The United States of America turns 250 this month. Its democratic system of governance remains alive, if far from well.
Of course, the Declaration of Independence fell short of establishing a true democracy in 1776, as did the Constitution a decade later. These profound documents articulate well the basic rights that belong to people—but not, apparently, to all people. Notably, the right to vote was extended only to the most privileged. A quarter millennium’s hard-won progress on this front has been largely the work not of politicians but of people’s movements.
This progress has been unsteady, two steps forward and one back. Lately, fair representation at the ballot box has been losing ground, and the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais is a devastating setback for Black voters in particular. It is, however, sadly familiar.
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Section 2 of the VRA didn’t deviate from fair representation; it enforced it.
In 1870, the 15th Amendment extended the vote to Black men. (Native American men—and all women—would have to keep fighting for it another 50 years.) Southern backlash was swift and fierce, and by 1877 the federal government had all but abandoned its oversight of this and other Reconstruction-era reforms. New Jim Crow laws forestalled any meaningful guarantee of Black suffrage until the civil rights movement fought successfully for it in the 1960s. The resulting federal laws are the ones now being systematically undermined, just as the Reconstruction Amendments were before them. It’s predictable: Advances in voting rights provoke backlash.
Yet it’s wrong to suggest, as some news coverage has, that this is merely one more episode in the struggle of zero-sum, hyperpartisan America. Callais defanged Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had long protected Black voters from district maps that dilute their power. Gerrymandering is a bipartisan tradition, and recently both major parties have pushed it to ever greater extremes. But Section 2 is far more consequential than any partisan effort to secure House seats. Its legacy is not about fighting fire with fire, tit for gerrymandered tat. It’s about preventing redistricting plans from marginalizing Black voters in the first place.
In 2022, a group of political scientists created a set of algorithms for drawing unbiased, common-sense congressional maps. After Callais, the New York Times used these algorithms to simulate such a map without the Section 2 safeguards. Across the Southeast, this simulation produced quite a few districts in which Black voters would be decisive—about the same number as existed under Section 2.
In other words, Section 2 didn’t deviate from fair representation to favor Black voters; it enforced it by banning deviations to favor White ones. The Roberts Court has long promoted a colorblind approach to race. But congressional maps were anything but colorblind before the 1965 law, and there’s little evidence that they will be much better now that it’s been gutted.
Indeed, legislatures started drawing new maps before the ink was dry on Callais. Red states seem downright eager to define Black districts out of existence, and even some blue states now face the temptation to effectively trade one Black Democrat in Congress for two White ones. The VRA represents the accomplishments of so many brave Americans who organized for their rights, marched many miles for them, were brutalized and sometimes even killed for them. Seeing this law so diminished is at once familiar and shocking, and it points to a larger question both old and dreadfully current: Can American democracy be sustained?
