So...I saw this on a centrist political sub. I wont post in this sub since I'd get banned and people of my political persuasion aren't welcome here, but I did want to address this given my own lukewarm reaction to section 2 of the VRA being overturned. His core point is this:
Unpopular point: A lot of leftists dont care if liberal black democrats may lose their seats in the south because they come from blue cities in blue states
Well, actually, I come from a purple state, and a SMALL blue city surrounded by the island of red known as Pennsyltucky. I'm a rust belt voter, ex conservative, and now progressive. And quite frankly, I will admit, I simply have different priorities than your typical 6th party system centrist democrat who is obsessed with race. That crap is like nails on a chalkboard to me. And you're darned right. I don't care much.
I mean, in a way I do, on a practical level. In this environment, seats are seats, and I'm gratutiously for gerrymandering as much as possible strategically to maximize our elections, and the VRA being struck down leads to net seats for republicans. In that sense, i do care.
But on the sheer PRINCIPLE of the thing, like on the higher minded principle of the thing, I don't care, no. And here's why. Because we allow gerrymandering for every other reason, but then we have this one protection purely for racial purposes. My city has been gerrymandered to hell for most of my life. My first election cycle I could vote in, I was taking poli sci 101 in college. I had to do a paper on my congressional representative, which first exposed me to the wonderful world of gerrymandering. My city was literally split into like 3 different districts. And I ended up doing the paper on the wrong one because the map was hard to read and we didnt have the internet tools to clearly delineate the boundaries. So I was like 2 blocks in some other guy's district and didn't know until election day.
Then in the 2010s, I was in one of those "goofy" (if you catch my reference) type districts here in PA where my city was gerrymandered to hell again and I was thrown in with a bunch of rural voters from the next county over. It was obviously gerrymandered and clearly intended to suppress my vote. But because I wasn't a black person in the south, well, apparently that was a okay. Anyway, PA DID eventually overturn the map in the supreme court, but this introduced me to even MORE problems.
While I was thrown into a bluer district, well, that district didn't represent the small city vibe that defines my politics. The fact is, no one cares about 100k or so blue voters in districts with 750k voters. So this time I was in one of the poorest cities in the US and thrown in with rich philly suburbanites who are exactly the kind of wealthy people who would complain about their taxes being raised if we implemented a UBI. And my representative is a complete and utter craplib who doesnt represent my politics at all.
However, when Tom Wolf asked voters for input on possible congressional maps, I found that it was literally impossible to give my own city proper representation. Why? Because the districts are too big. And we need further change, like not just banning gerrymandering, but uncapping the house of representatives to make districts more responsive to small city needs. Right now, under the current set of rules, the system ignores me. Oh, you live in a poor city with a bad economy with no jobs? Too bad. The dems only care about BIG city voters and suburbanites. And the rural areas are all Trumpy as hell. Ultimately, in presidential elections, my area is key. If 2024 ended up being as close as 2000 was where a handful of votes swung the entire election, my area would be ground zero. And both Trump and Harris campaigned in my area the day before the election. It was THAT essential to both campaigns. It was THE area that probably would've decided 2024 if the margins were 2000-style close.
But in congress? No one gives AF what I think. And then I'm supposed to care about ermahgerd they allow gerrymandering for racial reasons now. They allow gerrymandering in general, and the house of representatives isnt very representative. Either uncap the house and ban gerrymandering, or implement some form of proportional representation if you want my honest opinion. That solves the problem for EVERYONE. Most people don't care about an explicitly racial solution that only impacts a different part of the country. If anything, it just feels like special treatment to the rest of us. Sorry to engage in resentment politics myself, but yeah.
Anyway, to address the text of the guy's post, because this is juicy and I'm rearing to throw down with this guy.
Is anyone surprised by the fact that leftists do not eem to be concerned or upset by the Supreme Court undermining black political gains following the Louisiana v. Callais case that makes it harder to bring lawsuits claiming districts were targeting black voters in the south?
Why am I not surprised? Because Bernie sanders helped institute this current class is more important than race movement. A lot of leftists we see online are NOT from the south. They are from the upper north east or the west coast.
Yeah I know I often reject the whole "politics is local" idea to some extent, but to some degree it is. And my politics are shaped by my area. I'm NOT from the south, and given the current political map, idk why we give so much attention to rural blacks from the south anyway. Sure, they net us a few congressional seats (a whopping 12 out of 435 apparently...), but honestly, the south is that one area of the country I'm fine with democrats not pursuing. Because it's just a cesspit of regressivism. And idk why we spend so much time focusing on what black people in the south think and put them on a pedestal so much. The only reason they're even democrats is because the whites down there HATE them just for existing. They're actually some of the most conservative democrats in the country and many of their views are indistinguishable from republicans. The dems hyper emphasize them in the primaries for some reason despite their contribution to the democratic party as a whole being relatively minimal. And we all KNOW why. It's because the establishment loves to use these guys to push the party to the right, while crying foul and racism if we dare point out what they're doing like we do.
