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Pundits Pushed ‘Polarization’ So Far SCOTUS Used It to Justify Racism: Policy Expert
For decades, pundits and experts insisted that partisan polarization was the problem in American life. “Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and racism were symptoms rather than causes,” argues associate professor of public policy Jake Grumbach in “How Normie Pundits Paved the Way for the Supreme Court Voting Rights Disaster” at Slate.
“We built serious institutions around this diagnosis,” he explains — pointing to Duke University’s Polarization Lab, Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, the political organization No Labels, and others.
The conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court snatched up that hypothesis, tweaked it, and turned it into Wednesday’s Louisiana v. Callais decision that severely further eroded the Voting Rights Act.
How?
Grumbach argues that the Supreme Court claimed that congressional districts that are polarized along political party lines cannot also be seen as being polarized along racial lines. Grumbach also argues that “for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation.”
“To ‘control for partisanship’ when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels,” Grumbach says.
READ MORE: Fetterman Is Why 51 Senate Seats Won’t Be Good Enough: Columnist
“The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party,” Grumbach explains. “To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.”
While polarization-obsessed liberals “did not directly cause the Callais ruling,” they “laid an intellectual foundation.”
“When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive,” he says. “We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion.”
And by doing so, they “handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.”
READ MORE: Whistleblower Says DOJ Ordered Prosecutors to Rush SPLC Indictment: Report
Image via Shutterstock
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