Adam Serwer

And I think if you look at Roberts's, you know, argument and parents involved.

you know, which is this first school desegregation case where he writes this formulation that I think is sort of the central dogma of reactionary colorblindness, where he says the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

But by that, he means like trying to do anything about racism.

When you look at the Shelby County ruling, he regards federal interference as

on behalf of Black people to fight racism, he regards this as a tremendous tyranny.

I think that's sincere.

I think it is an extremely naive perspective.

And I think, you know, I think he's maybe slightly different from Alito in that Alito is just a hardcore partisan who doesn't have any, like...

real central philosophical beliefs that he applies consistently.

But Roberts has consistently opposed federal power to alleviate racism because he thinks it's worse than racism.

And I think that's really dumb.

And I think you can see why.

I mean, one of the things is that

You know, there's been all this self-congratulation every time the court has stripped away a piece of the Voting Rights Act and has said, well, we've come so far.

But actually, we really haven't.

I mean, what we're seeing right now in terms of like what Republican states are doing in the immediate aftermath of this ruling says that we haven't come so far.

It was not that there was, you know, the tremendous culture change that we thought we witnessed after my parents' generation.

was not so much a culture change as a legal change.

There were legal restraints on how racist people could be, and that forced a change in the culture.

But now that they're taking these restraints away, and Donald Trump has shown that there is not as much of a price to be paid for being overly racist, that supposed progress is not as visible.