Long War

MOURNING THE BANTUSTANS:

How Minority Districts Fueled the G.O.P.’s Southern Ascendancy in Congress (Carl Hulse, 5/08/26, NY Times)

The G.O.P. may find it more difficult to win in more diverse districts of the kind that existed before the reshuffling of maps prompted by the Voting Rights Act. […]

In the late 1980s, Republicans had been deep in the House minority for nearly 40 years. But growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party had begun moving white Southern conservatives into the Republican ranks, as illustrated by high-profile party switches in Washington. Then the redistricting initiated under a series of court decisions aimed at fostering more minority representation provided yet another opening that might have seemed counterintuitive at first glance.

Architects of the maps realized that if they could maximize Black and Hispanic representation in the new districts, they would simultaneously dilute Democratic strength in surrounding jurisdictions where coalitions of white and Black voters had elected white Democrats for decades. The shift would ultimately create dozens of openings for Republican candidates in what had formerly been known as Democrats’ “Solid South.”

Groups bankrolled by wealthy conservatives joined with liberal organizations to school minority advocacy groups in state capitals and in Washington about how to shape new districts to meet court tests and best guarantee the election of minority representatives for minority communities — an outcome that many on the left argued was long overdue. Republican groups even provided free access to expensive computer software that could craft the new districts. Democrats eagerly accepted the help.

Some civil rights figures such as Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat, warned at the time that the new maps could empower Republicans by weakening the partnership of progressive white and Black voters in the South. But others said the new districts were the only way to overcome centuries of institutional discrimination against minorities in the region.

“Gerrymandering was done to keep Black folks out,” Mr. Clyburn said. “If you gerrymander to keep them out, you’ve got to gerrymander to bring them in.”

It’s not racism when you ghettoize the vote?

“MY PERSONAL FAILURE MUST BE THE RESULT OF A CONSPIRACY!”:

The Serpent in the Garden: A.J.A. Woods’s history of the ‘cultural Marxism conspiracy’ (Matt McManus, May 4, 2026, Commonweal)

Woods, an intellectual historian, is interested in the role that conspiracy theories about cultural Marxism play on the right. He isn’t concerned about “refut[ing] all the claims that every critic of Cultural Marxism has made.” This is partly because so many of those claims are obviously not made in good faith. The people making them are not interested in accurately describing Marxism, cultural or otherwise. Even when critics of cultural Marxism are earnest, their theories are rarely intellectually substantive. What’s interesting is not the theories themselves but their strangely pervasive influence.

Woods shows how conservatives and far-right influencers like Paul Weyrich criticized the older American right for being “more interested in being right than winning power.” At a 2020 conference, William S. Lind, who effectively coined and popularized the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context, described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. He argued that “cultural Marxism” works as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As Woods writes, there was therefore no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” The term “cultural Marxism” is best understood as a floating signifier under which the right lumps a vast array of disparate phenomena to undermine their credibility. Woods puts it well early in the book: “The elements of cultural Marxism/s have been deconstructed and reconfigured time and time again as reactionary political forces across the world search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.”

DARWINISM IS THE LIFE OF FEAR:

Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences (Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva, 2026, American Economic Review)

We investigate the origins and implications of zero-sum thinking: the belief that gains for one individual or group tend to come at the cost of others. Using a new survey of 20,400 US residents, we measure zero-sum thinking, political preferences, policy views, and a rich array of ancestral information spanning four generations. We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.

WHAT ANTI-WOKE SEEKS TO DENY:

Body-Worn Cameras, Prosecutors, and Racial Differences in Criminal Justice Outcomes (Jeffrey Miron, 4/28/26, Cat0)

How do body-worn cameras affect the actions of police and prosecutors? A recent study of data from North Carolina suggests that introduction of these cameras

reduced incarceration rates for black people by 10.5 percent .… Similar reductions in disparities occurred for other outcomes, including conviction rates and jail time. … These findings suggest that prosecutors had previously misinterpreted information from police, either because they held biased beliefs or treated police reports as definitive accounts.

DON’T BOTHER US WITH THE THEOLOGY:

Post-Christian Christianity: On the Conscription of Christian Language and Symbolism (Well-Tempered, Apr 28, 2026)

The term needs a little unpacking. For centuries, Western societies have been recasting ideas with distinctly Christian roots—for example, human dignity, care for the poor, the equality of all before God—as self-evident, universal truths. That process, described so well by Tom Holland in Dominion, was a kind of intellectual plagiarism: Christian convictions were reshaped, repurposed, and often detached from the doctrines that undergird them. If plagiarism is a form of flattery, then this has been a kind of backhanded tribute. Christian ideas endured because they couldn’t easily be discarded even by Christianity’s fiercest critics. In that sense, Western secularism has been defined in part by the ghosts of its Christian past.

Post-Christian Christianity moves in the opposite direction. It’s less concerned with Christian beliefs and doctrines than with the signs by which it is recognised. It understands the power of symbols and slogans in a crowded public square, and so it reaches for Christian language and imagery as instruments—useful, adaptable, and readily deployed in the service of political ends. Instead of Scripture shaping its vision of reality, a prior framework—often nationalist, or more loosely ideological—selects and selects and arranges Christian elements to support its own claims. Christianity, in this register, becomes primarily a branded resource to be exploited: less a faith to be lived than a rhetoric to be wielded.

liberalism requires the substance of Christianity; Post-Liberalism just the trappings.

DONALD HAS RUBBED THEIR NOSES IN WHAT THEIR VOTES MEANT:

Why is the Maga project teetering? Because not even Trump supporters voted for this dysfunction (Moira Donegan, 4/21/26, The Guardian)

Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was once seen as a definitive cultural shift, proof that his aggressive, domineering style of rightwing populism had found permanent purchase in US politics. Pundits hailed the triumph of conservatism; institutions scrambled to adjust to the new dominance of a regime with authoritarian aspirations. This was always a suspicious claim: was a narrow victory in one close presidential election really a sign of a broad and permanent cultural shift?

Less than 18 months later, that thesis has collapsed. Trump and his allies have delivered an era of backlash and cultural retrenchment from the executive branch: slashing grants for “woke” research; turning federal programmes meant to promote equality into engines for discrimination; stymying promotions for women and people of colour in the armed services in what critics say is an effort to resegregate the military; and pressuring athletic conferences from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the International Olympic Committee to ban trans women athletes.

They have made their cultural values felt in pervasive and sadistic ways. Americans see ICE officers patrolling their airports and tanks on the streets of major cities; they see their neighbours being snatched away by immigration agents; and they see the costs of housing soaring out of reach as the construction industry workforce dwindles as a result. They see Trump and his friends posturing on television, complaining over and over again about issues that their side has already won. And they also see the signs posted at their local gas station, where the price has now soared from an average of $3.10 a gallon in 2025 to more than $4.

It’s all well and good to feel Identitarian, until you see the actions your feelings demand.