One of the most pernicious effects of the 1960s-era Voting Rights Act has been continued judicial interference in local government. At times, the Act is said to require districts that guarantee a majority-minority district, lest the minorities lose group power and influence. At others, it supposedly requires a single district voting system so that minorities can compete fairly in city and county-wide elections. The decisions of elected officials or voters in deciding on one or the other format are irrelevant. Democracy must be saved from itself and the empowerment it entails for evil white majorities.
These contradictory applications of a law originally designed to prevent white intimidation of black voters evidence a guiding principle: minority supremacy. Instead of undoing the old evil of white political violence and racially motivated disenfranchisement of blacks, a new evil is introduced in its place that goes beyond correcting the wrongs done to blacks in America’s past. That new evil is an evil on the level of ideas: the permanent elevation of racial group interests in our political life, but only when those groups are minorities. Under this principle, the many identities people have such as divisions by wealth, political party, religion, idiosyncratic personal beliefs, or anything else, are swept away and replaced with a view that their interests are primarily defined racially. Minority power is upheld as an end itself, because this is what people really are in terms of identity.
In practice, this principle requires judicial intervention to guarantee the success of the Democratic Party, which is the party which every minority group, as a group, consistently supports in all circumstances. Why? Because the Democratic Party openly and shamelessly denies the traditional American virtues of community, individualism, in favor of the Marxist gospel of oppression and class and racial justice through raw expressions of minority power. When these primitive feelings do not come forth naturally through envy, alienation, and ignorance of American values, they are inflamed, reinforced, and made respectable by professional race baiters like Al Sharpton, college and law school professors, Hollywood, the media, and all the rest of the liberal establishment.
This all too familiar drama has now played out in Osceola County, Florida where a burgeoning Mexican population has supposedly shown (retroactively) that the voter-approved county-wide elections for various county officials are unfair and discriminatory because they dilute minority power. And is that power diluted because Hispanic votes are treated differently from white ones, say as worth one half of a white vote? No. The dilution is that Hispanics must campaign, like white candidates, on a county-wide basis, but that they don’t always win in such a fight.
The transparent pro-Democrat and anti-white agenda of this ruling could not be more apparent. It has nothing to do with applying a neutral principle that large or small districts are a good or bad thing. Likely, there are many reasonable views on that subject, particularly as it relates to local government. Instead, a single uniting principle allows all of these superficially inconsistent actions: anti-white, anti-majority, anti-traditional antipathies built into liberalism, which aims at equality in all things. This unnatural and utopian goal in turn requires the erasure of distinction, power, and prestige garnered by whites and not by various minorities in an otherwise level playing field. Instead of evidencing enterprise, luck, commitment to getting votes, or something else admirable, all success is treated as suspect to liberals. This unbalanced commitment to a single principle leads tragically to a kind of nihilism that denies any capacity for principled action outside of the narrow demands of one’s race’s hunger for power.
The drama in Osceola County is just the pus that bursts forth occasionally from the infection of liberalism on what could be a healthy, balanced, and self-respecting body politic committed to some notion of common welfare.
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The principle of democracy and let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may is certainly the aspiration, but that wasn’t the situation before the Voting Rights Act came along. White legislatures were deliberately gerrymandering their states along racial lines to ensure that a city with a 40 percent black population wouldn’t have any black representatives elected. So what should be done about that? It would not be constitutional to require that 40 percent of the representatives be black — that kind of quota is apparently reserved for wink-wink law school admissions. After that, options get problematic. What would you propose we do to avoid legislatures that work to ensure that minority enclaves are decidedly underrepresented?
Not to mention that “one man, one vote” is a bit of a delusion as well, because not all votes are equal. Since each district gets the same number of representatives (one) no matter what its population, people living in bigger districts have less of a vote than those in smaller districts. Some amount of this is inevitable — it is just too hard to apportion population evenly in this regard. But it’s a real disparity. And let’s not forget the Electoral College…
Actually, white legislatures were straight up not letting blacks at all. Back then, however, the notion that blacks could get a black representative to represent black interests was anathema. The concept was they should be treated equally as fellow citizens of their respective jurisdictions by eliminating poll taxes,intimidation, and the like.
