Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
His 4 years of ineptitude gave us 12 years of Republican rule in the form of Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush. (It would have been at least 16 years, if not for Ross Perot taking many of Bush’s votes to be re-elected in 1992.) And arguably, that 12 years of GOP rule produced another 8 years of GOP rule through the prodigal son, George W. Bush.
I love Jimmy Carter. (I hate Ross Perot.)
There is a chance we’ll see something similar in the midterms this fall. The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, has been winning Democratic primaries. It turns out that Democrats love socialists.
Or they think they do. Democrats’ support for the idea of socialism is quite different from their support for socialism itself. For example:
One of the DSA policies in its platform is to abolish prisons. That’s right, convicted murderers and rapists would go free. But only 27% of Democrats support that policy. (You have to wonder what those 27% are smoking, but, still, that’s only a little more than one in four.)
Another DSA platform position is to abolish the U.S. military. If China invades, we’ll rely on guys with shotguns. (Oops, we’ll have taken away everyone’s gun, too.) Democrats in general disfavor that policy by about a two to one margin.
Another DSA position is to grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants. Democrats actually favor this policy by a plurality(!) but still only 44% favor it.
Here, it gets interesting. Another DSA platform is to abolish the Presidency and the Supreme Court, replacing both with arms of Congress. Only 30% of Democrats agree with this proposal.
While we’re abolishing sacrosanct branches of government established by the Constitution, DSA would also abolish the Senate. The problem with the Senate, they say, is that it serves as a check on pure democracy. Even the Democrats mostly oppose this abolition.
In short, the DSA would make us a lot like the Soviet Union (which failed, by the way), the Eastern Europe Soviet client states (ditto), Cuba (which will soon fail), and North Korea (ditto). It’s been tried many times, and the absence of checks and balances always results not in democracy, but tyranny. Assigning a word like “fair” to such a system will not make it work. It’s a trap.
DSA should have kept its trap shut about its trap. It should have just said, “We’re socialists, isn’t that wonderful?” Instead, they told us what it means to be a socialist. It’s not wonderful; it’s idiocy.
The media, of course, will try to hide the DSA platform because Orange Man Bad. They will not be successful, however. The DSA is quite proud of it, and intends to promote it.
Between now and the midterms in November, the American people will discover this platform. I anticipate they will soundly reject it.
Of course, the wild President is a wild card. He might find a way to prove me wrong. Or right.
This news item falls into the categories of both funny and weird – categories that are getting a lot of traction these days.
In Denver, the socialists met to party and celebrate, and to party some more, after their chosen socialist candidate beat the Democrat in the Democratic primary last month. It wasn’t even close.
By the way, the Democrats still have primaries for their non-Presidential candidates, apparently, but the winners are generally socialists, not Democrats. (Ah, but maybe I’m splitting hairs.)
The old Democrat who lost this primary has represented Denver in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years after succeeding the Democrat who had represented Denver for the preceding 24 years. In fact, the current one was elected before her socialist opponent was born.
I’m no fan of the old Democrat, but does Denver really want to be represented in Congress by a socialist child? Yes, they evidently do.
At the party/celebration/party, a good time was had by all. It was the most people in downtown Denver since the Broncos won the Superbowl, and I’m not excluding the dreadful Rockies games.
Yes, a good time was had by all. Except the 50% of the attendees who wore COVID masks. That’s right, about half of the hundreds of attendees at this socialist party wore COVID masks. A photo posted on X by one of the organizers appears above. The photo-posting organizer bragged;
“Packed house, line out the door, big things are happening!”
Then, he and the attendees were mocked mercilessly on-line for wearing COVID masks to a party – five years after COVID has passed. And so, he deleted the post. Next, we’ll learn that the masks were passed out at the door by the socialist hosts. I’m not sure whether that makes the whole episode better or worse.
COVID aside, this gives some insight into the mentality of the socialists of Denver. They believe the world is a very dangerous place. They’ll invent danger if none is present. And they want to be seen as doing something about this invented danger. Maybe this is unique to Colorado where pot has long been legal, but I think it’s deeper than that.
I suppose they could see danger in Vladimir Putin who invaded a separate nation. Or the Gazans who raped, beheaded and took hostage hundreds of Israelis. Or marijuana, the legalization of which is now recognized as a huge mistake by the medical establishment which treats victims of this mistake. Or the communists who killed 100 million people within the lifetimes of their parents and grandparents.
