Unintended Consequences of Shelby?

I think the thrust of your hypothesis is probably correct.
In the short term, preventing “minority voters” from voting aids the Republican cause.

In the long term, it prevents the GOP from finding a strategy to engage with “minority voters.” Eventually this will leads to an inability to win power – and that will lead to a realignment in the GOP that will be bitter, hard-fought and bloody.

What I have no answer to is “how long is the long term” – because they can pull off the balancing act for quite a while. Enough “minority voters” are either culturally or economically conservative that they can ignore the ethnocentrism of the party on the right for a long time.

Read this column by Matt Lewis.

I normally don’t venture out in search of mangoes, but in this case I made an exception. It’s worth the trip. Lewis discovers that 30 years of Republican race-baiting have resulted in a party where racists can let their racist flag fly without qualification or apology. And he’s just shocked, I tell you, shocked.

The cherry on the sundae: referring to Mickey Kaus as a Democrat. That’s just adorable.

@3:
I don’t read Kaus (mostly because I could rarely understand what he was saying, except for some generic hostility to immigration)
However, Mickey Kaus *is* a Democrat: he run for the Dem primary, for instance.

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_Kaus#Political_views
“Kaus usually supports Democratic politicians … Kaus supported Obama in the 2012 US Presidential Election…”

No Republican is allowed to call a fellow Republican a racist, obviously.

It’s an odd unintended consequence of the general triumph of the liberal idea of equality that racism, and to a lesser extent sexism, has become unspeakable. It’s an extension to the old ‘irregular verb’ gag – I know what I think, you have fixed ideas, he’s prejudiced… and absolutely nobody we know is a racist. Crossing racism off the list of things it’s OK to be seems fair enough; the trouble is what then happens if you call a statement “a bit racist”. It doesn’t come out sounding like “a bit reactionary” or even “a bit prejudiced” – more like “a bit Klan-like” or “a bit Nazi”. As a result, people whose statements might actually be a bit racist, and who might benefit from reflecting on how and why, can not only bat away the accusation but respond with quite genuine moral outrage – how dare you call me a racist? The next step is counter-attack – how low can your side sink, going around calling people racists? (The slippage between ‘racist’ adj. and ‘a racist’ a very bad person is symptomatic.)

It’s frustrating. But if it’s going to damage the Republicans, I guess it’s not all bad.

SamChevre, exactly. The Court did not legalize anything, it simply made it easier to break the law.

Metatone 06.28.13 at 10:46 am
“In the long term, it prevents the GOP from finding a strategy to engage with “minority voters.” Eventually this will leads to an inability to win power – and that will lead to a realignment in the GOP that will be bitter, hard-fought and bloody.”

In the medium term, the current batch of politicians will have retired, and much of the current Tea Party will have died.

If you think of it as a bunch of middle-aged people playing out the rest of their careers heedless of the damage left behind, it makes perfect sense.

It is important to understand the basic structure of American governance to estimate the impact this will have. Since there is no national vote, the potential impact is limited to states already controlled by Republicans. At the moment, that includes some states where a majority of the voting public would support Democratic candidates, especially for president. That gives the Republicans some time to leverge their current control of the state houses into a mechanism by which they can continue to maintain a majority in the House through gerrymandering. This prevents top down voting reform. And it might help them win the WH one of these days, which will probably lead to a restocking of the conservatives on the SC (also helping prevent voting reform). Holding the state houses and being able to block voting reform at the national level also allows them to deny the vote to minorities in state and use gerrymandering to maintain control of the state houses.

But this is all very high leverage. The very act of doing this stuff is a big turnoff for minorities (and many whites, frankly). And the obstruction at the national level may eventually backfire if the Senate finally gets rid of the fillibuster for appointments in 2014 or the Dems hold the WH in 2016. It’s hard to predict when the tide will turn precisely (though 2020 redistricting is a good bet), but you have to imagine that the Republicans + demographic shifts are setting up a scenario where the only two possible outcomes are a South African like voting system in an electoral college controlling number of states (if the Republicans have the appetite to go that far which I’m not sure that they do) or the complete collapse of the Republican party at the national level.

