Originally published at: South Carolina Republicans Advance Map That Aims to Eliminate Jim Clyburn’s Seat
Hello, and welcome back to another bleak edition of The Franchise! (How’s that for an opening line?) As the midterm primary season heats up, so do the attacks on election administration, which we will get into more below. But first … The distressing red state scramble to completely gut congressional district maps and gerrymander away…
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Serious mad king energy going on in this obsession over the 2020 election.
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A lot of states wouldn’t be facing this crap if the Democratic party was a national party that promoted people running for school boards, city councils and state legislatures across the country including in red states.. We have allowed the notion that the minority will soon be the majority to control our thinking for far too long. Give Republicans in South Carolina a run for their money. Stop letting some states be uncontested red states. Then watch democracy bloom.
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South Carolina has been trying to be an independent country since 1828, with the Nullification crisis. They didn’t want to follow federal laws back then. Now, they love the federal rogue SCOTUS, so it’s all good.
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Jim Crow On Steroids 2026!
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if approved, will give Republicans all seven of the state’s congressional seats.
Not a sure thing given the national mood, though, and I am hoping these gerrymanders will backfire spectacularly…
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“I assure the American people that as soon as we have something to say for it, whether it’s charges, whether it’s a report, whether it’s the results of an investigation,” Blanche continued, “the American people will learn about what we uncovered.”
So somewhere between the 2nd Tuesday of next week and the 12th of Never.
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Trump and his white nationalist cult (f/k/a the Republican Party) will stop at nothing to destroy free and fair elections and steal power. These are the absolute worst of the worst. Democrats need to fight back and extreme gerrymander in all blue states. If and when they regain control of the federal government, partisan gerrymandering must be declared illegal everywhere.
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This is where the GOP gets its start: Water Boards, Community Service Districts, School Boards…all low-level entry points into politics. This is where Devin Nunes got his start at College of the Sequoias ( a Community College in Visalia, CA one county away from me.) Why we’ve failed to do this, beats me.
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Blanch makes me blanch, but in addition to that, his grotesque corruption really pisses me off. He is a lickspittle of the highest order.
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National politicians decided that politics is easiest as a television game so that is how they rigged elections. Making politics a television game makes it easy for rich people to control outcomes. .
Notice the number of members in the house hasn’t changed since 1929. The country is much larger now. That makes entry into national politics much more expensive. Then there is the whole corporations are people too nonsense from John Roberts. You can’t stuff enough envelopes to overcome TV and social media ads in a congressional district of 700,000 voters.
Trump is the product of a years long program to disenfranchise Ameircans run by the Epstein class. We are going to have to work hard to reestablish anything like the democracy we had back in the 1940s and 50s.
Alabama is approximately 40% Black
Louisiana is approximately 33% Black
South Carolina is approximately 36% Black
Jim Crow rules.
Forgot Mississippi, 37% Black.
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You know those numbers are only relevant if you depend only on black people to vote for you. Maybe if the Democratic party had a popular agenda and a positive reputation with white people those numbers might be irrelevant. You only have to attract a minority of the white voters to win if the rest of the whites were the racists you believe. This isn’t 1960 anymore. Do you know what Democrats actually stand for? I haven’t heard in a long time.
No, those numbers are also relevant when you remember that chasing the white vote often reduces black turnout when those voters feel abandoned in favor of pushing ‘Republican-Lite’ agendas.
As for trying to get a ‘positive reputation with white people’, do you know how strong the RW media bubble is, in those states? Hard to establish a positive reputation when the ‘Demon-rat’ narrative is constantly bombarding people.
No, it’s not. In 1960, the Court wasn’t laughing in people’s faces and insisting there was nothing racist about the Deep South.
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How have we used those 60 years to change the racism of the “deep south?” It seems to me that we are still subject to the racism of the deep South. Clearly we have not used our time wisely.
All government can do is outlaw dejure racism. It can’t change hearts and minds. We haven’t used the 60 years to change those hearts and minds. Instead we have done all we can to extend segregation to our political parties and we have allowed those efforts to freeze us in place. Racism is still the focus of both political parties and both are working hard to preserve racism as their defining justificatioin..