Well, perhaps the reference to communists hit a little close to home. The reference to pot did, too.
In any event, I’m guessing that the masks did not interfere too much with the socialists drinking the Kool-Aid. These people are funny, weird and high – and dangerous.
The news of the days – or, rather, yesterday – is that the Democratic candidate running for the Senate from Maine named Graham Platner is alleged, again, to be a rapist.
Duty demands that I mention he denies the accusation.
In fact, he denies lots of things. He had a Nazi tattoo on his chest for some 19 years, but denies knowing that it was a Nazi tattoo. Notably, his friends deny his denial.
Before he was alleged to be a rapist, and during the time he sported a Nazi tattoo that he didn’t know was one unless you believe his friends, he pretended to be an oyster farmer. Or oyster fisherman. Or whatever you do to catch an oyster.
One year, he made about $5,000 as an oyster whatever. It was a lousy living but a good campaign story.
Back to the rape allegations, of which there are several, none of which is a good campaign story. This time, there’s a tendency on the left to believe the woman because she’s a Democrat. You should always believe the woman, if she’s a Democrat.
And so, the Democrat establishment have, finally, called on Platner to quit the race.
His Republican opponent, Susan Collins, makes the heads spin of Republicans because she is not in the tank for the President, but she makes the heads spin of Democrats because she allegedly is.
In any event, Senator Collins lacks even a decent taint of corruption over her several millennia in the Senate, unless one of those two head-spinning traits constitutes corruption. She has never been accused of raping anyone.
Platner has been urged to quit by even king-maker socialist Bernie Sanders. When a socialist loses Bernie, he’s lost everyone.
But Platner still won’t quit. Why not?
Here’s my theory. Like all good socialists, he wants some money. Rather, he needs some. So, he’s busy negotiating with the Democratic establishment for a Big Payday. It’ll beat oyster farming/fishing/whatevering for $5,000 a year.
If he stays another couple of weeks, the law of Maine will prevent the Democrats from replacing him with a new candidate.
In other words, he holds all the cards, if not the oysters. He has both the need for money and the ability to get it. It’s a great blend of socialism and capitalism. Tell them you plan to stay, Platner!
There’s an expression that I won’t use in a title to a piece, but I’ll use it in the body. The expression is, “You get a socialist with an election, you get rid of them with a gun.”
Socialists have a pattern. They won’t go away. It’s a one-way ratchet. They get elected, and then they refuse to get un-elected. So, we get more and more of them. They’re like houseflies – just as parasitic, just as bothersome, and just as unhealthy.
Bernie Sanders is a good example. He has been in politics for most of his 84-year life. Since 1981, he has been the mayor of Burlington, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and then a U.S. Senator since 2007.
Politics has been very good to Senator Sanders. He now owns multiple houses and has a seven-figure net worth. Not bad money, especially for a public servant who preaches the evil of the stuff.
Bernie reminds me of a bootlegging whiskey runner, which is perhaps appropriate since he represents a state that borders Canada. He opposes the legalization of alcohol because he doesn’t want the competition. (BTW, can we trade Vermont for Alberta?)
Now, we have five more socialists. Three have won their Democratic primaries in New York and are shoo-ins to win the general election since New Yorkers are not allowed to vote for Republicans.
Two won their primaries in Colorado this week – one against a 15-term Congresswoman who herself was hard-left, and one in a contest for the governorship. Both will win their general elections in November because, alas, my formerly great State of Colorado has gone to the dogs (or, more precisely, to the wolves, but that’s a different column).
Of course, socialism will work no better this time than it has worked since Karl Marx dreamed it up a couple of centuries ago. Giving to each according to his needs and taking from each according to his abilities will produce a very needy society with very little ability. When it comes to free stuff, people like to be on the receiving end more than on the giving end.
Who would have thought?
So, we’ll eventually vote the socialists out, as societies always do once they re-learn the fact that the Elon Musks of the world may or may not be likable but they do make the trains run on time, and the spaceships, too.
But what do we do when they don’t go away after we vote them out? When they plead “voter suppression” or some such nonsense? When they pull a Bernie Sanders by hanging around for 45 years? When they pretend to be Nicolus Maduro or Nicolae Ceaușescu or Czar Nicholas?
Over the last year and a half, the Democrats have gnashed their teeth about why they lost in 2024 – against Donald Trump, the candidate they hate so much they imagine that everyone else does, too.
