Adam Serwer

that he can achieve his own policy goals of maintaining at least de facto segregation, even without having to be an overt racist or to have overtly discriminatory laws.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that the court regards the liberty to discriminate as an actual liberty and the liberty not to be discriminated against as sort of a fake thing that was imposed by foolish liberals, whether in the 1860s and 70s or the 1960s and 70s.

And I think to some extent,

You know, you look at someone like Samuel Alito, who takes tremendous umbrage at accusations of racism, but is entirely indifferent to actual racial discrimination when it happens.

And I think that, you know, there is this sort of toxic naivete there.

That liberals are making up this whole racism problem and that, you know, it's just a way to be mean to conservatives.

And so none of these laws that ban discrimination are even needed because conservatives can possibly be racist.

And when you look at the logic of his decision, I mean, he says, you can't really disentangle race and partisanship and partisanship is fine.

So this isn't really racist to sort of redistrict black people or disenfranchise black people or ensure that districts are drawn in such a way that they waste their votes.

Right.

But that would have been shocking to the framers of the 15th Amendment who were partisan Republicans who understood that Democrats were disenfranchising black people in order to destroy the Republican Party in the South.

The thing was intertwined when the 15th Amendment was adopted.

So the idea that, you know, this is just a complicated problem and you can't disentangle it.

In what other context?

Would black people be disenfranchised if not a partisan context, whether that's the Democratic Party doing it or the Republican Party doing it?

That's the whole motive in the first place.

That's why the 15th Amendment was adopted.

So it's a combination of, I think, like I said, maliciousness and naivete and sort of a reactionary, everything the libs say must be wrong, ergo, this is totally fine.

Well, I think a couple of things have changed.