What is the Democratic view of America today on a host of modern issues facing America that weren’t set isn concrete in the 1950s and 60s. We haven’t solved health care, workers rights have receded, our educational system outside a few wealthy communities sucks (nobody in the Democratic party seems to realize that the kids going to middle class white schools are being left behind just like their black brothers and sisters), our infrastructre is decaying (there ae places outside the big cities where roads have returned to dirt.) We have abandoned rural America but their hospitals are closing in droves. There are lots of issues that affect all working class Americans. The defining issue for Democrats remains racism.
We need a party that talks to the concerns of all working class people (white, black and brown.) Where is it? It has been locked inside minority majority cities ignoring the needs to the people who are just outside the cities suffering the same negelect from Republican elected officials as the minorities in the cities. America is about position in class. That is how the Epstein class wants govern us, but they use race as a convenient way to keep us separtated. Politicians in both parties work for the Epstein class.
Well, let’s take a look at a very good point you make:
That’s very true. What it can do is attempt to provide structural changes that give people the chance to change those hearts and minds in one another. But see, here’s the problem:
You go from saying government can’t change hearts and minds to… demanding to know why the Democratic Party hasn’t done it. Well, it can’t. It’s not government that can’t do it, it’s politics. You can’t use political means to change hearts and minds.
You can’t force minorities, for example, to join a political party that hyper-marginalizes them. And you can’t force racists to remain in a political party that doesn’t cater to their needs. That’s the whole ‘freedom of assembly’ and ‘freedom of association’ thing.
But you also can’t fix health care, workers’ rights, or the education system when large chunks of the electorate are voting based purely on a tribalism that isn’t interested in solving those problems. That is, in fact, actively against solving those problems. Because those problems are useful. Those problems give them grievances to rail about—both in the continued existence of the problem, and in the proposed solutions. Just like you can’t keep rural hospitals afloat when the people those hospitals serve are electing politicians who are actively working against keeping them open.
You say we need a party that talks to the concerns of all working class people. I say we have a Democratic Party that has made a meaningful attempt to tackle healthcare, that has actively worked to find ways to provide debt relief, that 4 years ago pushed through the largest infrastructure programs in generations, mostly benefitting rural America—benefitting it so much, in fact, that Republicans who voted against Build Back Better turned around and tried to take credit for it.
But here you are, only 2 election cycles later, acting like none of that’s even been attempted. Like the only issue the Democrats ever talk about is race.
This is the media environment we live in. Biden’s infrastructure wins were forgotten the moment they were passed because things getting fixed aren’t as attention-grabbing as things going wrong. America is about position in class. But you know what else America is?
America is about sitting back and letting the bottle blond or square-chinned guy on the flat screen tell you what to think. That is where the majority of Americans get their news and thoughts. Cable news, streaming, podcasts, etc. The government can’t force people to get accurate information.
And until people do get accurate information, they’re gonna sit in their echo chambers, reinforcing the things they already think, blaming the people they’ve been hating for ‘wanting special rights’ for decades, and voting Republican, because, as Aaron Sorkin’s American President once said, that’s the party that ‘isn’t interested in fixing it’, but only ‘wants to tell you who’s to blame for it’.
A positive, hopeful message about what we’ve actually gotten done, and worked hard to try to get more done on? That’s out there, but it doesn’t stand a chance being heard when ‘FEAR!! FIRE!! FOES!! ALARM!!’ is paired with ‘GET MAD AND PUNISH THOSE UPPITY FOLKS WHO WANT TO MAKE YOU LESS SPECIAL BY MAKING EVERYONE EQUAL’.
We are just like every other Great Ape in that regard, hell, like every animal: The great motivator across the animal kingdom is fear. And humans are no different. We’re not better, and we’re not particularly special. Anyone who thinks we are is just arrogant enough to delude themselves.
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That is a very dark way to look at it. Thank you for your thoughts.
I am an American. I want to try for better things for all people because if I succeed America will be a better place for me to live. That is why we have politics.
Everybody wants to blame someone else for our woes. Let me give you something to think about. There is a group of people who want to exploit that human tendency by convincing whites to blame blacks and blacks to blame whites, all the while they are robbing America blind, They are people who exploit working class whites and blacks for fun and profit. I call that group of people the Epstein class. It includes national politicians of both parties, the operators of the mighty Wurlitzer media machine and assorted billionaires who really identify with the gilded age. They succeed if they can get others fighting with each other. That is what racism and everybody’s favorite culture war is all about, controlling a bunch of marks by talking them into fighting somebody else while you pick their pocket.