Well, the unleashed states are going to rack up quite a factual record to support the imposition of preclearance in the future.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republican Party is headed for oblivion in the long run. But in the long run, we are all dead. What will be left of the country by the time they have lost their power to obstruct?

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republican Party is headed for oblivion in the long run. But in the long run, we are all dead. What will be left of the country by the time they have lost their power to obstruct?

I honestly don’t think the whatever, culture/people/region, has changed much in 350 years nor will it ever change without violence. It has been , gradually but inexorably, withdrawing from the rest of the nation/world (in some ways) and is now more isolated as Republican Dixie than it was at the height of Jim Crow.

I think it is what they have wanted for thirty years, to build a fortress in solid states to sally forth with veto power and beg sanity to come challenging them. They are evil feudalists, and don’t care what you think of them.

I expect a 3rd Civil War to be necessary, but unlike the 1st and 2nd, I do not expect Yankees to come on down and save the 30%-50% of the South that is decent and vulnerable. I expect NY and Cal and IL to just say the hell with it.

And then they win.

I think it is what they have wanted for thirty years, to build a fortress in solid states to sally forth with veto power and beg sanity to come challenging them. They are evil feudalists, and don’t care what you think of them.

This is just ridiculous. You can’t attribute clearly defined motives to a movement. And even if you could, you really think this has been their goal? I think it would be much more accurate to say that they have fooled themselves into thinking they could continue winning national elections on the back of a white electorate. And a lot of them still don’t understand why the ‘good’ minorities don’t vote for them. Set aside the base for a moment. The party leaders are still a whole bunch of people (especially if you take a 30 year period). They have a lot of different goals and a lot of different opinions about what is possible, politically.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this post’s specifics, but I do believe that the author here (like most older/boomer observers) is mischaracterizing the rise/influence of populist conservatism. These are not extremists.

An objective observer would have a difficult task if asked to draw distinctions between the liberal/Dem platform and the “establishment” GOP. Herein lies the catalyst for popular conservatism, which in itself is nothing to be afraid of in my opinion. Populist conservatism shares many, many positions with the Occupy movement which was similarly demonized on the Left. Both Left and Right populism are simply a demonstration that a large & growing percentage of the population ARE NOT REPRESENTED BY EITHER PARTY. It’s just that simple.

Conservatives are exercising their will for true representation by attempting to change/reform the established party of the Right. Thus the ongoing primary challenges against “establishment” incumbants. There is no longer an argument or denial that the GOP is now split into two distinct factions, each with enough power to disrupt the other. Neither party has seen this sort of dynamic since the late 60’s/early 70s when populist (anti-war) liberals bucked against establishment Dems (personified by LBJ).

Obama’s election has 1) exacerbated the the split among conservatives, and 2) hidden the growing split among liberals. But this president is suffering from a very real lack of credibility with three full years remaining in his second term (thus the premature launch of the Hillary campaign). There is a possibility that the populist Right and populist Left may discover their common ground and compound the problems/decline of both establishment political parties… note how the ‘establishment’ Right & Left have both alligned themselves a) against Snowden, b) in support of NSA/DHS, c) against the rule-of-law, d) in support of ‘establishment’ criminals (like J. Corzine), e) against small business (healthcare, lack of tax code reform), and f) in support of corporate largesse (healthcare, farm bill, auto & bank bail-outs). Thus, in matters of true governance/policy import (i.e. non-social issues) ‘establishment’ Democrats & Republicans are indistinguishable. And the popular majority of americans disagrees with the ‘establishment’ on every single one of the issues mentioned above.

One could say that both parties are shrinking for the same reason – neither can claim to represent a criticical mass of citizens/voters regarding important civic/functional/constitutional issues. The Establishment Right & Left are defending a failing status quo while the majority of americans have already evolved and are well beyond the corruption and prejudices of their “leaders”.

The alleged Republican demographic problem may solve itself, because that part of the Republican base, which is most hostile to including Hispanics, will die off quickly.

The need to keep Republicans crazy will continue as long as it works to keep Obama (and Hilary?) plausible to Democrats.

mpower69 :

” I don’t necessarily disagree with this post’s specifics, but I do believe that the author here (like most older/boomer observers) is mischaracterizing the rise/influence of populist conservatism. These are not extremists.”

