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<\/p>\nAlain Stephens is an investigative reporter covering gun violence, arms trafficking, and federal law enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Within days of<\/span> the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais<\/a>, Republican lawmakers across the South moved with remarkable speed to carve up Black constituencies and consolidate political power. Tennessee rushed to dismantle Memphis\u2019s majority-Black district<\/a>. Louisiana went further, postponing an ongoing<\/a> election and moving to eliminate a majority-Black district that snakes for more than 200 miles, from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. South Carolina<\/a> and Georgia<\/a> began maneuvering toward special sessions to redraw districts to be even more favorable to Republicans.<\/p>\n Democrats have warned<\/a> that up to one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus could disappear, and Republicans aim to pick up as many as<\/a> 15 House seats.\u00a0<\/p>\n The immediate reaction shattered the comforting fiction that America has somehow transcended race in its democratic life. The court may describe these protections as outdated relics of another era, but the swift political response revealed something older and more durable beneath the surface: preserving racial hierarchy remains one of the most potent organizing instincts in American politics.<\/p>\n The Supreme Court\u2019s continued dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is often framed as a tragedy that primarily affects Black Americans. It is that. But in a much larger sense, it also reveals how willing the country is to weaken its own democracy to keep these racialized systems of power intact.<\/p>\n It is no surprise that many of the former slaveholding states have once again moved to cheat the nation out of its democratic values. While most Confederate soldiers did not personally own slaves<\/a>, the poison of white supremacy still convinced countless poor and working-class white men to fracture the country, slaughter their fellow Americans, and march themselves into mass death on the battlefield to preserve a racial order that benefited an elite planter class more than it ever benefited them.<\/p>\n After the Civil War, the South could have become a multiracial democracy built around poor Black and white laborers with overlapping economic interests. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black Americans briefly helped build some of the South\u2019s first systems of universal public education and expanded democratic participation across the region. But Southern elites responded by enacting Jim Crow laws \u2014 not merely to dominate Black Americans, but also to preempt any nascent democratic solidarity. As historian Heather Cox Richardson has written<\/a>, wealthy Southern landowners understood that interracial democracy threatened the entire economic order that had sustained plantation rule.\u00a0<\/p>\n The system harmed Black Americans most brutally. White racists got what they wanted: segregation, lynchings<\/a>, and Black exclusion from political life. But it also left millions of poor and working-class white Americans trapped inside oligarchic state structures, one-party political machines insulated from accountability and designed to serve landowners, industrialists, and political dynasties. As Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University, found in his study of postbellum Southern disenfranchisement that poll taxes and literacy tests didn\u2019t just suppress Black voters \u2014 they also hurt democratic participation across the South as a whole, reducing overall voter turnout by 8 to 22 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n As a result, public goods, such as schools and sanitation, weakened<\/a>, labor organizing collapsed under racial division, and political options narrowed for Southern whites. These shadows still haunt the South, the region that accounts for the nation\u2019s highest poverty rates and lowest per capita GDP<\/a> compared to other regions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act into law, infamously observed<\/a> that \u201cIf you can convince the lowest white man he\u2019s better than the best colored man, he won\u2019t notice you\u2019re picking his pocket.\u201d Johnson was articulating a fundamental truth about American political history: Racial status has often been used as compensation for democratic and economic weakness.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a system that has never disappeared.\u00a0<\/p>\n The erosion of democracy in our current era also cuts both ways. As the Voting Rights Act is chipped away, blue states are increasingly incentivized<\/a> to answer Republican gerrymandering with politically motivated maps of their own<\/a>. The country drifts further from representative democracy and deeper into a retaliatory system where both parties manipulate their electorates for survival.<\/p>\n Ordinary Americans become pawns in a larger struggle over racial hierarchy and entrenched political power. Millions of voters \u2014 many of them white Americans \u2014 are treated as acceptable political sacrifices in the effort to preserve white conservative hegemony across the South. Their votes become collateral damage in a campaign of anti-Blackness.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is an odd gamble to watch: these southern Republican yes-men rushing to exploit the hollowed-out voter protections at a period of time when their states have so much to lose. As other Republicans have voiced concerns<\/a> about Trump\u2019s unilateral war on Iran, it is actually the bodies of the South that stand to risk the most, as Southern states have long supplied a disproportionate amount of the nation\u2019s combat troops<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s tariff wars have also hammered away at that historic pillar of Southern agriculture,\u00a0particularly the soybean, cotton<\/a>, poultry<\/a>, and manufacturing sectors that rely heavily on exports to foreign markets. Farmers across states like Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas have been forced to depend on bailouts<\/a> after retaliatory tariffs slashed export demand and destabilized prices.<\/p>\n In trying to keep Black Americans farther from opportunity and power, white Southerners ultimately moved those civic possibilities farther from themselves, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The South\u2019s democratic decline has carried material consequences far beyond voting booths. Today, many of the same states most aggressive in restricting voting rights also rank among the nation\u2019s worst in healthcare access<\/a>, maternal mortality<\/a>, and rural hospital closures<\/a>. And as I\u2019ve written before<\/a>, the South also leads the nation in rates of gun violence.\u00a0<\/p>\n Millions of poor and working-class white Southerners now live with the realities of political systems shaped by a stark lack of public investment and democratic accountability. In trying to keep Black Americans farther from opportunity and power, white Southerners ultimately moved those civic possibilities farther from themselves, too.<\/p>\n What we stand to be left with is an electoral system based on voting blocs engineered by the elites, for the elites. Researchers found that when politics harden into insulated gerrymandered coalitions, democratic systems become less responsive, less representative, and more vulnerable to authoritarian<\/a> behavior. Politically jaded Americans, who increasingly identify as independents <\/a>or report feeling disenfranchised by both parties<\/a>, have now catapulted themselves into an arena with even fewer choices and no real levers left to pull to exercise political power. <\/p>\n In response, the Democrats have largely offered a restrained, institutional response, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urging Americans to \u201csummon the courage, character and conviction<\/a>\u201d of civil rights figures like Rosa Parks and John Lewis, which feels backwards as hell as the Supreme Court incinerates their legacies<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nJim Crow for All<\/h2>\n
Southern Comforts\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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