Identitarianism

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).

HOW LOSERS “WIN”:

Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R. (Amanda Taub, May 18, 2026, NY Times)

New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

THE IRON LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

Electoral reform won’t save the Republicans or the Democrats (David L. Leal, 05/16/26, The Hill)

Decades of research have found that socioeconomic status, and particularly education, is key to explaining voter turnout. To understand why, consider this formula: Voting likelihood equals benefits minus costs, plus duty. The benefits of voting are small for individuals, but so is the cost. While few have cast the deciding ballot in an election, voting usually requires minimal effort.

However, in “The Turnout Myth,” my Hoover Institution colleague Daron Shaw and his coauthors discuss a large “diploma gap” that has existed for decades. We see turnout differences across education levels, with the most educated about twice as likely to vote, at 80 percent, as the least, at 40 percent.

Scholars explain this in several ways: First, education reinforces the belief that voting is a civic obligation, or duty. Second, education increases knowledge about politics and government. Voting is easier when you’re familiar with the issues and parties. Third, education enhances civic skills such as public speaking, group organizing and managing paperwork that can make political participation easier.

People with more education therefore have lower costs and higher duty, which leads to greater turnout among them. Education is also associated with higher incomes and professional occupations, which allow individuals to better meet any financial or time costs of voting.

So, when voting is made more challenging, the more educated are, on average, more motivated and able to overcome the obstacles than are people with less education.

And in today’s politics, those individuals are increasingly likely to be Democrats.

ESCHEWING RESPONSIBILITY:

We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages (Katya Ungerman, 5/17/26, NY Times)

Demonic vexation, teleportation, increased interest in religious practice — those phenomena are all signs that life feels, to many, increasingly charged with unseen forces. You might say it has been re-enchanted. There’s a widespread feeling that the material explanation is no longer sufficient; that something uncanny, maybe even numinous, is diffused into the texture of ordinary American life.

Any excuse is better than accepting that they are the authors of their own misery.

NO RACISM REQUIRED:

Why Neutral Maps Could Empower Black Voters as Much as the Voting Rights Act (Nate Cohn and Eve Washington, May 17, 2026, NY Times)

A race-neutral, nonpartisan redistricting process could create just as many House districts where the candidate preferred by nonwhite voters — usually a Democrat — would be favored to win.

One way to tell whether nonwhite voters would lose their power in that kind of redistricting process is by looking at computer simulations of hypothetical congressional districts. The algorithms, first designed by a team of political scientists in 2022, try to draw compact districts that respect county and municipal lines. After the Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, we reran the simulations without consideration of race. Using the algorithms to draw new districts thousands of times with those compactness constraints can give a good sense of what neutral maps could look like.

And the simulations yield roughly as many so-called minority-opportunity districts across the South as existed under the Voting Rights Act.

In other words, the act didn’t create minority representation that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Nonpartisan, race-neutral redistricting would still preserve many such districts, even if in a different configuration…

CONSPIRACIES HELP THEM EXPLAIN AWAY PERSONAL FAILURES:

12 Things Everyone Should Know About Conspiracy Theories: The strange psychology of suspicious minds (Steve Stewart-Williams, Nov 15, 2025, Nature-Nurture)

Some personalities are more fertile soil for conspiracy theories than others. Research on the Big Five personality traits, for instance, shows that low agreeableness and high neuroticism tilt the odds toward conspiratorial thinking. Other personality predictors include entitlement, low inquisitiveness, low humility, and a victimhood mentality.

But the single strongest personality predictor is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.

ASSUMED IDENTITY:

Black Candidates Do Not Need Black Voters to Win (Deroy Murdock, May 15, 2026, American Spectator)

In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Elena Kagan argued: “If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

Can Kagan read the minds of “minority citizens?” If not, how would she know whether the “candidates of their choice” are minorities, Democrats, or anything else?

Also important: Where is it written that minority candidates must represent minority voters?

Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District is 61.3 percent black and only 24.5 percent white, the Census Bureau reports. And yet, since 2006, this majority-black, greater-Memphis electorate has voted 10 times to send Steve Cohen to the U.S. House. Cohen is white.

Conversely, the Left whines that black Democrats can win only if a majority of voters of color (typically black) elect them. They assume that black contenders cannot secure a plurality or even a majority of white votes. This racist argument suggests that black candidates lack the charm, ideas, or ideas to win white votes, and/or whites are too bigoted to back blacks.

Thus, race-obsessed Democrats concentrate black candidates in constituencies that resemble South Africa’s Apartheid-era Bantustans. Predominantly minority congressional districts recall Bophuthatswana, KwaZulu, Transkei, and other black “homelands.” And yet, for decades, constituencies with neither black majorities nor shapes like Rorschach blots have elected black Democrats and Republicans.

EMPOWERING MINORITY VOTERS:

Key Jeffries ally endorses aggressive tactics to create more blue seats (Riley Rogerson, 05/14/2026, Politico)

Asked specifically if he would be supportive of unseating Republicans by redrawing deep-blue New York City districts held by minority lawmakers, like his own, to extend instead into less diverse suburban areas, he said, “I’m going to win, but we’ve got to get more Democrats, also.”

“We’re going to have a level playing field,” added Meeks, the longtime leader of the Queens Democratic Party.

Forcing potential representatives to court their votes.