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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of the Cruelty Is the Point, It's Adam Starwar. How are you doing, man?
- [00:10]
B
I'm all right. How are you doing, Tim?
- [00:13]
A
I'm trying to. Maybe a little better than you. You kind of seem sad. You're just all right. You got allergies?
- [00:18]
B
You know, I think the Voting Rights act thing is one of the most depressing and demoralizing developments in American politics. I think, you know, watching things like Tennessee trying to redistrict its only black district out of existence, you know, days essentially after the ruling, you know, it's very hard to think about all the people who lived through the 1960s and the civil rights movement who are now seeing all that work, all that sacrifice being undone by a court that is equal parts naive and malicious.
- [00:58]
A
Yeah. All right, well, let's get into that. I was thinking about this before I had you on. You can kind of see, get a sense for what's going wrong in the country based on guest frequency. It's like, it's not really a great sign for racial and social justice issues that. This is my second Adam Serwer visit in the last couple months. But I appreciate you coming on. Your latest article on this kind of goes back. I want to get. I want to spend a lot of time on Tennessee, but I do think it's. It's valuable to take the lens back a little bit. And you started talking about a character that, you know, only old timers, maybe, or conservative, you know, media obsessives would know about, a guy named James Jackson Kilpatrick. And why don't you just kind of talk about why you framed up the article about the decision around him and, and know what, what lessons we can learn from that?
- [01:48]
B
Well, Kilpatrick's an interesting figure because, you know, he starts off as a hardcore segregationist, as a guy who is opposed to Brown v. Board, opposed to the Civil Rights act, opposed to the Voting Rights act, makes an affirmative case that, you know, racial discrimination is one of the central liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, and that American society falls apart without it. And then, you know, he becomes a much more mainstream figure. He becomes a newspaper columnist for Newsday, and he starts abandoning sort of the overt segregation. And, you know, people have a lot of his personal correspondence. So his rationalizations about this are. Are fairly mercenary and clear. You know, he, he, he's. There's at one point, he you know, this didn't make it into the article, but at one point, you know, he wants to publish a piece arguing that black people are biologically and permanently inferior. And then the. The. The. The 15th Street Baptist Church bombing happens. And so he's like, well, this might not be a good time to. To. To publish this. So he doesn't publish it. And then, you know, the editor comes back later, and he's like, you know, do you want to publish this now that, you know, everything sort of blowed over? And he says, well, I can't really afford to be associated with those views right now because his career is going well. And so he doesn't want to be. He doesn't want to be an open Klansman anymore. And in some of his correspondence, he says, I'm now a big convert to colorblindness. I'm like the Catholic who's more Catholic than the Pope. And the reason he becomes a convert to colorblindness is not that his views have fundamentally changed. It's just that he realizes through this expression of sort of reactionary colorblindness, the idea that. That it's racist. There's an equivalence between attempts to remedy racism and racism itself, that he can achieve his own policy goals of maintaining at least de facto segregation, even without having to be an overt racist or to have overtly discriminatory laws.
- [03:56]
A
Yeah, you framed it up nicely in the piece and tying it to the court's decision this way. You wrote the court's decision is consonant with the philosophy articulated by Kilpatrick that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And I just said that was a very succinct way to kind of put. To frame it.
- [04:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that the court regards the liberty to discriminate as an actual liberty and the liberty not to be discriminated against as sort of a fake thing that was imposed by foolish liberals, whether in the 1860s and 70s or the 1960s and 70s. And I think, you know, to some extent, you know, you look at someone like Samuel Alito who takes tremendous umbrage at accusations of racism, but is, you know, entirely indifferent to actual racial discrimination when it happens. And I think that, you know, there is this sort of toxic naivete that liberals are making up this whole racism problem and that, you know, it's just a way to be mean to conservatives. And so none of these laws that ban discrimination are even needed because conservatives couldn't possibly be racist. And you know, when you look at the logic of his decision, I mean, he says, you know, you can't really disentangle race and partisanship. And partisanship is fine. So this isn't really racist to sort of redistrict black people or disenfranchise black people, ensure that districts are drawn in such a way that they waste their votes. But that would have been shocking to the framers of the 15th Amendment, who were partisan Republicans who understood that Democrats were disenfranchising black people in order to destroy the Republican Party in the South. The thing was intertwined when the 15th amendment was adopted. So the idea that, you know, this is just a complicated problem and you can't disentangle it. In what other context would black people be disenfranchised if not a partisan context? Whether that's the Democratic Party doing it or the Republican Party doing it. That's the whole motive in the first place. That's why the 15th Amendment was adopted. So it's. It's, you know, it's a combination of, I think, like I said, you know, maliciousness and naivete and sort of a reactionary. Everything the libs say must be wrong. Ergo, this is totally fine.