This is a flat-out lie; the actions and motivations of the Tea Party are clear, and extremists is precisely what they are.

” An objective observer would have a difficult task if asked to draw distinctions between the liberal/Dem platform and the “establishment” GOP. ”

Again, flat-out lie. They’re a lot closer than I’d like, but they are clearly different.

I don’t see striking down VRA’s section 5 as presenting the Rs with any appreciable, useful, voter suppression opportunities. Therefore I don’t think there will be much in the way of exploitation of such opportunities in the old Confederacy. Oh, maybe some piling on, just to indulge the segregationists’ feelings on the subject, but they don’t really have to exploit the ruling’s direct effects to achieve any practical advantage, so they will probably mostly avoid such.

This is because the segregationists have long since built up their defenses against whatever effect section 5 was ever going to have as a tool for an anti-segregationist attack on Jim Crow voting. The effective stuff — lifelong denial of the franchise to felons, and making felons out of a huge chunk of the black population; caging black voters into a few majority minority CDs per state; having local elections off the federal cycle — isn’t touched by VRA scrutiny. Chiseling down a few further % points of the black vote might conceivably swing statewide races in AZ, VA or NC, but those aren’t the states where the legislature is deep red enough to get aggressive anyway. There’s no further blood to be squeezed from the electoral turnip in states like SC or LA where the lege is radical enough to go radical on voter suppression. These states aren’t going blue in statewide contests until sometime after the Millennium, and they have their minority majority CDs already carved out.

In general, the black vote is static in size, and entrenched in its pattern of voting and not voting. The real fighting is going to occur in areas of the battlefield that aren’t already covered five trench systems deep.

I think there is much greater potential for voter suppression mischief in the reasoning the five used in throwing out section 5. I haven’t seen any useful commentary on that, and I’m not a constitutional lawyer myself, so I haven’t even tried to read the decision to figure out that reasoning.

That rationale is important because the US system has this Achilles heel (Among many! I don’t understand why the US Constitution is at all admired.), that individual states divide the power to decide who votes, in even federal elections, with the federal govt. SCOTUS polices that division, so what the policemen will and won’t let the federal govt enforce on states is hugely important to the fundamental question of any representative form of govt — who gets to vote.

There are all sorts of really effective things that R state leges could do to actually suppress big chunks of the vote far outside the Old Confederacy, but that would be questionably allowed by SCOTUS. Not that I think they would do this per se and openly, because it would be unpopular, but something I mention just as a reminder of how wide state discretion could be in withholding the franchise if they get a friendly SCOTUS — nothing in the Constitution keeps states from denying the franchise on the basis of wealth or income. They would have to achieve the same effect more indirectly to get past the court of public opinion, but exactly what they have to do to get past the Supreme Court was probably made clearer by this VRA ruling. I think that’s where the true importance f this ruling will eventually prove to lie, what standard of SCOTUS scrutiny of voter suppression it sets forth, not that it threw out section 5.

I’m with Suzanne. And Matthew Yglesias:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/06/hispanics_and_the_affordable_care_act_latinos_love_obamacare.html
Republican policies are generally not that popular, except among white Christians. The people who care the most about immigration are ineligible to vote, other hispanics prioritize other issues.

And European immigrants were always considered white. There was a thing called Jim Crow (as well as immigration acts to exclude Asians). It didn’t apply to them.

“And European immigrants were always considered white. There was a thing called Jim Crow (as well as immigration acts to exclude Asians). It didn’t apply to them.”

No; Jim Crow leaned on black people, specifically, but that didn’t mean European immigrants were white – they just weren’t black. I remember somebody posting a link on a blog (probably Lawyers, Guns and Money) to the case where Finns were declared to be Caucasian. Formerly, they were classified as Asians.

“…there will be enormous pressure of Republicans in that state to adapt their coalition strategically…”

No strategy change can unmake R segregationism. At the outset, maybe, it made sense to talk about a Southern Strategy, a play for the segregationist vote as a strategy that the party could dial up or dial back. That has long since ceased to be the case. Racism is a feature to the people who control the party, it’s not a bug. It’s the reason the party exists, and no longer a strategy they can leave behind.

