2026

BREAKING OUT OF THE BANTUSTANS:

The Voting Rights Act Is Dead. Here’s a New Model for Black Politics. (Jake Grumbach, Perry Bacon, May 25, 2026, New Republic)

It’s worth explaining when and how Black politics lost its effectiveness. There has never been a singular Black political movement or African American ideology. Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois famously quarreled. Du Bois’s own views shifted over the course of his life. The reality of the civil rights activism of the 1950s and ’60s was more complicated and messy than beautiful Martin Luther King speeches and smartly organized boycotts.

But after the civil rights victories of the 1960s, a clear Black politics emerged and predominated for five decades. Aspiring Black leaders, who had earlier led from the pulpit or protests, sought and won political office, most commonly becoming either mayor or member of Congress in heavily Black areas. A network of Black organizations, such as the National Urban League and the NAACP, focused less on the mass protests of the civil rights era and more on behind-the-scenes lobbying and collaborating with those Black officials in office.

Though they varied considerably, these organizations often became synonymous with a single famous leader, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And these leaders were often treated by the media and politicians as spokespeople for the entire Black population. These politicians, groups, and leaders aligned tightly with the Democratic Party, viewing it as the only vehicle to advance Black political goals.

The results of this approach have been uneven. On the one hand, African American politicians became increasingly powerful within the Democratic Party, gaining committee chairmanships, the mayor’s office in some of America’s largest cities, Cabinet and judicial appointments, and finally, in Barack Obama, the party’s presidential nomination. These elected officials delivered major policy victories to Black Americans and the country as a whole, from local economic empowerment of Black communities to the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, African Americans became a “captured minority,” the term invoked by Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer. Democratic Party officials knew that Black voters would back them no matter what, so they had little incentive to push hard for policies and programs that would help African Americans in particular. Electoral pressures led the Democratic Party to set an agenda that would appeal to swing voters in swing states—a very non-Black constituency.

As the Democratic Party became increasingly concerned that advancing Black concerns turned off white voters, Black Democratic politicians and prominent activists faced a choice: advance in the party by downplaying and sidelining Black concerns, or advocate Black interests at the expense of their careers. Many chose the former. Contrary to conservative pundits who claim that he stoked racial conflict, Obama actually spoke far less about racial issues than his Democratic predecessors. Prominent activists shifted from pressuring Democratic politicians to being very defensive of them. Sharpton and others negotiated with mayors, presidents, and corporations, but grew unaccountable to Black America at large—operating more like celebrities than community activists. Over time it became difficult to distinguish the policies of Black and white mayors, as both were beholden to the police and corporations in their cities and thereby unwilling (and often lacking any real power) to advance policies to help rank-and-file Black Americans.

The Congressional Black Caucus for a time earned its self-given moniker, the “Conscience of the Congress,” pushing the U.S. in radical directions, whether on enforcing civil rights or in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. But gradually, members of the CBC became advocates for Democratic donors and big business as much as for Black activists and voters. Above all, they advocated for their own careers. Many CBC members are among the cohort of congressional Democrats in their upper seventies and eighties who insist on running for reelection despite growing concerns of a gerontocracy.

TO NOT KNOW IS TO HATE?:

The Smugness of Anti-Empathy Politics: Gad Saad spells out his ‘own the libs, scorn the weak’ ethos: a review of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad (Cathy Young, May 22, 2026, The Bulwark)

Quillette ran a scathing review by conservative British writer Ben Sixsmith titled “Playing Gad,” critiquing it as simplistic and intellectually self-absorbed. The reviewer in another “heterodox” outlet, Unherd, panned the book for dressing up a catchy concept in a lot of incoherent and “vibes-based” arguments, political vitriol, and lame humor.

The thing is, Saad’s concept—empathy is a good and necessary trait, but can be bad and self-damaging when taken too far—is one few people would dispute. Obvious examples include being trapped in an abusive relationship or a toxic friendship because you’re afraid to hurt the other person by ending it, a concern exploitative people can easily manipulate. On a larger scale, it is self-evidently true that empathy alone is usually not a reliable guide to policy or collective action: refusing, on compassionate grounds, to forcibly hospitalize people experiencing certain acute mental health crises can result in grave harm not only to other people but to the patients themselves.

Indeed, other people have critiqued the overreliance on empathy—at least in the literal “I feel your pain” sense which distinguishes empathy from the related concepts of sympathy and compassion, even if many people use the words interchangeably. Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom wrote a generally well-received book titled Against Empathy in 2016, proposing “Rational Compassion” instead. Bloom argued, among other things, that the emotional component of empathy leads us to focus too much on highly visible cases of suffering (a little child who falls down a well becomes more important than a lot of little children whose lives are quietly wrecked by poverty). Ironically—given that Saad spends a lot of time excoriating liberals for being too afraid to seem racist—Bloom also argued that empathy-based morality can easily become de facto racist and tribalist, since we tend to empathize more with people like ourselves: hence the disproportionate media focus on young white women who go missing.

For Saad, though, “suicidal empathy” is strictly a culture-war concept. In his framework, the term refers to ostensibly compassionate political views he considers misguided: support for migrants and refugees, Muslim immigrants in particular; excessive concern with the rights and well-being of criminals and/or homeless people; high taxes to pay for social programs; defense of transgender identities; an #IBelieveHer stance toward women who accuse men of sexual misconduct. (Unless, of course, the alleged perps are migrants or Muslims or both, in which case insufficient support for the victims is a sign of suicidal empathy for those groups.)

Gaad has just dressed up Identitarianism. By definition empathy is a personal concept, not one you apply to entire groups (whose personal experiences you can not even pretend to know, as advocates of empathy do).