- [06:35]
A
If we look at the kind of. The trajectory of this. You write about the 1982 congressional reauthorization, which obviously Reagan signs, and then it gets reauthorized again in 2006 with Bush. A lot of these sentiments you describe were held then. Right. It's not as if conservatives did not believe in 1982 and 2006 that liberals weaponized accusations, allegations of racism against them for ways that were, whatever, overwrought or fake, and there weren't people that took umbrage against them. And Bush appointed Alito, for example. And so I'm wondering what you make of why the change now and what that says about our trajectory. And just to give some context to this, I think it'd be interesting. I went back and listened to Bush's signing speech when he was signing the reauthorization in 2006. I just want to play a little bit of that for you.
- [07:27]
C
In four decades since the Voting Rights act was first passed, we made progress toward equality. Yet the work for a more perfect union is never ending. Today we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy. My administration will vigorously enforce the provisions of this law, and we will defend it in court.
- [07:53]
A
What's changed, do you think?
- [07:55]
B
Well, I think a couple things have changed. You know, I think the Cold War put a tremendous amount of pressure on the United States to live up to its ideals domestically. And I think, you know, we were sort of on autopilot in that sense. You know, after the Cold War and during the war on terror, there, there was, I think, not the same kind of pressure, but a similar kind of pressure. But what really happened was that Trump showed that the price to pay for being overtly racist was not nearly as much as they thought it was. And so Trump winning two elections sends the message. And I think even during the Bush era, there was a whole scandal about the Civil Rights division and in particular the voting section and the people running it saying, you know, we're going to gerrymander all those libs out of the division. This was from an Office of Professional Responsibility report on the politicized hiring scandal at the time. So these people did exist, but they were, I think, restrained by leadership because they felt like there would be a political cost to pay for overt racism. And I think Bush in particular, the Bush era Republican Party, if you remember, like the Republican conventions of that era, you know, they had a gospel choir. There was very much a. Like, you know, we're. We're not that Republican Party anymore. And then Trump comes out and he just, you know, he can get away with saying, you know, calling black people garbage, saying, you know, we. We have these people coming from countries. We don't want them. We only want Nordics.
- [09:38]
A
Yeah.
- [09:38]
B
Here in America, you know, and it doesn't seem to, you know, his, like, the public's perception of him is so embedded among low information voters of, like, he's just the business guy that nobody seems to believe that he is this ideological racist that he is. And as a result, the Republican Party feels like, oh, there are no rules anymore. We can get away with all of this. But, you know, someone like Roberts and someone like Alito, they've been gunning for this for a long time. They've wanted to repeal the Voting Rights act for a long time. And I think if you look at Roberts's, you know, argument and parents involved, you know, which is the school desegregate first school desegregation case where he writes this formulation that I think is sort of the, the, you know, the sort of central dogma of reactionary colorblindness where he says, you know, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. But by that he, he means, like, trying to do anything about racism.
- [10:44]
A
Yeah.
- [10:45]
B
And he regards, you know, when you look at the Shelby county ruling. He regards federal interference on behalf of black people to fight racism. He regards this as a tremendous tyranny. And this is, I think that's sincere. I think it is an extremely naive perspective. And I think, you know, I think he's maybe slightly different from Alito in that Alito is just a hardcore partisan who doesn't have any, like real central philosophical beliefs that he applies consistently. But Roberts has consistently opposed federal power to alleviate racism because he thinks it's worse than racism. And I think that's really dumb. And I think you can see why. I mean, one of the things is that, you know, there's all been all this self congratulation. Every time the court has stripped away a piece of the Voting Rights act, it has said, well, we've come so far, but actually we really haven't. I mean, what we're seeing right now in terms of like what Republican states are doing in the immediate aftermath of this ruling says that we haven't come so far. It was not that there was, you know, the tremendous culture change that we thought we witnessed after my parents generation was not so much a culture change as a legal change. There were legal restraints on how racist people could be and that forced a change in the culture. But now that they're taking these restraints away and Donald Trump has shown that there is not as much of a price to be paid for being overtly racist, that supposed progress is not as visible.
- [12:22]
A
I agree with a lot of that. I'm curious your thoughts on my initial reaction when you first started talking is. One of my fundamental belief changes recently is I've become very pro virtue signaling lately. I feel like virtue signaling was much maligned for a while. You listen to the Bush speech and it's like there's something to be said for it. It's kind of like at some level you want people's hearts to be changed. But there's also something to be said for leaders feeling like they should appeal to virtue rather than to vice. But the complicating thing about what you're saying, maybe it isn't complicating. I don't know. I don't want to make this seem like this is a blame on the voters of color that voted for Trump. But I think that the cynical view that you're talking about where Republicans feel like there wasn't a price to be paid. During the Bush era, Republicans were doing terrible with black voters. There was this idea that if they demonstrated good faith that eventually it could be won over. Right? And so I think that Trump, not just winning twice, but like, doing not much better, but like slightly better among black and brown voters, I think also contributed like. And it like ended this conventional wisdom in Republican circles that like, to win over Hispanic voters, you have to be moderate on immigration. To win over black voters, you have to, you know, moderate on voting rights and on criminal justice reform, whatever these stereotypical issues are. And at some ways, like that is obviously wrong and bad, but it's a rat. You can understand why that change was made. And it makes you wonder if, I don't know, maybe like the distance from the Civil Rights act and the types of voters who came along for Trump, you know, that, that like time part, that, that the time contributed in that manner as well. I don't know. What do you make of that?