32:” Most Hispanic voters are not immigrants, and many are not entirely sympathetic to immigrants, for a variety of reasons. (Not an endorsement of their views.)”

More Hispanic voters are being born in the US rather than immigrating and the Hispanic community is no monolith, but it’s still true that many Hispanic voters appreciate the need for government services and for sound reasons.

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/04/v-politics-values-and-religion/?src=prc-number

There is indeed a notion some GOPers have that they can reach out to the “good” Hispanics who are “natural” Republicans who just need to hear the right cues to make a switch. For partisan reasons I hope they stay with this line of thought, but it’s a misleading one.

Me @7:

“call[ing] a statement “a bit racist” … doesn’t come out sounding like “a bit reactionary” or even “a bit prejudiced” – more like “a bit Klan-like” or “a bit Nazi”. As a result, people whose statements might actually be a bit racist, and who might benefit from reflecting on how and why, can not only bat away the accusation but respond with quite genuine moral outrage – how dare you call me a racist?”

‘Greg’, commenting at Matt Lewis’s column:

“Ahhhh, it’s pretty pathetic that people who have no argument or any other card in their hand when they bring out the “RACE-CARD”. What’s next, the terms xenophobia and Nazi? There are plenty of us who are against amnesty, and it doesn’t have anything to do with race; it has to do with cultural differences and unacceptable “cultural norms” that Mexicans are bringing in with them, including lawlessness, ungratefulness, and the expectation that we’re supposed to raise their standard of living (while they destroy ours).”

Stephen @36: Democrats are spread all around the country, dominating the densely populated northeast, northern midwest, and the Pacific coast, with an increasing share of the southwest, while Republicans dominate the sparsely populated prairie and western states and the more densely populated south. In 2012 Democrats won the white vote in the northwest, split it on the west coast, and narrowly lost it in the midwest. Southern whites overwhelmingly voted Republican.

While historically and in theory Hispanics might choose either party, California Republicans decisively alienated Latinos with anti-immigrant measures, and now Arizona and Texas are going down the same road. They can’t help themselves. The party is dominated by racists, and that alone is enough to drive away the growing Asian population, and may lose them the generations who grow up in multi-ethnic communities.

I notice that those who claim there are ‘big’ or ‘huge’ differences between the ironically named ‘Democrats’ and the ironically named ‘Republicans’ are not going into any great detail about what those differences actually are, political rhetoric notwithstanding.

Mao, it seems to me that, after foreign policy, economic topics is where the 2 parties differ less.

Mao, the difference is that ethnocentrism changes very slowly. The big ethnic issue for the past few years is that we in the USA got to the point where Hispanics were now candidates to ‘become white’, from the viewpoint of the party which cares about that. The Base resoundingly said ‘no’. This is likely to change, but probably it will take a generation.

@46
As I think is tolerably well-known, Obamacare (or Romneycare as it should really be called) is almost literally identical to Mitt Romney’s Mass. Heath Reform Bill. Romney felt duty bound to lie about this during the election run up (Obama of course proudly proclaimed that it was a Republican idea) but that’s just politicking, as is current Republican objections to Obamacare.

The Violence Against Women act is indeed laudable although we should be very careful to see how this ‘new’ funding will actually work in practice. This act has also been criticised on various grounds (which I pass on without comment, merely to note that it is not an uncontroversial bill cf here (http://nation.time.com/2013/02/27/whats-wrong-with-the-violence-against-women-act/).

Again with climate change. Obama’s new speech is admirable, but he has a habit of making big promises which he has no intention of keeping, then working secretly with his Republican ‘enemies’ to gut them, and then turning round and pretending that it was all the Republicans’ fault. We should very much wait and see about this one.

Of course an accurate balance sheet should also include all the very many ways in which Obama is objectively worse than Bush and indeed almost any Republican: cf his murder (‘drone’) campaign, his murder of avowedly innocent American citizens, his historically unprecedented attack on civil liberties and basic freedoms, and so on.

Hidari @49:

As I think is tolerably well-known, Obamacare (or Romneycare as it should really be called) is almost literally identical to Mitt Romney’s Mass. Heath Reform Bill. Romney felt duty bound to lie about this during the election run up (Obama of course proudly proclaimed that it was a Republican idea) but that’s just politicking, as is current Republican objections to Obamacare.