What the Epstein class wants is for all of us to let them rob from us without accountability. Racism and women’s rights are two of the tools they use to keep us form looking at them. We probably can’t beat them but we have zero chance if we don’t realize what they are doing.
So do I. But no, we have politics because politics is what happens as soon as there are more than 1 personality in a situation. Once there’s 2, there’s politics. Even if it’s just you and your dog. One of you will want something from the other, and try to figure out how to get it. And so, politics will ensue.
I tend to blame myself whenever possible, but really, I just can’t take responsibility for the fuckups of millions over 400 years.
Correct.
Almost accurate.
Racism is about the fact that people, especially disadvantaged people, want to feel good about themselves. The oldest and easiest way to do this is to look down on someone else. You’re not wrong to say the modern ‘Epstein Class’ are perpetuating this, but that goes back well beyond the Revolution, especially in the Deep South. Poor whites looked down on the blacks, including freemen, because it meant they weren’t at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Poor whites in the south aren’t racist because the billionaires tell them to be. The billionaires can play the race game because poor whites are racists. Poor racist whites are racist because… get this… they were raised to be racists. Changing that mindset means convincing them that not only is a huge part of their identity wrong, but that their parents—who may well still be alive and who they love very much—were wrong-headed and led them astray. That they, and their parents, may well have been evil in these beliefs.
For people who want simplicity and clear Right vs Wrong morality, that is an almost impossible sell. That’s why the whole ‘it’s muh heritage’ thing had as much sway as it did: because you are dealing with deeply-held, foundational parts of peoples’ very identities.
They’re not racist because they’re being controlled. They’re easier to control because they’re racists.
And misogyny goes back to basically the earliest civilizational turnovers. Look at the earliest myths of major pantheons. You have a creator being—often associated with water/the ocean—who later gets shifted in the myths to be a ‘monster’. And it’s usually female. A great example of this is Tiamat. Before she’s the ‘mother of monsters’ that Marduk defeats and dismembers, she’s the creator goddess who birthed the gods.
There’s a school of thought that these mythological shifts reflect actual cultural shifts: when the power and ‘who’s in charge of the group’ shifts from a matriarchal arrangement (such as we tend to see in our closest relatives) to the males using physical power to keep the women subjugated. And the ‘why’ is pretty simple.
First, obviously, men want sex whenever they want sex, so securing that is part of it. But also… women scare men. Even now, that’s true. Women bleed for days and don’t die. Worse, women create life. A woman never needs to ask if a child is hers, she’s literally where the kid came from.
So, again, you’re talking about some old, deep belief systems and fears here. Once again, it’s not that the billionaires are making men misogynistic (though they definitely do contribute to the environment that perpetuates it), but that the old fears, resentments, and ‘this is just how it’s supposed to be’ is an easy handle for the Epstein Class to use.
And if you don’t recognize that these things don’t start with the rich fuckers, you can’t fight them.
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You are mostly right but I think you unnecessarily give the Epstein class a real pass. You seem to believe that every white man is a fucking racist. That is pretty damn judgmental and tells me that you don’t think the world can’t change.
Change in this area is created by contact. If you work with a person who is different you stop judging them by race, religion or sex, Over 50 years ago I went to work for a law firm. I was the first non-Jew to work for that firm. I had preconceptions about Jewish lawyers and they had preconceptions about young Catholic lawyers. Those preconceptions went out the window in a few days. I became just another associate in the firm. They became my mentors and role models.
Years later my nephew came out. I had known he was gay since he was a child. His parents pretended to be surprised and at first they weren’t very helpful. After a while they realized that he was still the same boy they knew and loved.
Right now my granddaughter is expecting her first child. She is in a relationship with a black guy. My wife is looking forward to a little black baby with red hair.
The point of all of this is to say prejudice rarely survives first contact. Desegregating the schools 60 years ago means that most working class whites have had black classmates since the 1970s-1980s. There was resistence at first but most working class whites have been exposed to black people in their schools. If not there they are exposed to them at work.
The kind of racism you talk about is now practiced mostly by whites who have been self segregated in religious or private schools and in affluent communities like the Villiages in Florida.. You know, assholes like Donald Trump. The rest of us just do our best to get along.
It is time the Democratic party went back to its roots and started delivering for working Americans. I don’t think the high flying professional Democrats can because I think they are as blinded by their private schools, affluent camps and whites only country clubs as the professional Republicans.