Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision (Louisiana v. Callais) regarding the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has the first-order effect of invalidating legislative districts specifically crafted based on race. This has obvious ramifications for the upcoming midterms and the balance of Congressional power more generally.
However, I believe this decision may be a harbinger of a far more impactful and much less obvious political sea change for Democrats. The decision may signal the end of virtually monolithic Democrat voting by black Americans.
Think about what happens when a state crafts Congressional districts that are designed to be “black majority” where whites are otherwise the state’s majority. The black people in those districts become politically isolated. The majority white districts proffer candidates who have little regard for the concerns of black Americans, because they have very few black constituents they are accountable to—instead the black voters have been politically ghettoized into a single district.
Further, human nature dictates that when a group of people sharing certain characteristics are segregated into a grouping outside the mainstream, they can become ideologically isolated and develop homogeneous belief systems driven by internal group forces such as peer pressure, coercion, shame, shunning and all manner of other horrible group dynamics that humans routinely force themselves into.
It’s easy to see how that same phenomenon can emerge politically when members of certain demographic groups are shoved into a ghettoized political district. Inside that district, the peculiar issues of that group come to predominate over all other issues, and the homogeneity of the voting population in that district leads to monolithic thought and the very peer pressure, coercion, shame, shunning and other horrible practices that sociologists define as methods of “social control” used to enforce conformity to group norms.