Party All the Time

The lower court also “failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns.”
Supreme Court permits Alabama to use congressional map struck by lower court as racially discriminatory. SCOTUSblog

So then, one wonders, what is?

In the unsigned order, handed down late last month, the 6 conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court basically said that a racial community that consistently votes in a partisan manner are partisans first, and members of their racial community second. Accordingly, gerrymandering districts in such a way as to dilute their voting power is a partisan act, and not a racially discriminatory one.

I understand the logic in play there, even if I highly doubt that this was what Congress had in mind with the various Voting Rights acts. But those were a long time ago, and in the meantime, the Supreme Court has become a hotbed of partisanship. Not because the justices are bad at their jobs, but because the White House and the Senate effectively control access to the court; and with the President now being the effective leader of their political party, anyone who cannot be shown to be loyal to the party line has zero chance of being nominated, let alone confirmed to the bench. In other words, being a loyal partisan is the job of a Justice of the Supreme Court.

And thus, we have a decision widely regarded as nakedly partisan.

Personally, I'm somewhat impressed the ability of partisans to see partisan bias as good for the country. The whole reason why the Louisiana legislature had redrawn its maps was to add another Republican seat to its Congressional delegation, and it had apparently concluded that there was no way they were going to convince enough voters in either of the districts held by Democrats to change their affiliations; so writing one of the districts out of existence was their only option.

One can debate whose fault this is; Black voters in Louisiana for not buying whatever it was Republicans there are selling, or the Republicans for not being willing to make a deal appealing enough to win over those voters. But the end result of the gerrymander is that it no longer matters... Not needing any more actual votes to secure a new seat, Republicans no longer need to offer anything better to Democratic voters, and they have no reason to respond to any shift those voters might make in their direction. Which, in turn, means that Democrats have no reason to consider Republican candidates. One-party systems, even when not enforced by law, tend to be unresponsive to fairly high levels of dissatisfaction for just this reason; unless their base of support completely collapses, they have the ability to tell those who disagree with them to simply lump it. And they don't have to reward anyone outside of their base of support, because those people have no way of inflicting pain on the establishment. And if their base currently benefits at the expense of outsiders, there's an active incentive to keep them outside.

Of course, one of the recurring blind spots of partisans is to see their positions as objectively right and good, and see the public as having a responsibility to them, rather than the other way around. I think that American politics has become more and more partisan since the election of Ronald Reagan, back when I was in junior high school, with Newt Gingrich and company really kicking the process into high gear. (Although this might simply be a factor of my being too young to really follow politics prior to that.) But they were abetted in this by a general fecklessness in government by both parties at a number of levels, which left a lot of people (and i think more join them every day) with the impression that the only way they could protect their interests was single-party dominance.

The very idea that partisan gerrymanders are allowable, but strictly racial gerrymanders are not speaks to this. While gerrymanders rely on the fact that people's votes can be reliably predicted fairly well in advance, their point is to make elections non-competitive. And this lessens the importance of policies that impact the electorate as a whole, in favor of the preferences of primary voters. To use myself as an example, if I only vote in the general elections, and will base my vote on the party affiliation of whomever is on the ballot, why should any care what my opinion on anything is? My vote isn't in play, and so it affords me no power. Given that political parties are simply private political organizations, why hand them, via their most vocal members, this sort of influence?

Coming up on 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is still a disunified (and largely dysfunctional) polity. There's no rational reason why Democratic and Republican voters should be so at odds with one another that so many of them won't even consider voting across party lines. The divide may not be as total as it's often described, but it's present, and deeper than I suspect is healthy.

Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, ma’am. If you can keep it.”
Overheard, it is said, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787

Keep it? I'm not convinced that many people even want any part of it.

Severance

The problem with "inside the Beltway" punditry is that it tends to be divorced from the actual reasons why the public at large does things. I was listening to a recent episode of the Slate Politics podcast, and host David Plotz was attempting to make the point that Graham Platner's character flaws were different, and lesser, than President Trump's, as an answer to a an expected Republican callout of hypocrisy.

