto “The Great Replacement.”

“The attacker was structuring his manifesto not only to speak to audiences but to algorithms,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard. “‘The Great Replacement’ is a ‘data void,’ in the sense that it would be very easy to capture that space on the front page of Google.”

Research shows that when you present white people with facts that counter the white-extinction theory, they become less alarmed and anxious about demographic change. Racial categories are blurry, and there’s a big debate among demographers about how one of the fastest-growing racial groups — people of mixed-race who have one white parent — will identify in the future. It could be that they will not be thought of as “white.” It could also be that they will marry white people, have mostly white children, and generally become “absorbed” into mainstream white culture, which is what has happened with previous generations of immigrants who were not considered white (like Eastern and Southern Europeans). Under the most inclusive definitions of whiteness, America could remain a white-majority society indefinitely. [W]hite people are still by far the wealthiest Americans. The net worth of the median black American family is only around fifteen percent of that of the median white American family. While most other groups experienced a net decrease in wealth in the six years after the Great Recession, “white families' net worth was essentially unchanged,” according to government surveys. Whites are also less likely than people of other races to live in poverty, and they are more likely to be among the superrich. Just about every American chief executive, billionaire and large political donor is a white person. Sure, white political overrepresentation is likely to fall. But not quickly, and not drastically. According to one projection, in the 2036 election, 59 percent of voters will be white.

The Great Replacement is a lie. The country is becoming more diverse, but white people are not losing their grip on America, nor on the world, not by a long shot.

Can America Ever Be Great Again After Trump?

Donald Trump campaigned under the slogan "make America great again."  The slogan was a lie because what he really meant was that he would bring back right wing white privilege and put "those people" - i.e., blacks, gays, Hispanics, non-Christians - back in their place and as in the imaginary good old days. Sadly, many Republicans who should have know better, understood Trump's real meaning and voted for him anyway, shedding any claim to moral decency in the process. Now, two years into the Trump nightmare, America finds itself the most isolated perhaps since the 1920's or perhaps even prior to WWI.  Europeans still like American tourists,. but view our leadership with justified contempt.  Meanwhile, the nation's social fabric is being torn apart and the nation's institutions are under daily attack by the demagogue in the White House and his Republican enablers and sycophants.  A column by a Washington Post columnist provides a review of Trump's damage to the nation.  It's an indictment of Trump, but also of those who continue to support him. Although not specifically mentioned, perhaps the most morally bankrupt are the evangelicals whose support of Trump has stripped them of moral authority on any topic.  Here are column excerpts:

There will be no Mount Rushmore for Donald Trump. But, if there's a presidential library, it should contain a Hall of Tweets, a Hall of Lies, a Hall of Insults and, with the "Marines' Hymn" softly playing, a Hall of Montezuma, with a section of his border wall. Finally, there should be a Hall of Consequences, the grandest in the place. No president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has mattered as much.

Trump has remade the Republican Party. It is no longer the party of Lincoln or Reagan, but increasingly a snarling, sneering collection of score-settlers, white nationalists, immigrant bashers, homophobes, science-deniers and religious reactionaries who praise a president who has lived a squalid personal life but who promised them a Supreme Court in their own image. Trump's GOP may not endure, but for the foreseeable future it reigns supreme.

Trump's dominance of his party is personified by Mitch McConnell. . . . . Trump has personally berated McConnell, but -- unburdened by either pride or principle -- McConnell does what the president wants. He faces re-election next year in a state, Kentucky, whose heart throbs for Trump. Understandably, McConnell fears vilification as a moderate.

In foreign affairs, the Trump presidency has had a huge impact. By fiat, by insult and by a dazzling display of historical ignorance, Trump has diminished the Atlantic alliance which every president since Roosevelt has supported and nourished. The lessons of World War II and of the implosion of the Soviet communist empire -- signal achievements of American involvement and leadership in the affairs of Europe -- are being discarded. . . . . . America may not yet be isolationist, but it is isolated.