But yeah. As I see it, those blue areas in the northeast and west coast, those are WHERE MOST DEMOCRATS LIVE. They're the real base of the party. But centrists like to ignore that because they ultimately wanna push the party to the center. Which is why I'm personally so nonchalant over this whole thing. Do you honestly think I care if, for example, Jim Clyburn loses their seat after he basically single handedly played kingmaker and foisted Biden on us in 2020 when Bernie was looking to run away with it? Nah. if anything, if those relatively conservative representatives disappeared, and that strategy was no longer viable, maybe they'd listen to people like me more.
because, again. I'm in Pennsylvania. I AM the median voter, demographically speaking. Sure, I'm a progressive, but my own progressivism comes from my rust belt background, and rust belt problems. As you can tell, I often have serious differences from blue state and large city dems, which lead to some policy differences. But it seems like the democratic party doesn't care.
Why am I not surprised? Because Bernie sanders helped institute this current class is more important than race movement.
And to emphasize this part again. Uh, YEAH, BECAUSE BERNIE REPRESENTS MY POLITICS, YOUR RACE CENTRIC VISION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY DOESN'T!
Seriously, what's wrong with focusing on class, other than the fact that it pisses off the donors? What's wrong with having a multiracial working class movement geared toward fixing problems for everyone, rather than super special solutions only for black voters that the rest of us don't get? Want to end gerrymandering? End it for all of us. Want economic justice? Get it for all of us. That's what I'm about. I don't care what skin color people are. And if anything, the democratic party has this image of only caring about black people while not caring about white ones. If there's any holdover attitudes I have from my conservatism, it's that yeah, they kinda got the dems' number there. Which is why they've bled white working class voters over the past few decades and especially in my state since 2016. And then these guys have the gall to be like "well that's a dog whistle." No, what's a dog whistle is you guys not knowing how to shut up about race every 5 seconds and making everything a racial issue. I WAS a republican. I KNOW how they think, how the median voter thinks. They see this hyper racialized crap and it makes them wanna vote republican. If anything is the answer for the future of the democratic party, it's moving away from race and BUILDING a genuine working class movement, across racial lines.
Again, it's YOU GUYS, you centrists, who dont want that. You use the race issue to push progressives around, bully them, guilt trip them, take advantage of their empathy, while working class whites on the fence between two candidates see the dems as doing nothing for them, so they vote Trump in response. Quite frankly, I'd go so far to see the failure of YOU GUYS' vision of the democratic party is what got us trump in the first place. and I MEAN that wholeheartedly. Bernie would've broken us out of that pattern. You reinforced it. And that's why we've been losing ever since, because your average voter looks at the democrats and genuinely don't feel like they care about us or wanna make our lives better. It's at best a bunch of band aid fixes.
Even more so, this is intentional. Chuck Schumer, who is currently the face and de facto leader of the dems right now, once said in 2016:
"For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."
He's talking people like me here. He's literally talking about trading ME for a bunch of upper class suburbanites who are functionally republicans in all but name, and combining them with centrist southern democrats who functionally vote democrat not because they have genuine progressive convictions, but because they fear the whites in their states.
And honestly, that's why I got such a chip over my shoulder on this topic. Because as I see it, I'm a progressive. Im rearing to go. I wanna actually beat the republicans. But what's the point in beating the republicans if the democrats we get are just moderate republicans anyway? And that's when people like me start checking out of politics and stop caring about you, your party, or your success. It's why a lot of people even have that "burn it all down" mentality some trumpers like, say, asmongold have. Because we're literally not invested in the system. I literally feel disenfranchised myself. And it's centrists like you who did it to me.
Name a single popular leftist streamer from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, or Florida...
…I’ll wait...
Yeah because most of those states...are red states. And some are turning more purple...but at the expense of my area also turning more purple...when 10-20 years ago I'd say it was a bit bluer. And we didn't need those states back then during the obama years. Look at the 2008 map. Outside of florida, not a single one of those states went blue. They were functionally irrelevant. Because, guess what? THEY'RE CONSERVATIVE.
But even then, I'll bite. Not quite "leftist" but what about the atheist community of austin which hosts the atheist experience and who was almost singlehandedly advancing the secular agenda? And quite frankly, I know a lot of southern leftists through debate groups. And some are further left than I am. Some of them are literally trans. Some are literally like full on socialist or communist. Those guys tend to be progressive AF despite living in a conservative craphole. Sure, they're a statistical minority, but they exist. They just dont have twitch or youtube streams with millions of viewers.
Precisely. The place where MOST black people live, in the South, is NOT represented in leftist spaces online where discourse about this stuff happens.
Because most of them arent progressive. Most of them are conservatives who just vote democrat because the white southern republicans hate them just for existing. They're refugees to the democratic party. They're not ideological progressives. And those of us who are don't think that they should be the standard bearers for the whole fricking party. It makes zero sense given how little strategic importance those voters have in the grand scheme of things. The centrists just focus on that stuff because they have so little of everything else. Again, it's part of THEIR strategy to keep the democrats relatively right wing.
The “blue city-red state” democrat perspective of most black democrats is completely overlooked in this regard. Leftist truly have this blind spot and wonder why black democrats never trusted them with their votes or took their issues seriously.
