Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Cruelty is the Point. It's Adam Sarwar. How you doing, man? I'm all right. How are you doing, Tim? I'm doing maybe a little better than you. You kind of seem sad. You're just all right. You got allergies.
You know, I think the voting rights act thing is one of the most depressing and demoralizing developments in American politics. I think, you know, watching things like Tennessee elections
redistrict its only black district out of existence, you know, days essentially after the ruling, you know, it's very hard to think about all the people who live through, you know, the 1960s and the civil rights movement who are now seeing all that work, all that sacrifice being undone by a court that is equal parts naive and malicious.
Yeah.
All right, well, let's get into that. I was thinking about this before I had you on. You can kind of see, you get a sense for what's going wrong in the country based on guest frequency. And it's like, it's not really a great sign for racial and social justice issues that this is my second Adam Serwer visit in the last couple months. But I do, I appreciate you coming on.
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Chapter 2: What recent events in Tennessee highlight issues of voter disenfranchisement?
After the Cold War and during the War on Terror, there was, I think, not the same kind of pressure, but a similar kind of pressure. But what really happened was that Trump showed that the price to pay for being overtly racist was not nearly as much as they thought it was. And so Trump winning two elections. you know, sends the message.
And I think, you know, even during the Bush era, there was a whole scandal about the civil rights division and in particular the voting section and the people running it saying, you know, we're going to gerrymander all those libs out of the division. This was from an office of professional responsibility report on the politicized hiring scandal at the time.
So these people did exist, but they were, I think, restrained by leadership because because they felt like there would be a political cost to pay for overt racism. And I think Bush, in particular, the Bush-era Republican Party, if you remember the Republican conventions of that era, they had a gospel choir. There was very much a like, we're not that Republican Party anymore.
And then Trump comes out and he just, you know, he can get away with saying, you know, calling black people garbage, saying, you know, we have these people coming from shithole countries. We don't want them. We only want Nordics here in America.
The public's perception of him is so embedded among low information voters of like, he's just the business guy that nobody seems to believe that he is this ideological racist that he is. And as a result, the Republican Party feels like, oh, there are no rules anymore. We can get away with all of this.
But, you know, someone like Roberts and someone like Alito, they've been gunning for this for a long time. They wanted to repeal the Voting Rights Act for a long time. 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
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Chapter 3: How does Adam Serwer connect historical figures to current voting rights issues?
The opposite.
We have a whites only refugee program. You know, that's shocking to me. I think about it every day. And I don't like to me, that's a five alarm scandal, but it's just sort of like something that's in the ether. The administration has banned travel from like almost every majority non-white country in the world.
Again, I think that this is an artifact of Trump's image being so cemented in the minds of a lot of low information voters that they simply don't believe any of the stuff that comes out about him or they're not paying attention or they just think of him as
As the guy that they saw in The Apprentice, I do think there's an element of denial involved just based on personal experience with, you know, non-white Trump voters in my own family. There is just a tremendous denial that he is this person. They don't want to believe it. They want to believe that he's the guy that they want him to be.
I mean, you know, ideally in the long term, you do want some kind of racial depolarization because that means that those issues are no longer, you know, a central part of American life. Right. Yeah.
Ideally, that comes from broad social and economic equality, the end of racism, basically, not from a kind of authoritarian depolarization where you have voters who are attracted to authoritarian governance, even if it comes from a candidate who is surrounded fundamentally by people who are ideological white nationalists who think being an American is about being white.
To your point that this is the voters' fault, I mean, I don't think there's any way to argue with that. They picked him. I think that they were delusional to some extent. I think that's why his approval ratings are so low. When I talk to Trump voters, again, they just discount it during the campaign.
They just refuse to believe any of the negative stuff was true, even when it was coming from people who used to work for him. And like when you talk to people there and say, oh, he's just going to, you know, mass deportation means go after the criminals. Well, that's not what that means. Or like the tariffs, you know, they pay the tariff. I mean, there's just a total refusal to accept that.
What Trump's agenda actually was because they liked him personally, like his personal brand was so strong with these people that they simply refused to believe that he would do these things. And now that he's doing them, they don't like it very much.
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Chapter 4: What does the Supreme Court's decision mean for racial and social justice?
Yeah, I realized as I was saying that, I feel like I don't want to demoralize my Tennessee listeners because, but, you know, just the reality is reality.
No, I mean, look, but there are no permanent victories. You know, part of the folly here is that Republicans think That if they do this, that people will eventually stop wanting to be free. But it didn't happen in the 1890s. It didn't happen in the 1920s. It didn't happen after the Red Summer and all those massacres and riots.
It did not happen after the lynchings of soldiers coming back from World War I and World War II. People are not going to give up. But that doesn't take away from the evil, in my view, of what's being done and the conscious malice with which it is being done. I do think it is going to take a tremendous effort to get us back even to square one.