- [14:08]
B
I'm not sure how much these numbers that Trump has put up, you know, improving with voters of color have, you know, are a result of the voters of color who would normally vote Republican turning out and those who are not staying home. The other theory was that once the Republican Party started earning these votes that they would moderate on these issues. Right. And you know, Stephen Miller has not become any less ideologically committed to socially engineering America to be no opposite. You know, the opposite. We have a whites only refugee program. You know, that's shocking to me. I think about it every day and I don't like, to me that's a five alarm scandal, but it's just sort of like something that's in the ether. You know, he, the administration has banned travel from like almost every majority nonwhite country in the world. You know, I don't, I, you know, to some extent, again, I think that this is an artifact of Trump's image being so cemented in the minds of a lot of low information voters that they simply don't believe any of the stuff that comes out about him or they're not paying attention or they, they just think of him as, you know, as the guy that they saw in the Apprentice, you know, and I, I do think there's an element of denial involved just based on personal experience with, you know, non white Trump voters. In my own family, there's just a tremendous denial that he is this person. They don't want to believe it. They want to believe that he's the guy that they want him to be. And I think that I can't really explain that effect. I mean, you know, ideally, in the long term, you do want some kind of racial depolarization because that means that Those issues are no longer, you know, a central part of American life. But, you know, ideally that comes from, you know, broad social and economic equality. Not and, you know, the end of racism, basically. Not from, you know, a kind of authoritarian depolarization where you have voters who are attracted to authoritarian governance, even if it comes from, you know, a candidate who was surrounded fundamentally by people who are ideological white nationalists who think being an American is about being white. But I think, you know, to your point that this is the voter's fault, I mean, I don't think there's any way to argue with that. They picked him.
- [16:41]
A
Right.
- [16:42]
B
You know, I can. You know, I can. I think that they were delusional to some extent. I think that's why his approval ratings are so low. When I talked to Trump voters, again, they just discount it, you know, during the campaign, they just refused to believe any of the negative stuff was true, even when it was coming from people who used to work for him. So I just think, you know, and like, when you talk to people, they would say, oh, he's just gonna, you know, mass deportation means go after the criminals. Well, that's not what that means. Yeah, there was just a total refusal, or like, the tariffs, you know, they pay the terror. I mean, there's just a total refusal to accept what Trump, what Trump's agenda actually was because they liked him personally. Like, his personal brand was so strong with these people that they simply refused to believe that he would do these things. And now that he's doing them, they don't like it very much. And I said this, you know, right after the election. It was one of the, it was like maybe the second piece I published that, that if Trump actually pursued his agenda, a lot of his voters would be disappointed with it. And I think they are. But I do think that there is, you know, on the flip side of that, just to go back to the virtue signaling question, I think there was a tremendously successful, and I don't think that this is all their responsibility. I think there was a tremendously successful caricaturing of the sort of, you know, highly educated liberal who was like, policing everybody's language. You know, this perception that you weren't the right was not attacking people of color when it was attacking, quote, unquote, wokeness, but it was actually just attacking these, you know, pointy headed, annoying libs, annoying white libs, not the actual communities that these white libs were purporting to defend. And I think that sleight of hand, I think, tricked people to some extent to think, oh these people aren't that bad. They just hate political correctness. And I, and I don't really like it either. It's so annoying to be told, you know, that I'm not allowed to say this, to say that. But ultimately like the, the, the, the hardcore ideological agenda that you know, the quote unquote wokes were warning about was the actual agenda. You know, again, I think it gets complicated in because I think that voters, a lot of Trump voters voted for him disbelieving that he would do the things that he was committed to doing. What is democracy if the voters aren't accountable for their choices and they made a really bad choice and a lot of people who are vulnerable are going to suffer the consequences of that choice.
- [19:26]
A
Well, as you've alluded to a couple times in Tennessee, there is no sleight of hand. Could not be more over. I mean I guess there is but it is about as obvious of one as possible being put forth by the Republicans that are redistricting the state. They divided Shelby county, where Memphis is into thirds, like a third, a third, a third and equally put that percentage of black voters into three different congressional districts to dilute black voting power as much as possible. The, you know, in the quote unquote debate about this, obviously they're just rubber stamping it. You know, black Representative Jesse Chisholm was asking a question to the House Majority Leader William Lamberth about this, about the manner in which Shelby county was redistricted. And I want to play that for
- [20:15]
C
you because I'm, I'm trying to catch up here. I may not be as smart as some of, some of the rest of us. So I'm just going to ask some really simple questions. So Memphis is a predominantly African American. See the decorate leader Lamberth. I'm not privy to those demographics.
- [20:32]
A
I don't know. President, President Chisholm. So are you recognizing follow up? Okay, that's. They're not even pretending you had a guy in a Trump flag. State State rep walked in on a Trump flag. I mean like it says blatant as possible until.