What serious Democrat cares if Republicans think they're a hypocrite, given the number of Republicans who already regard them as Enemies of the State? Democrats who are going to vote for Graham Platner will do so not because they've decided he's morally upstanding, but because control of the United States Senate is important, and a Senator Platner makes that more likely than Senator Susan Collins remaining in office does. Disliking the new rules of the game doesn't mean that people don't have to play. And the new rules of the game dictate that controlling the various levers of government is the only thing that matters.

As long as Democratic and Republican voters continue to organize themselves into two mutually hostile camps where "the other side losing" is considered equal to "winning," this is going to be the new normal, because the activist classes on both sides see themselves as too broke to be able to care about right and wrong.

Ironically, it's because they can't afford not to.

"Inside the Beltway" commentary that expects people to feel secure enough to take the high road simply comes across as disconnected from the way that people are actually engaging with politics. And it's difficult to offer workable solutions to a problem when one is committed to an incorrect diagnosis.

Junish

It's June again, and so it's also LGBTQ Pride Month. I have to admit that it's only the Third, and I'm already weary of the skirmishing between conservative Christians and Pride boosters, even if I understand the real and imagined stakes of the conflict.

It reminded me of Ross Douthat's Believe, which I read earlier this year. Chapter 6 is "Three Stumbling Blocks," barriers to returning to faith that Mr. Douthat believes people may encounter. After laying out his answers to "Why Does God Allow So Many Wicked Things to Happen?" and "Why Do Religious Institutions Do So Many Wicked Things?" he moves on to "Why are Traditional Religions So Hung Up on Sex?" (As an aside, I'm curious how he decided that these were the topics to tackle. Perhaps his readers who wrote to him about their vacillations over their choice to leave their faiths sought these answers.)

At one point in the section he notes:

It's possible to think that Christianity or Islam or any other faith is a locus of divinely revealed truth about the universe and that it's gotten sexual ethics almost completely wrong from the get-go. But there's a certain tension between those two beliefs, and it's hardly ridiculous to think that the second one substantially undermines the first. Come worship the God who revealed Himself to us, and who, by the way, let us go completely and cruelly wrong about sex and gender for several thousand years isn't an ideal pitch even if it seems to fit the spirit of the times.

Mr. Douthat then goes on to make his case that religions haven't gotten sexual ethics wrong, but that brings me to another thing that comes up every June: Juneteenth.

Now, when I first learned of Juneteenth, it was just something that people in Texas did to have another excuse for a barbecue. And I don't really pay any more attention to it now. But what's important here is that it doesn't draw sectarian fire in the same way that Pride month does. Even though one can make the case that God, by the way, let humanity go completely and cruelly wrong about owning other people as property for several thousand years.

If it's uncontroversial that Abrahamic acceptance of slavery was actively misguided, why is it so difficult to credit that Abrahamic sexual and gender ethics might also reasonably be considered to have outlived their usefulness? The Bible is pretty clear on the permissibility of owning slaves; Mosaic law doesn't beat around the bush on the topic. Sure, there are people who string together various parts of Scripture to make the case that the Bible actually condemns slave owning, but if that's the case it's remarkable that it took some eighteen centuries for the message to get across, and reasonable to ask why such a long delay.

To defend divine revelation that everyone ought to be either in a monogamous, cisgender, mixed-sex relationship or celibate for life, while discarding divine revelation that slavery is permissible and that slaves have responsibilities to their owners as flawed comes across as cherry-picking. While Mr. Douthat confidently states: "But the social history of the last few decades should, at the very least, disturb one's confidence that the world before the sexual revolution was simply oppressive and the world since simply more liberated and just," making the case that the social history of the period from June 19, 1865 to today should disturb one's confidence that the world before emancipation was simply oppressive, et cetera, would be to invite being pilloried as an unreconstructed racist. Perhaps I'm incorrect in this, but I can't see Mr. Douthat attempting to make the second case, despite the current state of the African-American community writ large.

