SATURDAY, MAY 23, 2026
...in the wake of the Callais decision? Friend, here we go, on a holiday weekend, with an important policy question:
As a matter of public policy, should Blue America continue to push for the creation of majority Black congressional districts in the various states?
It seems to us that a well-intentioned person could teach it flat or round. For ourselves, we keep wishing that Blue America would rise to meet the old progressive bromide:
Dare to struggle, dare to win!
On balance, we'd like to see Blue America roll up its sleeves and look for ways to win House seats in various southern states without the deliberate creation of congressional districts which make such outcomes a foregone conclusion.
We'd like to see Black Democrats manage to do that, though we'd even settle for a world in which white Democrats were able to fashion such wins.
Full disclosure:
Black Republican have been elected to the House from heavily white districts in Florida, Texas and South Carolina in recent years. In South Carolina, those same white Republican voters keep sending the Black Republican to whom we refer back to his current seat in the United States Senate.
We wouldn't vote for this (Black) guy ourselves. But South Carolina's white Republican voters did and continue to do so!
In Florida, white Republican voters are hoping to elect a Black congressman as their state's next governor, though one recent poll shows him trailing the likely Democratic nominee.
If we ourselves lived in Florida, we'd vote for that white Democrat too! But we regard this behavior by Republican voters in those southern states as a hard-won victory in the attempt to realize the "racial" American dream.
In South Carolina, white Republican voters even preferred that Black congressional candidate to the white congressional candidate who was Strom Thurmond's son! And good grief:
After his election to the House, he was selected to fill a vacated Senate seat by South Carolina's Indian-American female governor. White Republican voters had elected her to serve as their state's governor when she was just 38!
We wouldn't have voted for those Republican candidates, but we regard those choices by those South Carolina Republican voters as major wins for long-standing progressive ideals. We'd like to see Blue America—white, Black, Hispanic, Asian--dare to struggle after similar wins in the nation's southern states.
On balance, those southern states remain highly "conservative"—or, in current parlance, they remain strongly pro-MAGA. Absent the construction of gerrymandered House districts, it would be hard for any Democrat, white or Black, to win election to the House or the Senate in any one of those states.
Having said that, hold on:
In 2017 and 2018, a miracle happened in Alabama. A progressive Democrat, Doug Jones, was narrowly elected to the Senate in a special election to fill the seat of Senator Jeff Sessions, who was leaving the Senate to (briefly) serve as President Trump's first attorney general (of many).
Jones eked out his narrow win (victory margin: 1.6 points) because Alabama's Republicans had nominated a uniquely unelectable candidate. In 2020, Senator Jones sought election to a full, six-year term, and the norm prevailed:
2020 Alabama Senate election:
Doug Jones (D): 39.7%
Tommy Tuberville (R): 60.1%
It won't come easy in Alabama. Under present circumstances, it would be hard for any Democrat, white or Black, to win a statewide race in Alabama—or to win a House seat in a congressional district which, whether gerrymandered or not, wasn't majority Black.
That said, please hold on again:
One state over, right there in Georgia, Rep. Lucy McBath has been elected to the House four straight times in the heavily white 6th congressional district (18.2% Black). In 2018, she dared to struggle and dared to win, narrowly unseating a Republican incumbent.
Georgia also did this:
2020-21 Georgia Senate special election:
Raphael Warnock (D): 51.04%
Kelly Loeffler (R): 48.96%
That was a narrow win—but it was a win. Less than two years later, Senator Warnock did it again, winning a full six-year term:
2022 Georgia Senate election:
Raphael Warnock (D): 51.4%
Herschel Walker (R): 48.6%
In fairness—here too, Georgia Republicans had nominated a weirdly unelectable candidate.
Can Senator Warnock get re-elected to another full term? Only time will tell. The same is true of Senator Ossoff, who got elected to the Senate from Georgia (by 1.2 points) as part of the 2020 election cycle.
Demographically, Georgia differs from such neighboring states as Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. It will still be hard for Democrats of any race to win House seats from those states—especially so, it may seem, if those states reconfigure their maps in an attempt to ensure that every district in the state favors the Republican candidate.
Given those circumstances, should Blue America continue to push, as a matter of policy, for the deliberate creation of gerrymandered districts—for districts which are specifically designed for the purpose of letting Black Democrats win House seats?
We suppose that a decent person could teach it flat or round. But every time we Blues go out and say that this is Jim Crow 2.0, or say that it's 1892 all over again, a bevy of wavering voters for Trump decide to hang onto their wings.
As a matter of policy, we ourselves would prefer to see Blues dare to struggle to win. At present, it's hard for any Democrat to win in many southern states.
That's surely true of Black Democrats, and it's true of white Democrats too.
Also this, from the standpoint of the American voter:
At present, it's hard for Democratic or progressive voters—Democratic voters of any race—to vote for the winning candidate in elections in those states.
Does that mean that those Democratic voters have been "disenfranchised?" Does it mean that they've been "effectively disenfranchised," as one specialist has recently said?
Does it mean that they are no longer "represented" in the Congress? Is that what it means when the person you favored ends us losing the race?
Almost half the voters in this nation's congressional elections vote for the candidate who doesn't win. Have all those voters been "disenfranchised?" Are they "unrepresented" too?
These conceptual boondoggles come into our lives "when language goes on holiday," or so the later Wittgenstein somewhat unclearly said. And so it goes, around the clock, within our bungled imitation of a national discourse.
There's a great deal more to be said about the endless conceptual jumbles which have led us down the long, winding road which has us at this point. But trust us:
Every time Harvard and Princeton professors go on cable TV to speak with the magna cum laude Harvard grad who grew up in the suburbs with her lawyer parents, voters all across the country are listening to what gets said.
Trust us:
When those extremely highly placed, high achieving people seem to say that they've been excluded from the democracy, waves of wavering pro-Trump voters do in fact make an unhelpful decision:
They decide to hang onto their wings! Every time claptrap like that gets emitted, Blue America fails to make gains.
With respect to the fascinating specific topic which lies at the heart of the current dispute, language has been going on holiday for more than four decades now.
Language has been going on holiday in legal and journalistic work. Language has been on holiday in much of the Blue American agitprop which has emerged in the wake of Callais.
Anthropologically, we humans possess limited judgment and sharply circumscribed analytical skills. We simply aren't "the rational animal," as was first claimed long ago.
Even on the highest levels, we humans are gifted with limited judgment. Not unlike our counterpart Reds, we Blues go out, again and again, and work to establish that point.