Under Trump, the judiciary is being transformed. His judges not only are bitterly conservative but have been deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association at an unprecedented rate. He has vitiated Cabinet and other offices dealing with the environment and natural resources, turning over the grandeur of America to despoilers. Only his appointees' ineptness or sense of grandiosity -- EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's $25,000 phone booth, for instance -- has slowed the onslaught. Pruitt did manage to get Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement before he resigned.

But maybe the most damaging is how he has soiled the presidency itself. His incessant lying -- The Washington Post counted 8,459 false or misleading statements as of Feb 3 -- has turned the presidency into a gong show. He sits at the desk of presidents who took the truth seriously, who may have lied on occasion but never routinely. Trump, though, spouts lies like a drunken parrot, with, approximately, similar plumage. He has diminished the importance of truth, making it indistinguishable from lies -- just more noise.

Trump's attacks on the press are vividly demagogic. He has weakened its ability to be believed, to uncover scandal, to hold accountable the otherwise unaccountable. He applies the prefix "fake" to any news he does not like.

He has weakened the FBI, denigrated the CIA, praised Russia's Vladimir Putin and shrugged at the murder of a Post columnist by the Saudis. He is a president out of Orwell, a creature out of Kafka, a nightmare out of the Electoral College.

Will America recover from the Trump era? Not soon, maybe never. The wounds to the environment may never heal. Inept judges serve for life. Our erstwhile European allies will move on, finding their own way, which, we must pray, will not be the old way. The planet will cook and despots will thrive. Bad days are coming.

But maybe the most terrible consequence of all is the growing realization that Trump mined a vein of meanness in the American electorate. We are not the country we once were. . . . . He has not made America greater. Instead, he may have put greatness out of reach.

White Women Need to Stop Betraying Themselves

Women putting white privilege ahead of equality and decency.

I often ridicule white redneck types - think Southwest Virginia or West Virginia voters - who time and time again voted for Republicans who do nothing for them and, in fact, enact policies that do them significant financial harm.  How do Republicans get away with this?  By playing the race card as they have ever since Richard Nixon devised the so-called Southern strategy.  But it is not just rednecks that fall for the ploy.  Leading the charge of self-harm are and bible thumping, broad assed women, typically evangelicals who place their whiteness above all else. In doing so, they perpetually condemn themselves and their daughters and granddaughters to an inferior place in society.   (Gay Republicans maddeningly do the same thing, in my view) With two daughters and three granddaughters, it enrages me.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon and urges white women to stop the self-betrayal.  Here are excerpts:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out.

They’re more sympathetic to Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who actually shooed away a crowd of women and told them to “grow up.” Or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose response to a woman telling him she was raped was: “I’m sorry. Call the cops.”

These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped. The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday. But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades. White women have broken for Democratic presidential candidates only twice: in the 1964 and 1996 elections, according to an analysis by Jane Junn, a political scientist at the University of Southern California. . . . . The gender gap in politics is really a color line.

That’s because white women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain. In return they’re placed on a pedestal to be “cherished and revered,” as Speaker Paul D. Ryan has said about women, but all the while denied basic rights.

This elevated position over women of color comes at a cost, though. . . . . white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies.

[A] woman who steps out of line may be ridiculed by [Trump] the president himself. President Trump mocked Dr. Blasey in front of a cheering crowd on Tuesday evening. Betray the patriarchy and your whiteness won’t save you.

The pedestal is a superior, if precarious, place. For white women, it’s apparently better than being “stronger together,” with the 94 percent of black women and 86 percent of Latinas who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness.

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore. Maybe it’s because she comes from a state with the nation’s highest rate of sexual violence, with a sexual assault rate three times the national average, where prosecutors just let a man evade jail time after he kidnapped a native Alaskan woman and strangled her unconscious, then masturbated over her body. Maybe.

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.

The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?

I know where my daughters fall on this question.  They will vote against maintaining white privilege.  I also know where some "friends" votes will fall: they will vote to maintain their white privilege even when it means trowing decency, morality and the "Christian values" they pretend to honor.