Was it because the Democrats advocated transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms? Was it because they favored abandoning the southern border while simultaneously lying to us that it was secure? Was it because they nominated a nitwit candidate without a nomination convention? Was it because the sitting Democrat President was demonstrably incompetent, and they lied to us about that, too?
The consensus was that they lost for all of those reasons. If they want to turn around their electoral misfortunes, it was said, some moderation was in order on all of those things.
Yet, here we are. Nearly two years later, the Democrats are not busy getting the transsexual boys out of the girls’ bathrooms. They have no time to secure the southern border. They threaten to nominate the same nitwit candidate (presumably via a bona fide nomination convention this time).
The incontinent sitting Democratic President has graduated from sitting to lying. Though he is persona non grata, he’s not entirely out of the limelight and onto the beach; his wife has some books to sell. Perhaps those books will be in the husband’s “library” which will be an added wing to Mordor, the library that Obama built. (Who would have thought that the south side of Chicago could be worse?)
All of this has nothing to do with the Democrats’ 2024 loss. Nope. Instead of moderating their crazy stances, the Democrats are hard at work in perfecting their pitch to be the world’s greatest at something alright – at being socialist antisemites.
They’ve elected an admitted socialist for Mayor of America’s greatest city. They nominated his apostles for the U.S. House of Representatives. Other self-proclaimed socialists have come out of the worm-infested woodwork nationwide and are running for office on the Democrat side. They don’t even hide their socialism anymore; they boast of it.
And they boast of their hatred for the Jews.
One of the nominated socialists brags that the Jews had it coming on Oct 7. She refuses even to condemn the 9/11 attacks on New York City. This is a candidate who will represent, in a manner of speaking, that very same New York City in the halls of Congress.
The Jewish angle is interesting. Antisemitism, socialism and Zionism have a complicated history. Let’s not forget that the architects of the Holocaust went by the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nor that the term “fascism” was from the party of Benito Mussolini, a former labor leader before he brought Italy low. Nor that the Soviet Union blatantly and patently discriminated against the Jews.
And so, the Democrats have re-discovered a winning formula. Don’t side on the 80 side of 80/20 issues like transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms and illegal immigration of people who want to make a living by cleaning American’s toilets or putting their drywall up. Too many of those issues involve too few people. And to the extent they involve a lot of people, well, who are you going to get to put up your drywall?
The way to get elected is instead to own two timeless issues that almost everyone likes. One, is that really successful people have too much money compared to . . . um, me for example.
There are lots of reasons for that disparate rate of money-getting, including the fact that people who get money tend to be more adept at getting it. But let’s settle on one fact: luck. The good luck of those successful people and the bad luck of . . . um, me for example.
Luck is by definition not fair. So, let’s take some of that unfairly-gotten money from the people who unfairly got it, and give it to the people who unfairly didn’t . . . like, um . . . me!
The other timeless issue for getting elected is to rely on people’s prejudices and bigotry. This is tricky, because it’s quite fashionable these days to be a racial minority. A politician cannot rely on people’s inherent bigotry if that bigotry is against what is fashionable.
It would be better to find a bigotry that is not racial per se, and offends only a small minority of the minorities – say about 2% or less. It would be nice if that minority has always been one step from being ostracized, anyway. It would also be helpful if that minority were to have a history, at least recently, of being financially successful. Such a history would dovetail nicely with the socialism.
What better than antisemitism? It might just work. After all, it has before.
Forget about moderation. As the person known for christening New York City “Hymietown,” let’s imagine that the late, great civil rights activist, Jesse Jackson, were still alive. He might say, rhymingly and rhythmically, who needs to moder-ATE if you have Jew-HATE?
Some issues are no-brainers for politicians: Transexuals in women’s sports and girl’s bathrooms. Showing an ID to vote. Securing the border. Enforcing the criminal laws. Judging people by merit. These are 80/20 issues where 80% of the citizens are on one side and only 20% are on the other.
Being on the 20% side of 80/20 issues is not a winning election strategy. We saw that in 2024. Therefore, the big thinkers in the Democratic Party are preaching that Democrats need to shift over to the 80% side on these 80/20 issues.
However, many small thinkers in the Democratic Party are stuck hard in the 20% camp. And the small thinkers in the Democrat Party outnumber the big thinkers by about a zillion to one,
Why do Democrats stubbornly cling to the losing side? Why do Democrats risk losing more elections by siding against 80% of the voters?