I think we–as the feds and its judges–should do almost nothing at all to address the alleged problem of making sue minority intersts are underreprsented because (a) the federal government should have a strong bias against interfering in local affairs and (b) times have changed considerably from the era of voter intimidation and it’s wrong to read such a nefarious intent into practices like voter-approved count-wide elections, whcih is what was the case in Osceola. The United States’ largest collection of black elected officials is in the former cotton belt, where many counties have black majorities. This is according to the chief ethnographer of the South, John Shelton Reed. These federal interventions are a problem in search of a solution.
One Man One Vote is indeed contradited by the minimum district size of “one state” and the statewide elections of Senators. But the Supreme Court has not allowed similar regimes to exist at the state and local level to preserve rural interests. It’s ridiculous, but even more ridiculous is the notion that blacks or other minorities, particularly recently arrived Mexicans, have a right to group representation. There is at least some plausible basis for giving blacks a helping hand through affirmative action to undo earlier white discrimination. But newcomers who come here voluntarily should not be given the same privilege. What wrongs were ever done to them that are remotely on the scale of the old Jim Crow system. What evil is being undone other than the fact that they’re poor, political novices, and in many cases illegal and can’t vote diluting their group power.
The notion of using federal law and federal courts to advance the group power and group representation of minorities is completely un-American.
So if a state’s legislature chose to gerrymander based on race to hinder minority representation, you would oppose any federal effort to correct this, even under the 14th Amendment? And your solution would then be…what, exactly?
I don’t think there is racism today like there used to be. Not even close. But I do think that it has been shown that minorities tend to vote for Democrats more than for Republicans, which means that race will still be an important factor in redrawing district lines. Republicans have an interest in arranging districts so as to effectuate more Republican legislators, and Democrats have the opposite interest. How do we ensure that the game-playing does not get out of hand? After all, the minority voters themselves will have a hard time making their vote count and change the situation when their population has been strategically split into ineffectual blocs.
I simply think the costs of policing that are far higher than the benefits. More often that gerrymandering is done for political not racial reasons; whichever party is in power wants to stay in power. And majority-minoriyt districts–what is being fought for in Osceola County–are more often than not desired by Republicans as they suck voters out of ajoining districts and have a net positive effect on them. This was one of the strange aspects of the Texas redistricting case.
So, while I don’t deny that it would be a bad thing if what you say happened actually happened, I don’t think it’s worth the trouble. I have no problem either policy wise or constitution wise with the federal governmetn making sure KKK horsemen are not pointing guns at people on election day, dropping them from the rolls, etc. But beyond that, how districts are set up and whether they dilute “minority power” is of no interest to me. Minorities should have the same power to vote as individuals as anyone else in whatever oddly shaped district or political unit they happen to live in.
Are you telling me that if blocs of these “newly arrived Mexicans” starting redrawing districts so as to ensure fewer whites could be elected to office, it wouldn’t interest you? I think you’d be positively apoplectic.
If you want people to have faith in the election system — which is a pretty valuable thing in a republican form of government like ours — then you’re going to have to have some effective method of preventing gerrymandering along racial lines to minimize minority representation, at least to some extent. I’m still not sure why you think federal courts are particularly unsuited to this task. How big is that cost, really?
Minorities hurt whites and campaign to hurt whites every day through things like affirmative action, majority minority districts, etc. I oppose all of these group think experiments. That said, since all of these federal interventions are based on the opposite presumption that whites are being racists when in fact the primary racism in our society comes from the so-called oppressed minorities, for now I’d err on the side of trusting democracy or at least letting it fail on its own. Whites have shown that they’ll simply move away when a minority-dominated political unit gets too bad, e.g., Detroit, LA. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than federal judges chasing phantom charges of white racism.
In short, I simply don’t think white racism is worth one cent from the feds other becuase its chief support in white attitudes has largely dissipated.