Except the choice Americans face is not Republicans in Massachusetts a decade ago vs. national Democrats today. It’s national Democrats today vs. national Republicans today. There’s unquestionably a ratchet effect in our politics. One of the tragedies of our political system is that today’s Republican policies are probably tomorrow’s Democratic ones. But that doesn’t make them no different from today‘s Democratic policies. And the process isn’t stopped by empowering Republicans. Indeed, it only speeds up.

Of course an accurate balance sheet should also include all the very many ways in which Obama is objectively worse than Bush and indeed almost any Republican: cf his murder (‘drone’) campaign, his murder of avowedly innocent American citizens, his historically unprecedented attack on civil liberties and basic freedoms, and so on.

Except, again, Republicans today support all these policies (even Rand Paul only objects to using drones against US citizens on American soil, something even the President doesn’t support). There’s precisely zero evidence that electing Republicans will make any of these things better.

@mpower69 #23
I take your point, however, I don’t know that the populist left and populist right could or should form a coalition. I am not a believer in “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Considering my myself a Social-Democrat, or sometimes a “Leftatarian”, I don’t see that much in common with the Tea Party other than a distaste for the centrist establishment.

Ben Alpers: Except the choice Americans face . . .

The people, who make up the menu are in charge, not those of us, who are allowed to choose from the menu they present us.

What I don’t quite grasp is the enthusiasm for this state of affairs.

Bruce Wilder @55:

The people, who make up the menu are in charge, not those of us, who are allowed to choose from the menu they present us.

What I don’t quite grasp is the enthusiasm for this state of affairs.

I’m basically in agreement with this. But I’d add that one does not have to be at all enthusiastic about the choice to recognize that it is a real choice, though a lousy one.

Haven’t read commentary on this or even about the Shelby decision, but in response to the OP, these two points may be relevant.

1. Harvard Prof Steven Ansolabehere’s analyses of the electorate. After the first Obama victory, I think that he showed that what made the difference was not more youth turnout for Obama and more white, “guilt-ridden” liberal support for Obama but simply Obama’s success in winning back for the Democrats a substantial majority of the Latino vote (Bush had basically split it) and increasing black turnout. This is my vague recollection of a piece that he published in the Boston Review.

2. With Adelman’s biography of Albert Hirschman widely discussed, perhaps we can look for an exit/voice angle to this. In Exit, Voice and Loyalty Hirschman shows how an extremist minority within a party that thinks it has no viable exit option may use voice to capture that party to the detriment of the electoral chances of the party. If I remember correctly–and it’s been years since I read the book–Hirschman actually analyzes Barry Goldwater’s influence on Republicans in terms of his framework. Such an analysis may be relevant again.

I guess I need a few things filled in:

Why do Republicans need moderates? How many moderates do they have now?

Why would racist suppression of the vote not work this time when it worked so well for so many years? What is different about the present as opposed to the past?

It will get ugly and they will attract the voters that like ugly and there seems to be lots of them.

Do we need to assume there is natural arc of racial progress? Might it also happen that things will decline and get worse as whites start to become a minority and they get more entrenched?

Ben @52,

Exactly. You can get away with being much more extremely anti-poor than anti-black. The other side is going to be much more aggressively anti-poor in the whatever voter suppression plans it has than anti-black.

The NC lege is much more likely to do something like impose a length-of-residence restriction on voting (to prevent voting fraud during registration to vote, of course), than anything anti-black. Make it restrictive enough, and you can go a far way towards an effective disenfranchisement of apartment dwellers. Of course you give people who live at these less stable addresses some workaround, you just make it cumbersome, so when they fail to jump through all hoops, you can once again blame the undeserving poor, who are that way because they’re lazy. You get a lot more done in the way of voter suppression if you take this broader approach, and it’s more acceptable than directly targeting blacks.

That’s my point. The VRA prevented stuff that mostly you can’t get away with any more anyway because the climate of opinion has changed. You can’t talk about lazy undeserving blacks anymore. It’s lazy undeserving poor people you talk about, it’s those urban voters who aren’t really American in their outlook and their values.