I have a theory. I think those hard-left Democrats reflexively side against mainstream Americans – against the 80%.
It’s well-documented that Democrats are less patriotic and hold less love for their country than either Republicans or Independents. In fact, a surprising number of Democrats answer “no” to the question “Do you love America?”
That’s because many of them truly hate America. There are lots of reasons that they hate America – from having been taught to hate America by pea-brained teachers who think America underpays them for their part-time jobs, to simply being of a personality type that would hate anywhere they find themselves including heaven itself.
I’ll look at the reasons in detail some day in another column. For now, accept the fact, and it is a fact, that Democrats love America much less than Republicans do, and that a number of Democrats actively, passionately hate America.
And so, I think they don’t really care where the trannies go to the bathroom; they just want them to go wherever most Americans want them not to. They don’t really care if non-citizens vote in the elections; they just want them to vote because most Americans want them not to. They don’t care whether illegals come across the border; they just want them to because most Americans want them not to. They don’t care whether criminals go free; they just want them to because most American want them not to.
If trannies in the girls’ bathroom, noncitizens voting in elections, illegal aliens, and criminals are America’s enemies, the 20% reason, then those same people are the 20%ers’ friends. It’s the same reasoning that makes them root for Iran.
For this perverse display, these America-haters view themselves as heroic, edgy “resisters.” The fact that they’re resisting not just President Trump but also 2,500 years of Western Civilization makes them, in their vain eyes, all the more heroic, edgy and resistive.
Here’s a survey I’d like to see. Get two random groups of Democrats. Choose an issue they’re not familiar with. Tell the first group that polls show that Americans are split 50/50 on the issue. Tell the second group that Americans are split 80/20 on the issue, and tell them which side of the issue the 80% are on.
I’m betting that the outcome would be markedly different between the two groups. The second group would side against what they were told was the 80% view.
Groucho Marx once said “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me.” Democrats in the 20% cohort know as much about Groucho as Karl, but the saying applies. They don’t want to belong to any country that would have them. Sadly for them and us, they’re here anyway.
The latest battle in the gerrymandering wars took place in Virginia. The Democrats in Virginia had all the guns – they control the governorship, the legislature and a majority of the voters. In a classic example of “Ready-Fire-Aim,” the Democrats promptly used those guns to shoot themselves in the foot.
It all started a few years ago, back when Virginia was a purplish state. Voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to establish a non-partisan procedure for drawing Congressional Districts. That procedure produced Districts that resulted in a Democrat-Republican split in the elected Representatives of 5-4, which is approximately the same as the split in Virginia voters. So far, so good.
Then Virginia gradually shifted blue. Last fall, Virginia Democrats joined the gerrymandering wars. As is often the case with wars, it started with the political equivalent of stirring songs, glitzy parades, and predictions of victory in a month.
The Democrats figured that with a little creativity and an utter absence of shame – the absence of which has never been in short supply among politicians – they could gerrymander the Districts to shift the 5-4 split in their Congressional delegation to a 10-1 split.
They would be heroes! (And maybe some of them would fill those five new Democrat Congressional seats!)
Sure, it would take another amendment to the state constitution in order to nullify the one from a few years ago that established the non-partisan procedure for drawing Districts. But, as the Democrats reminded themselves, they controlled the three bodies that approve such amendments – the legislature, the governorship and the voters.
Constitutions contain procedures for amending them. The Virginia constitution stated that the legislature is supposed to approve the amendment twice. In between those two approvals, there’s supposed to be an election of the legislature. Only after those two legislative approvals and that intervening election, can the matter be put to the voters in a referendum.
There’s method behind this redundant madness. The thought is that, after the legislature approves the amendment the first time, the voters should get a chance to dis-elect the legislature that approved the amendment. And then the new legislature has to re-approve the amendment.
A constitution is a sacred thing, you see, even if it’s just a state one. Amendments to it are not to be taken lightly.
This is where the Democrats misfired. They got the requisite approval accomplished in the state legislature which they controlled, but the approval came after early voting had already begun on the requisite election of the legislature. In fact, about 40% of the votes had already been cast for that election.
After the election, they got the requisite second approval from the new legislature, and then they narrowly got the approval of voters in a referendum.
The matter went to the Virginia Supreme Court. This week, that Court held that the first approval by the legislature did not occur before the election of legislature, because at the time of that approval the election was already underway and 40% of the voters had already cast their ballots.