Well, it's already been kind of a bleak show, so I'm sorry to do this to you. I have some more bad news on the breaking news front. The Virginia Supreme Court has overturned the redistricting map that was passed by the voters of Virginia on technical grounds. This is just happening right now, so I obviously haven't had a chance to dig into the ruling. You wrote about this in Virginia Post.
voters were purposefully disenfranchising Republicans, but it was part of this effort, the broader fight, to kind of fight fire with fire here and hopefully lead to a better result. I think that the political position for the president is so bad right now that I'm not sure that this ruling will have an impact on what happens to the House of Representatives, really.
I think that the only way what the Virginia Democrats did is justifiable is as an escalation meant to de-escalate, ultimately, to get to a point where Republicans are willing to negotiate over the issue of gerrymandering. Drawing districts is tough. I mean, the other thing is, is that you can try to do this and you can get it down to a pretty good science. But the fact is people move.
Those lines don't always stay what you think they're going to stay. you think you've made a bulletproof district and sometimes it doesn't actually turn out that way.
Again, I think this race to the bottom with gerrymandering where democratic states have been responding to Republican gerrymandering by gerrymandering of their own is only necessary because the only thing that's worse than constitutional hardball is unilateral constitutional hardball. You ultimately have to get to a point where both sides are open to de-escalation, not just one side.
I think that race to the bottom is bad news in general. I don't know how else to describe it. To go back to our previous conversation, they are going to try and redistrict Black people out of American political life. It is harder to do that than they think. That's all I can say about that.
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Chapter 5: How do partisan politics affect the Voting Rights Act today?
The United States is militarily superior to the Iranian military that does not necessarily yield strategic victory. And this is sort of the lesson of American military interventions for like the past century. So it's kind of striking that they hadn't learned it.
The other thing that they seem to misunderstand, but this is pretty related just kind of to the misconception of how and why America does what it does versus how these foreign countries act. Rubio had a press conference this week, and there were two segments of the press conference that were pretty striking.
One, he talked about how Iran needs to understand that they're the bad guys right now since they're the ones blowing up boats and that we're the good guys. He literally used good guys, bad guys as the frame. And then he also talked later about how the Iranian regime was bad because they killed protesters and because protesters aren't given the opportunity to speak out.
There didn't seem to be any kind of awareness of the way other people might see those facts, which I, by the way, in the context of Iran, I agree. But coming from somebody speaking on behalf of this administration, there may be some logical flaws.
I think to go back to your point about virtue signaling, if you abandon the virtue signaling and you just – you want to talk like Darth Vader in your speeches, then it's a little harder to be like, but we're the good guys. And obviously if you kill protesters in the United States – it gets a lot harder to attack other governments for doing the same thing.
And to be clear, the Iranian regime has been a lot deadlier against this protest than the Trump administration. Sure, of course. But the issue with abandoning morality and being like –
a might makes right school shooter manifesto type rhetoric is that, you know, then people take you seriously and it's harder to appeal to the better angels of people's nature and make it seem like, you know, you're doing things out of the goodness of your heart. You've already told us that your might makes right people. You can't then complain that it's wrong when the strong abuse the weak.
I want to just do a little politics with you to end. We've obviously all, everything is politics, but just like campaign politics. And first, as it relates to the war, I'm just curious what you have thoughts on this.
I do think that, like, the commentariat doesn't really appreciate the degree of rage in the electorate, particularly the Democratic electorate, just broadly about what is happening, but about this war in particular. And I think that that is only going to increase. I think that's led to some misanalysis of what's happening. And just a couple of examples. Like, we had the Plattner story.
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Chapter 6: What implications does gerrymandering have on democracy in the U.S.?
And, and this type of shit sort of drives me crazy. I think I must not, I cannot be the only father of daughters. who is like continuously radicalized by the amount of casual misogyny you see on the internet every day.
I saw my dad finally getting into the me too movement, watching my daughter play on a, um, um, mixed gender basketball team, watch the boys never pass it to her, even though she was better than most of them. And it just slowly watched my father be like fucking sexism is a problem.
Yeah. I can see it. You know, there's this whole conversation about like what the Democrats should do about men. And like, I don't have an answer to that except like – I just think you should not want to be an asshole.
You're consuming fitness content though. So that means you must be doing something. Are you doing peptides? Are you peptiding?
No, I just, you know, I'm just, I'm a middle-aged man. I need to, you know, I need like 30 minutes of physical therapy before I go to the gym so I can make sure that I can carry both of my kids, you know, to their rooms when it's bedtime. Like, you know.
All right. So you're not looks maxing. No, I'm not.
I mean, are you kidding me?
I think you look good. Well, thank you for that, Tim. All right. Anytime, Adam. It wasn't a very uplifting podcast for a Friday, but I guess we knew that when we scheduled it. So, you know, hope people can get outside, find some joy this weekend and appreciate your time as always. Thank you so much for having me. We'll be back here on Monday for another edition of the show.
We'll see everybody then. Peace.
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