Post-racial, partisan discrimination and the VRA

In conspicuous but indirect relation to yesterday's Supremely expressed prejudice against the Voting Rights Act, the NYT's Thomas Edsall plows through mounds of conflicting social science before answering the question, "How salient is race?" His assessment is cryptic:

I would say the ability of the United States to go from legal segregation a half century ago to the election of a black president suggests there is enormous elasticity in the American political system, and that the country has the capacity to deal with what it now faces, both inside and outside its borders.

You may take that answer to your local sibyl, who will be happy to translate it into equal inscrutability.

But what if Tom Edsall and the Five Supremes are asking the wrong question? What if the VRA's Section 5 contemporarily has far less to do with identifying racial prejudice than it does partisan discrimination? What if the 21st-century editions of white citizen councils in control of local and state voting procedures have grown sophisticated enough to care less about skin color than Democratic proclivities?

As Edsall's impressively researched column shows, you can get any answer you want to the question of racism's endurance in America. But partisan identifiers are indisputable, entailing not just race but socioeconomic status, education, religious affiliation, and of course empirical voting patterns within precincts.

Do scheming Republicans really care if you're as pink as they are? Maybe not so much anymore. Who knows for sure? But unquestionably they do care if your geopolitics, so to speak, suggest anything but Republicanism. And therein lies the democratic value of Section 5, which, rather than erased, would be better extended to Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Comments

[japa21]

PM, there you go being rational again. It is, without a doubt, a mixture of the two. After all, most of the attempts (there may have been one exception somewhere) to limit the vote have been done by Republicans. And many of the attempts have been targeted toward racial minorities. That fact that those minorities trend heavily (and will trend even moreso in the future) toward Democrats is obviously a mere coincidence, don't you think?

[Robert Lipscomb]

I hope progressives do not miss the opportunity that the GOP wing of the Supreme Court is about to give them. Why not pass a new voting rights act that ensures te sanctity of voting for all Americans everywhere?

I am not sure of the constitutional legal limits on dictating criteria, but I assume that the federal government could impose criteria for federal elections. Whatever state and local governments put in place for federal elections would likely be used for all elections - as a matter of convenience and cost.

[Marc McKenzie]

@Robert: That's a bold wish, Robert, and one I hope for....but remember, most progressives are too busy wailing about drones and Bradley Manning and about how Obama is worse than Bush.

During the campaign of 2012, when the GOP was busy trying to deny millions their right to vote, such stalwarts like Glenn Greenwald and Dave Lindorff spent their time putting out invectives against Obama for being a murderer and a corrupt politician. They never even brought the voter suppression issue, not even once.