In effect, therefore, there was no “election day,” but rather an “election period.” The Democrats mistakenly failed to accomplish the requisite legislative approval for the amendment prior to the commencement of that election period. The result was that 40% of the voters were denied the opportunity to consider that approval in weighing their votes in what was supposed to be a subsequent election.
The matter cannot be reviewed further by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it is purely a matter of state law. The Virginia Supreme Court is the final authority on the subject. The Democrats could start again from square one in Virginia, but it’s too late for the upcoming mid-term election.
There’s a certain poetic justice in this. Democrats like loosey-goosey election procedures such as early and absentee voting for any and all. This time, it shot them in the foot and blew up in their faces. They will use this experience to advocate for gun control, no doubt.
There’s a rule of law that Americans of all races have long asked for, and thought they had. That rule is the one that outlaws racial discrimination.
First, consider where we are now as we approach two centuries since the Civil War and three generations since the first Civil Rights Act. We’ve elected a Black President and a Black Vice President, we currently have a stellar Hispanic Secretary of State, we’ve had 14 Black Senators and 183 Black members of the House (including many from states that were part of the Confederacy), and oddsmakers say a Black man is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.
America has plenty of flaws that need fixing, but, given these facts, it’s hard to make a case that one of those flaws is systemic racism. Are there a few racist people in America? Of course, everywhere has that, and most places have a lot more of them than America does.
But is America a systemically racist society? No. America is probably the least-racist place on earth.
America’s world-leading progress wasn’t enough for an alliance of well-intentioned social engineers seeking to improve us and ill-intentioned fascists seeking to end us.
They decided that our color-blind society has too little color – too few Black people – in prestige universities, company board rooms, and status professions like law and medicine, because Black presence in those fields was less than their 13% presence in the population at large. Consistent with the pre-conceived goal of improving us (or ending us), these do-gooders (and do-baders) attributed that shortfall to our racism.
They conveniently ignored the abundance of Blacks and the paucity of whites in lucrative sports such as basketball and football in our purportedly racist nation. When facts don’t fit the narrative, these people ignore the facts.
To “remedy” the perceived “problem” that America had racially discriminated against Blacks, the social engineers and fascists schemed to discriminate in favor of them. They embarked on a campaign to correct racial discrimination by . . . racially discriminating.
They didn’t call it racial discrimination, of course. They used euphemisms like “affirmative action.” When “affirmative action” came to be recognized as racial discrimination, they rebranded it “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Now that “diversity, equity and inclusion” has likewise been recognized as racial discrimination, they are re-branding yet again.
Whatever their name, these programs were all based on the notion that Blacks should be favored in non-athletic competition that is ordinarily based on merit, in order to achieve a number of Blacks that is proportionate to their representation in society.
The degree of discrimination necessary to produce this outcome has been extreme, as shown by objective measures. The average test scores of people admitted to prestige colleges or to medical school are wildly different depending on the race of the applicant. As a matter of pure statistics, it is a simple and undeniable fact that the average Black physician would never have been admitted to med school if he’d been white.
This racial discrimination for the purpose of achieving proportionate representation was extended to every nook and cranny of American society (with that notable exception of sports). Businesses, clubs, fraternities, company board rooms, hospitals, law firms, colleges and every other group of people were pressured, coerced and often sued. They were forced to compromise merit in favor of proportionate racial representation.
Our elected leaders chose not to stand up to this. Democrats instead egged it on, because they benefited politically. Republicans just watched silently, because they were too damned cowardly to risk, ironically, being name-called “racist” for standing against racial discrimination.
We now teeter over a racial abyss where people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. As a society, we’ve almost succeeded in snatching a racist defeat from the jaws of a colorblind victory.
But a rescue is coming from the Supreme Court. Beginning a few years ago, the Court has re-affirmed the rules against racial discrimination in hiring, contracting and college admissions.
A case issued last week (though it was apparently decided many months ago – more about that later) built on this start. The topic was the drawing of Congressional Districts by race. I’ll discuss it in my next post.
Imagine a system where arrests, convictions and sentencing for the crime of murder had to be in proportion to the racial composition of the population.
Since Asians are about 7% of the population, the murder arrests, convictions and sentences for Asians in such a scheme would have to be 7% of the total. Likewise, since Blacks, Latinos and whites make up about 13%, 19% and 62% of the population, respectively, they’d have to account for 13%, 19% and 62% of the murder arrests, convictions and sentencing.