Oh, just like you overlook me and therefore I dont trust you guys either? See, I can play this game too. *points to my introduction*
Now? We’re about to lose a lot of districts held by black democrats in the south and leftists think it’s because of some insufficient prioritization of class.
As someone who didn't vote blue in 2016 because I found "omg but the court!" to be an insufficient rationale, boo fricking hoo. So now those voters are in the same camp as the rest of us. Can we get some REAL change that fixes the issue for EVERYONE now? Gerrymandering should be banned nationwide. And districts should either be a lot smaller, allowing for more granularity, or, alternatively, representatives should be decided proportionally based on the total number of votes in each state. If you want REAL representation, you need to do that. But until dems care about my plight (or at least stop actively throwing ME under the bus as a PA voter), why should I care about this sob story about southern black voters? As I say, you can't force people to care.
Do you know what blue state democrats are doing ironically? Chasing rabbit holes around Israel/Palestine, platforming Hasan piker and other contrarians, and fighting elected democrats in already-blue seats over marginal issues making it easier for republicans to win general elections.
Uh, let's see, caring about a genocide, and even I admit they often care too much, although given the foothold AIPAC has over our politics and how it's literally led to the war in Iran, I don't blame them at this point. Campaigning with a popular streamer while YOU GUYS are just running a hate campaign against the guy because guess what, YOU HATE US, and holding our representatives accountable in advocating for policy that improves our lives.
Meanwhile, what are YOU GUYS doing? The same old centrist hugbox of "we can't have nice things, but you better vote for us or else, or youre sexist/racist/privileged", while attacking progressives in bad faith for actually advocating for solutions that actually FIX THE FRICKING PROBLEMS!
Really. If you guys could just go away, that would be great. We run against you because we want you out of politics. We want the geriatric political class full of worthless centrists to retire. And from the bottom of my heart, screw Jim Clyburn. I'm kinda looking forward to HIM losing his seat after what he did to tilt the scales toward Biden in 2020. Yeah, I got schadenfreude on that one.
The red-state democrat is completely under attack from all sides right now.
The legitimate red state democrat is tactically irrelevant. You wanna focus on blue and purple states if you wanna win elections. You wanna know what we call the majority of people in red states? Conservatives. And that includes many of those "red state democrats."
But yeah. Idk. I just wanted to respond to this one. These centrists love to make themselves out to be the victims and act like progressives are responsible for everything wrong with the democrats, when it's them.
I fully admit my own biases. I'm a rust belt democrat. And the democrats have largely abandoned us. But hey, we're supposed to care about those demographics they DO care about. I kinda have the whole schadenfreude mentality toward these guys. Sorry if that makes me a bad person, but I do.
Anyway, I wanna preface this in saying that I don't really have any ill will toward any racial group in particular, I just hate this weird reverence for red state democrats while the democratic party has functionally abandoned people like me a voters. And you know what? The impact of THAT is far greater than this ruling. We had the electoral college locked down well into the 2030 reapportionment at the very least until they F-ed things up. Because they turned the blue wall into a breeding ground for fascism, with their shameless trade of working class voters (LIKE ME!) for suburbanites. Theyre responsible for everything wrong with our politics, and they're why the democrats are so weak. But hey, we're supposed to drop everything and care because some conservative democrats might get gerrymandered out of existence? Cry me a river.
But yeah, I just wanted to throw down with this guy, because MAN i hate these smarmy centrists. They eat, sleep, and breathe hatred for the progressive movement. And after pissing us off, they then complain about us being...understandably pissed at them. And yeah, that's kinda why I have schadenfreude for the whole thing. No offense to any black southern democrat in particular. I'm more mad at the entire democratic party for heavily prioritizing those voters when they provide so little strategic value to the party but then dilute it ideologically. But the ideological dilution is the point. Because centrists be centrists and they HATE the left and actual working class voters who wanna make their lives better. When they use black voters as a cudgel, I'm not exactly gonna be upset when that cudgel is suddenly gerrymandered out of existence. And for any centrist who points out that makes it harder for us to pass our agenda...yall dont wanna pass our agenda anyway, so why do we care? Again, we're not invested in this iteration of the democrats to care. Because it is hostile to our very existence.
Which is why when this ruling dropped, my first reaction was "okay, well hopefully this causes the dems to abandon their current strategy and start appealing to actual swing state voters who are electorally relevant again." Maybe instead of looking at us with disdain as they minmax demographics with my own demographic being on the "min" side of things, they realize, hey they kinda need us and actually reach out to appeal to us. Seriously, in the current environment, beating republicans shouldnt be that hard. They're literally evil inc. But the democrats are widely hated by a wide majority of voters even now because the dems are just...a different kind of evil. They dont try to be better. if anything, that's their whole point. They suck. We all know they suck, but we better vote for them anyway. Oh, and then they actually attack the people trying to actually make things better. Yeah, I mean, it's hard NOT to hate them at this point. So if the dems lose one of their tools that allows their current coalition to be viable...well....hey, it's free real estate. Hopefully progressives can take over the party and lead it to victory.
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