Backward March!

Now that the Supreme Court has concluded that much of the Voting Rights Act is unnecessary and has served its purpose because we have finally achieved equality in this country, it’s natural to speculate where this is going.

We know that several Southern states moved quickly after the decision to diminish or eliminate Black (Democratic) representation in Congress, the better to hold onto Republican control of the House, fair or unfair. These states will next move to lock in Republican control of their state legislatures as well — moves that could take generations to undo.

Virginia’s supreme court has also ruled against the Commonwealth’s recent vote to redistrict in favor of the Democrats, an opinion that will most likely be challenged in an even higher court. For now, I guess it’s okay to redistrict your state if the result is more Republican members of Congress. But it’s not okay if similar redistricting results in more Democrats. Hmmm.

And I get the whole thing about needing to maintain Republican control of the levers of power in Washington and all the state capitals. After all, the Democrats are demons incarnate, are they not? But what do Republicans want to do with the power they’re cheating to keep? Restore the Confederacy?

Paul Waldman has written in his Substack Public Notice, that “The Lost Cause (of the Confederacy) doesn’t seem so lost anymore.” I think he’s right. I think there is a very large, and probably growing slice of America that still — decades later — sees the 1950s and 1960s as historical aberrations to be corrected. Our president has given these folks permission to dream again that one day, everyone will know their place.

As Vice President J.D. Vance put it recently, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” And what a relief that must be.

Imagine how terrible they must have felt to see a Black president, how humiliating it must have been to see Critical Race Theory introduced in our schools, or D.E.I. embraced by our government and our businesses.

To these terribly put-upon Whites, diversity, equity and inclusion is a challenge to their status quo, a form of retribution by the descendants of African slaves. They don’t want to live or work next to Black people, much less marry them, and believe that those who do are race-haters.

They proved how upset they were when they twice elevated a completely unqualified oafish Donald Trump to the highest office in the land. Trump was a knee-jerk reaction to the election of Obama. (Emphasis on “jerk.”)

Trump has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want dark-skinned immigrants from “shithole countries” polluting the blood and soil of our native land. He has cut immigration to almost zero, with exceptions, of course, for White Afrikaners from South Africa — the ones who serve as a textbook lesson, Trump implies, for what happens when White people lose their supremacy. Democracy can go to hell, I guess.

Remember the big fight over the statues of Civil War traitors? Monuments to Lee, Jackson, et al, should never have been taken down. According to Civil War die-hards, they were honorable men serving a just cause. A just cause? The enslavement for centuries of fellow human beings?

For years a motley group dressed up in Confederate uniforms would demonstrate on the Battery in Charleston, S.C., to celebrate their Confederate “heritage.” A friend of mine wrote the local newspaper that the demonstrators were missing something. Were they true to the Confederate story, he argued, they should have rolled around, shackled in their own waste for months on end to get a real feel for what that “heritage” included.

I remember listening to Republican Rep. Ron Paul, when he was running for president in 2012, berate Abraham Lincoln. There was no need for a Civil War, or even the Emancipation Proclamation, Paul argued, slavery would have died out on its own one day anyway. Right, and until it died on its own, White Americans would keep Blacks in bondage, picking cotton.

Back in the 1950s, there sprang up a campaign called Massive Resistance — a bid to block the desegregation of public schools. It was a coalition of retrograde Southern politicians who curried favor with the racist numbskulls who voted for them. The Massive Resistance movement was a reaction to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — a ruling that found the doctrine of Separate but Equal to be unconstitutional.

Those Southern states did all they could to keep integration from happening, passing laws against it, closing public schools, directing taxpayer dollars to private, all-White academies.

In those days, billboards dotted the countryside reading “Impeach Earl Warren.” Warren was the chief justice of the Supreme Court and a target of segregation dead-enders as well as the John Birch Society idiots. The Warren Court also struck down state-sponsored school prayer and decided that defendants had the right to remain silent and have a lawyer. (Miranda v. Arizona) Conservatives to this day claim the Warren Court was awful.

Eventually, public schools were integrated, but the opponents never gave up. George Wallace ran an unapologetically racist — and successful — campaign to become governor of Alabama, and then he ran for president in 1968 and again in 1972. He got millions of votes from the parents and grandparents of the MAGA movement.

Which makes me wonder whether, given the current mood in this country and the make-up of this Roberts Court which has done so much damage, would Justices Alito, Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Barrett have joined Roberts in voting against the doctrine of Separate but Equal if they had been on the high court in 1954? Or would these justices have upheld it, and permitted segregation in public education to continue?

I think I know the answer. And it’s troubling.