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.