At first glance, that sounds reasonable. But of course, it is not.
The reason is because those four races commit murder at dramatically different rates. FBI data show that whites (if you include Latinos/Hispanics as whites) comprise 82% of the population but commit only 46% of murders. Asians comprise 7% but commit only 1% of murders. (Latinos/Hispanics apart from whites comprise 19% and commit 20% of murders.)
So, who is committing all the murders that whites, Asians and Latinos are not?
Blacks are. Blacks comprise 13% of the population, but commit 51% of murders in the country. If you do the math, the statistical likelihood of a Black person being a murderer is quadruple the likelihood of a white person being a murderer, and roughly 22 times the likelihood of an Asian being a murderer.
A few tangential points are worth your attention. One, this high Black murder rate accounts for a large part (but not all) of the high overall murder rate in America as compared to Europe.
Two, the victims of these Black murderers are also mostly Black themselves. Black-on-Black violent crime in America is, tragically, extremely high.
Three, a few people would contend that Blacks don’t really commit murder at a high rate (though they cannot dispute that they die of murder at a high rate since, after all, there’s a Black body to prove it).
Those people would say that these statistics to the contrary are instead proof that the justice system racially discriminates against Blacks in arresting them, convicting them and sentencing them for crimes they did not commit (but, interestingly, does not discriminate against Latinos or Asians). Nobody really believes that contention – even the people saying it – so I won’t address it.
And four, an interesting tidbit is that the number of men we arrest, convict and sentence for murder is several times the number of women, even though the two sexes are about 50/50 in the population. Does anyone seriously contend that men are victims of sex discrimination in the field of murder arrests?
Back to our hypothetical. A scheme where people must be arrested, convicted and sentenced for murder in proportion to their racial representation in the population, even though murders are not committed in that same proportion, is undeniably unjust and probably criminal.
We would have to arrest many more whites and a lot of Asians for murders they didn’t commit. And we would have to leave un-arrested a lot of Blacks for murders they did commit, all to achieve our fantasy of racially proportionate representation in the law of murder.
This superficially appealing but fundamentally unfair concept of racially proportionate representation in the law brings us to another area of law – the way we elect Congress.
The country is divided into Congressional Districts of equal population – about 762,000 people each. Each district gets one representative. That amounts to the 435 members of the House of Representatives.
Each district typically elects a House member of the party that controls the district. Only 10-15% of the districts are actually competitive. (That’s why members of Congress are seldom voted out of office.)
Because populations shift, the districts must be redrawn periodically. That’s done by state legislatures. In doing so, the legislatures often “gerrymander” the districts. That is, they draw weird-shaped districts in order to distribute the population such that each district has a slight majority of the party doing the drawing. In a state with a 55/45 split between the two parties, the party in power can easily achieve an 80-20 split in the House members elected from that state. There’s more about gerrymandering HERE.
Gerrymandering has been going on for a long time, overtly or covertly. It’s unseemly and might be unfair, but it’s part of our system of representative government. The Supreme Court allows it, because there’s nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it.
But when the gerrymandering is done for the purpose of racial discrimination, there are special rules that have evolved and changed. For a while back in the Jim Crow days, the Democrats who controlled the South racially gerrymandered the districts in a way to prevent the election of Black representatives.
That wasn’t difficult. Even in Louisiana which is about 30% Black, they simply drew the districts such that no district had anywhere close to a majority of Black voters. Divide and conquer was the strategy. The result for many years was that there were none or very few Black members of Congress.
That changed in the last half of the 20th century with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and numerous legal challenges to districting. In fits and starts, judges gradually concluded that the VRA together with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment required that a state’s Congressional delegation be Black in proportion to the Black population of the state. In Louisiana, that meant that two of their six representatives should be Black since about 30% of the state population was Black.
That was achieved with gerrymandering. They drew two “majority minority” districts that concentrated the 30% Black population. The resulting districts had a weird shape, but there was some assurance that two Blacks would get elected in those two mostly-Black districts.
It was something like affirmative action. When the number of Blacks qualifying for prestige colleges and jobs was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the qualifications scale. Similarly, when the number of Blacks getting elected to Congress was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the election scale. For a while, Lady Justice peeked to check which race she was judging.
There’s an expression in law that hard facts make bad law. Imagine a case where a child is run over and crippled after darting into a passing car. The law says the driver was not at fault but our emotions want to help that child, and so we bend the law to obtain a result that’s emotionally satisfying but legally bad.