So sure, the NC lege is radical from my point of view and yours, as they end unemployment benefits. Doing that in the middle of a slump in demand means that they are so radically anti-poor that they are willing to tank the economy and make everyone suffer just to punish the unemployed. That’s the radical you can get away with now, but that’s radical the VRA doesn’t touch.

Wow. screwed up the blockquote big time.

Bruce Wilder @64:

Is it a “real” choice, as Ben says, or is it a “real choice” carefully calibrated into a false choice?

Not to sound like a broken record here, but one does not have to believe it is the choice that Democrats say it is to believe that it is a choice. Things get worse faster when the Republicans are in charge, even if the best that Democrats offer is things getting worse at a slightly slower rate. That is a choice. And because I don’t think that things getting worse faster hastens the day when we have better choices, I will continue to vote for things getting worse slower, while reminding myself (and others) that not all politics is electoral politics.

“I give Obama’s record on civil liberties a solid F-minus, but “historically unprecedented”? Please.”

“The Obama administration has charged more people (six) under the Espionage Act for the alleged mishandling of classified information than all past presidencies combined. /strong>(Prior to Obama, there were only three such cases in American history, one being Daniel Ellsberg, of Nixon-era Pentagon Papers fame.)” (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/06/obamas-whistleblowers-stuxnet-leaks-drones)

*LIke Romneycare, implemented by Obama, you mean?

The Republican Party has tuned itself to welcome Cubans, thinking that this shows that they welcome Hispanics into the party and are well positioned to handle the ongoing shift in US demographics. The problem with this proposition is that it isn’t true. In essence, Cubans are white while Mexicans are brown, allowing the Republican Party to claim it has made its tent bigger without ever shifting its core identity the way it would have to in order attract browns or blacks.

Perhaps this sounds far-fetched, but really, it’s no surprise if you are a member of these groups, or of any group descended from Spanish colonizers. Rich and influential families often took efforts to maintaining “pure” family bloodlines, with varying levels of success. In Cuba, as on many other island colonies, the planter class was much more successful than in Mexico, so many of the emigres when Castro took over were very white compared to your typical Mexican immigrant.

This means that the efforts to push for openly racist policies in states on the Mexican border result in the Republican Party failing to attract large blocks of Hispanic voters, because they have failed to see fundamental identity differences, instead lumping anyone with a bit of Spanish ancestry because the Census Bureau invented the catch-all “Hispanic”.

Speaking as a foreigner, I would have said that the position statement for American presidents includes the line “War criminal”. Some of them seem to enjoy it more than others, but they all have to show willing.

jake the snake 06.29.13 at 2:22 pm
@mpower69 #23
“I take your point, however, I don’t know that the populist left and populist right could or should form a coalition. I am not a believer in “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Considering my myself a Social-Democrat, or sometimes a “Leftatarian”, I don’t see that much in common with the Tea Party other than a distaste for the centrist establishment.”

I haven’t seen any sign pf actual right-wing populism, just the usual slavish service to billionaires and megacorps, while trash-talking college professors as ‘elites’.

Hidari @ 69:

“LIke Romneycare, implemented by Obama, you mean?”

I’m so tired of this misleading line of argument. Two points:

1) Despite its intellectual origins in a conservative think-tank, Romneycare is not Republican policy by any reasonable measure. It was only ever vaporware, a rhetorical counter to more liberal proposals. No Republican ever considered implementing anything like it until the governor of one of the most liberal states in the country decided that it might neutralize Democratic efforts to pass something else. The overwhelming liberal majority in the Massachussets legislature thought this was liberal enough for them, and so they agreed to it.

2) Obamacare is not the same thing as Romneycare. It has the same pseudo-market mechanism, but it also includes a *massive* expansion of Medicaid. That is how most people without insurance are now going to get it, and it’s being paid for by higher taxes on rich people. Unsurprisingly, this is the aspect of Obamacare that has faced the stiffest opposition, with enormous help from the Roberts court.

And I’m just going to leave aside all the other great aspects of the law, from the banning of predatory practices to the implementation of smarter payment mechanisms to the programs related to medical records to everything else. In my perfect world, we’d have something like Medicare for all, and there are many things to dislike about Obamacare. But anyone who calls actually existing Obamacare “Republican” is spouting nonsense.