The supreme court's voting rights decision is a death knell for American democracy
The US was not a true democracy before the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday’s decision has essentially destroyed the law
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/30/supreme-court-voting-rights-act-ruling
‘It is difficult to say how many seats Democrats will lose in the coming Republican redistricting bonanza that the court’s decision will allow.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Is America a democracy? The term implies an equality of rights and dignity among citizens, a collective and uniform right of individuals to participate in self-government and to shape the laws that rule them. In that sense, the answer is no: though it has been a republic since its founding, America has only rarely been a true democracy, one where all citizens have the full right to vote and to have that vote counted.
Political scientists such as the University of Notre Dame’s Christine Wolbrecht have argued that America wasn’t really a democracy, not in the meaningful sense of the term, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law that formed the signature achievement of the civil rights movement and sought to end racial barriers to voting across the south when it was passed in 1965. If you accept that premise, you could say that the era of American democracy officially ended on Wednesday, when the supreme court finished its project of dismantling the VRA in its 6-3 decision in Louisiana v Callais. Whatever this country has become now, “democracy” does not describe it.
The decision, authored by Samuel Alito and joined by the Republican appointees Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, completes an effort that the court began in 2013’s Shelby County v Holder, in which the justices struck down the VRA’s section 5. Section 5 had required federal oversight of voting laws and districts adopted by states with a history of racial discrimination in voting; its absence has already led to greater difficulty for minority voters in Republican-controlled states to elect the representatives of their choice – usually Democrats.
In that 2013 decision – and in subsequent rulings that further weakened the Voting Rights Act over the intervening years – the court had claimed that section 5’s protections were no longer necessary to ensure minorities’ equal access to the franchise, because the law’s section 2, requiring that no state adopt a voting practice or district map that discriminated on the basis of race, was still standing. In his Callais opinion, seeking to preserve the pretext that the court was merely altering the application of the VRA’s section 2, rather than eliminating it entirely, Alito suggested that he was merely creating a new set of tests for the law. Do not believe this: section 2 is now effectively moot. The court has drawn new standards for plaintiffs to establish claims of illegal racial discrimination in voting that virtually no case will be able to meet. The Voting Right Act is dead.
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A bit apologetically since this is so serious a topic.. but to the extent that the human brain has a role in understanding the mess we are in maybe there is a point.
I have been feeling so low I even wondered if there was something to Seasonal Affective Disorder and if that was why it being overcast the last couple of days made one feel this bleak. The last time I felt this glum was that foul Madison Square Garden event just before the election.
I wonder sometimes if one can control one’s general low spirits over the state of reality by trying to track what is affecting one’s moods.
I read in Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” that women are good at detecting scammy websites (I have to look up exactly what he said) and the next thing is a little pop, but this was one of the rare things I came across that while a little pop, struck me as somewhat interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_of_Fear
I am skeptical of a lot of studies of the Ariely, Gino, Zimbardo, Milgram, Pentland, Haidt, Pinker, MIT Media Lab, Sunstein, Kahneman, Ramachandran, Deepak Chopra, Elkins, Facebook emotion contagion, Freakonomics, Harriri, Kosinski, Malcolm Gladwell type, Woebot, a lot of Epstein associated crap aimed at clogging up the social sciences with surveillance Panopticonware driven hack like attempts to understand the human mind and brain. Lie detectors, emotion ai etc. The stuff popular on those awful TED tech talks and crap that makes for airport best-sellers.
I see it where I live all the time. The most third rate crap imaginable.
Even without misconduct those studies seem to be terrible and ill-conceived bschool fluff that churns out foul things that never work like “nudge theory” and “lie detection”. And as far as I know “subliminal advertising” is a scam.
Things like harm reduction that do work are undermined.
Anyway, I have wondered why and how one responds to things without ambiguity using sparse amounts of info and the normally obligatory explanation is..because it works for me to avoid drivel I dislike as generally kinda sleazy, lightweight.
There is the type of science I think would be hard and inexact but not necessarily bunk. Most of this stuff is junk.
And looking around glumly, it doesn’t seem like all the crap I dislike is working out well for anyone.
Not one thing I listed as charlatanry is hard science or like the stuff anti-vaxxers push. I have never had any use for conspiracy theory as it all looks like the banality of evil.
Further, after annoying everyone and a tonne of theft, the more honest ai scientists turn around and admit that LLMs are overrated and then blandly move on to other drivel. Timnit Gebru/DAIR/Emily Bender and Yan LeCun are pretty much the only scientists I trust to be honest about ai.
In a very complex society we make calls all the time about stuff we don’t understand well and cannot possibly gain much knowledge of.
About a week ago I woke up feeling really bleak and I had a dream in which somehow Current Affairs’ piece on Bitter Roots struck me as one of rare rays of sunshine out there:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/bitter-root
Strange…the ways of the human brain..a mysterious organ at the end of the day and far from pliable or docile.
I usually turn to good solid science not coding and ai (ai 
) to have some hope even to find good metaphors:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/break-it-to-make-it-how-fracturing-sculpts-tissues-and-organs-20260227/
Use of metaphors this way is kinda scary not cool:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/05/john-naughton-networker-spooks
Lightweight fluff is rightwing, but slips under the public radar due to the infatuation with and submission to tech oligarchs:
https://www.thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk/
You need it all and would have it all in a civilized democratic society- environmental issues, civil, women’s, lgbtq rights, science, family planning/abortion, affirmative action, animal welfare, social safety nets, regulatory oversight, healthcare, peace, separation of church and state, education as a right.
We mostly seem to have corporate welfare, cottage industries of disinfo, several warring religions and chaos.
This should be a call to build systems globally that can withstand Trump and the present scotus and corrupt politicians everywhere. I pretty much dislike all our politicians here..I am in a communist state in the global south and I absolutely hate our local govt though they claim to be “left”. They have never seen an environment destroying industry or corrupt, misogynistic scam they wouldn’t use and they use divide and rule to enrich themselves at the expense of the earth. And I distrust everything but the courts which are not quite as crass yet.
The Trump era has to result in updated safeguards for democracy, safe from transactionalism and corruption and extortion/manipulation of the general public.
both parties are the same