The sectarian sniping over Pride Month, and whether or not LGBTQ people fit properly into some divine plan is pointless, and drives home the fact that religion can be completely (even if "cruelly" overstates things) out-of-step with modern ethical understanding; all in the name of a refusal to simply live and let live when Internet clout points are on the line.

Vector

There is a type of fraud, perpetrated against job seekers, termed a "Contagious Interview." The tactic has been around for a few years now, and like many fraud tactics, has been evolving and spreading. Originally, it was targeted at developers: a fraudster would ask a job seeker to clone and execute code from code hosting platforms, like GitHub. The code package would have a malicious payload attached to it, and if it was run in an insecure environment, that payload would be installed on the target's computer/network.

It's taken a while, but the technique is now being deployed against other job seekers. Some examples I've heard of are people being asked to record videos of themselves for verification purposes or even something as simple as being sent a Zoom link. In each case, the target is presented with an error message or dialog box that informs them that a driver, or their Zoom installation, is out-of-date and that specific commands need to be run in the Terminal to address this and continue.

Of course, updating camera drivers or video conferencing software doesn't require Terminal commands; this fraud depends on targets following instructions, even when they don't understand precisely what they are doing. And that relies, at least in part, on a certain amount of anxiety. And there's no shortage of anxiety among job seekers today. Someone flustered by a potential roadblock between them and an interview is much more likely to follow dodgy instructions than someone feeling more secure in their situation.

And, of course, someone stressed from being unemployed will find being stolen from via malicious software running on their computer to be a bigger blow than someone with a steady income. But money is money, and the fact that a dollar, pound or euro goes a fairly long way in a poor or developing nation means that people there will continue to target people in wealthy nations who are looking for work. It's a form of resource curse unto itself, and one that will keep evolving, so long as the world's poor have easy access to websites and people's inboxes.

Handed Over

“James Madison’s design — ‘ambition must be made to counteract ambition’ — assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.”
The Week, quoting Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

I understand Mr. Zakaria’s point, but I feel it somewhat obscures an important factor. For many Republican lawmakers the congregants in “the personality cult of one man” are the people whose support they need to be reelected. No matter how well a lawmaker’s chosen policies might serve the nation as a whole, they cannot implement them if they are voted out of office.

Donald Trump controls the Republican Party because he is able to influence it’s activists and primary electorate to vote in accordance with what he understands his interests to be, because those voters believe that those are also their interests. And this is due to a long history of “the political establishment,” as it were, paying lip service to making people’s lives better, but sacrificing their direct interests at nearly every opportunity. Donald Trump only needed to have just enough credibility to get people to think that “this time might be different,” and he was in.

Republican members of Congress have the ability to neither counteract the ambition of the President with their own ambitions nor to jealously guard their powers against the executive, because any ambition other than using their powers to be an instrument of the President’s will is punished by the “MAGA” base. And a public airing of the missteps that brought Congress to this place won’t do anyone any good. As long as those people who are motivated to turn out for Republican primary elections believe that if President Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone to death, that it would be the best thing for them and the nation at large, the Republican party doesn’t need to “surrender its institutional ambition;” it has already lost any ability it may have had to retain it.

The best way to save a home from a fire is to prevent ignition. Once hoses are being taken from the hook-and-ladder and attached to hydrants, the question isn’t “Will the structure burn?” but "How much of it will remain once the flames are extinguished?”

Mr. Zakaria’s point, at least as quoted by The Week, starts with noting that for partisans, corruption isn’t about what is being done, but about who is doing it. This interpretation of The Rule of Law is nothing new at this point. This is a function of the fact that holding a member of one’s own “tribe” accountable comes with costs. People who understand impartial application of the rules to be fundamentally unaffordable are predictably unwilling to pay what it asks.