The Boys’ Club That Protects Brett Kavanaugh

At élite institutions like Georgetown Prep, where Brett Kavanaugh was a student, high
school doesn’t end when you’re eighteen; it’s a lifelong circle of mutual support.

Perhaps I am beating a dead horse, but I continue to believe that Brett Kavanaugh NOT be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court regardless of whether or not he assaulted Christine Blasey Ford as alleged.  Why?  Because he epitomizes the mindset that has fostered bigotry and discrimination for decades, if not far longer.  It is noteworthy that 1000 alumni of Blasey Ford's high school have signed a letter stating that the facts of her allegations against Kavanaugh is completely consistent with the atmosphere that they witnessed and experienced. A lengthy piece in The New Yorker looks at the system that formed Kavanaugh and it makes it clear that Kavanaugh is incapable of identifying with those not from his privileged white world.  Here are excerpts:

Ten days later, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high-school house party in Bethesda, Maryland. Ford described Kavanaugh as “stumbling drunk” at the time of the assault. He has flatly denied the accusation. His defenders point out that she dates the assault to thirty-six years ago, when Kavanaugh was only a teen-ager. But Kavanaugh has made his high-school years a very prominent part of his personal narrative. In a speech three years ago at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, Kavanaugh said, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” adding, of himself and his friends, “That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think.” When he answered Kennedy in the Senate hearings, Kavanaugh mentioned that Jim Fegan, his high-school football coach, had texted him just three nights before, and that since being nominated he’s been running on the Georgetown Prep track on the weekends. Some people put high school behind them. Kavanaugh has not. 

Kavanaugh managed to avoid testifying on whether he snuck a few beers past Jesus. But, as has been widely reported, the inside jokes on his high-school yearbook page list him as the treasurer of the “Keg City Club” and a member of the “Beach Week Ralph Club,” and make reference to “100 Kegs or Bust.” Close readers of his yearbook page have debated whether “Have You Boofed Yet?” refers to the practice of anally ingesting alcohol or drugs. According to many graduates of Washington prep schools, the party culture described in yearbooks often created occasions for sexual harassment and assault. More than a thousand women who attended Holton-Arms, the girls’ school from which Ford graduated, have signed a letter that describes the alleged assault as “all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.” Now the rest of us are learning about the hierarchy of Washington private schools—about what it meant, in the eighties, to go to Georgetown Prep as opposed to Landon or Gonzaga, and about the girls’ schools Stone Ridge, Visitation, and Holton-Arms. By all appearances, the kids from these prep schools almost exclusively socialize with one another, and that social network informs their identities for the rest of their lives. As reporters have investigated Kavanaugh’s high-school years, many alumni have expressed fear about going on the record and alienating themselves from a close-knit community. “I guess you could call it a fraternity between a bunch of rich kids,” an anonymous alumnus of Georgetown Prep, who overlapped with Kavanaugh there, told the Huff Post. “All this shit happens, and then nobody really wants to talk about it, because if one person crumbles, the whole system crumbles, and everybody tells on everybody.” I spoke with another Georgetown Prep alumnus, who hated high school but still didn’t want to go on the record about what it was like there. Even for those who take less pride in the institution, what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. What Kavanaugh appears to have been taught, as a young person, is that goodness is working at a soup kitchen or volunteering on a mission to a poorer country; it’s granted to other people as an act of charity. Meanwhile, less good behavior would be tolerated, as long as it happened under the veil of drunkenness, or as a joke. The Jesuit fathers would turn a blind eye to the yearbook, and U.S. senators would chuckle at frat-boy antics. In this world, high school doesn’t end when you’re eighteen; it’s a lifelong circle of mutual support, an in-crowd that protects itself.

One quote on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page is an apparent reference to his friend Mark Judge, who Ford says was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her. Judge, who says he has “no memory” of the incident and that he does not want to testify, is the author of a 1997 memoir called “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.” The quote is from Benjamin Franklin ; the emphasis is Kavanaugh’s: “He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows, nor JUDGE all he sees.” The next few days will show whether Kavanaugh was right to place his faith in this system.