In racial gerrymandering, the hard fact was that not many Blacks were being elected to Congress despite a significant sentiment that Congress should have more. The bad law that resulted was divvying up Congressional districts by race.
Allocating representation in Congress by skin color is almost as bad as allocating arrests, convictions and sentencing in murder cases by skin color. It denies our individuality. It assumes that Blacks will and should vote only for Blacks while whites will and should vote only for whites. To the extent those assumptions are unfortunately accurate, the effect is to further drive people apart racially. It is all founded on a destructive us/them view of race.
Moreover, this racial divisiveness is self-perpetuating. Politicians become motivated to reinforce their constituents’ destructive beliefs that they can only be represented by a member of their own race, not “the other” race.
In short, racial gerrymandering is founded in racism, and it promotes more racism.
In my upcoming final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last week abolishing racial gerrymandering. It’s the most boldly correct and politically consequential decision in years. And I’ll discuss the media’s disgraceful reporting on it.
It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.
Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.
Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”
History sided with the Declaration and against the Democrats, for a while.
But, alas, history these days is written not by the winners but by the Democrats – specifically the Democrats who rule the Humanities Departments at major U.S. universities. These Democrat humanist historians saw that slavery was bad for the Democrat brand. So, they buried it.
As a result, most people today – especially young people – think it was the Republicans who were the Southern slave owners and they think (I’m not making this up) that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.
Blame this on the Democrats in higher education, but blame it also on the Democrats in lower education. Teachers tend to be Democrats. When it comes to teaching the role of Democrats in slavery and the Civil War, they don’t.
Their past safely buried, the Democrats succeeded in rebranding themselves as civil libertarians who wanted equal civil rights for everyone. In short, they rebranded themselves as Republicans.
But they kept the name “Democrat,” mostly.
But not entirely. Many Democrats decided to candidly call themselves “socialists.” I give them credit for being honest enough to call themselves what they were, but I give them discredit for being what they were. Socialism is a proven failure.
As time went on, people came to recognize the failure of socialism. It sounded great in those university humanities departments, but invariably failed every time it was tried in the real world – from the Soviet Union to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America to Cuba to everywhere else. It succeeded in exactly zero places.
And so, the growing socialist wing of the Democratic party re-branded itself. They became “liberals.”
It was a shameless theft of the word “liberal,” which had always meant small-government and individual rights. In fact, in Great Britain, the word liberal still retains its old meaning. If you want to start a fight, introduce a GB liberal to an American one. (Don’t worry, they won’t break anything.)
That worked for a while for the Democrats. But the people eventually caught on. They came to recognize that “liberal” did not mean liberal in the classic sense. It instead meant something roughly the opposite – it meant socialism. And so “liberal” became a bad brand.
The Democrats wondered, what do we do now? Starting another civil war seemed imprudent, given that they didn’t have many guns.
They decided to simply re-brand again. It worked before, sort of, so it would work again. They started calling themselves “woke.” As if non-Democrats are all busy sleeping.
You know what happened to “woke.” It became a four-letter word. The reason is that people began to associate woke with – you know what’s coming – socialism (and worse).
And then came “progressive.” As if anyone not a Democrat is regressive. This progressive moniker ironically harkens back over a century to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who was an avowed white supremacist until a stroke involuntarily relieved him of his power in favor of his wife who was an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist.
As for the success of the current “progressive” brand . . . meh.
The problem is that Democrats are simply too burdened by the brand “Democrat.” They can call themselves whatever, but people still know that Democrats are the people who wanted to replace merit with skin color, who wanted boys in the girls’ locker rooms, who have been predicting the incineration of the world for two generations, and who wanted – and did – abolish the nation’s borders.
And so, in the most brazen re-branding yet, the Democrats have taken to calling themselves non-Democrats. Specifically, they are starting to call themselves “Independents.”
Yep, in a number of upcoming races, lifelong hard-left Democrats are calling themselves “Independents” in an apparent bid to distance themselves from any accountability for their Party’s craziness – a craziness that they endorsed up until, oh, about yesterday.
It reminds me of one particular craziness by the Democrats. For years, they maintained that a man could change into a woman by announcing that he had simply changed his mind about his man/woman thing.
I submit that Democrats are likely to be about as successful in “changing” into Independents as men are successful in “changing” into women. But we’ll see.
the Aspen beat 