On Tuesday, federal judges blocked an attempt by Alabama Republicans to eliminate a heavily Black congressional district, and GOP politicians in South Carolina opted not to eliminate longtime Representative James Clyburn’s district. But those decisions don’t diminish what’s happened over the last few weeks: In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, Southern Republicans have moved swiftly to remove as many Black lawmakers from Congress as possible. That callous approach might feel unprecedented and even shocking to people outside of the South. But for those of us who live in this region, this is normal—and far from the worst thing GOP politicians are doing.
Forcing Black politicians out of office is in many ways just another step in the re-transformation of the South (and more broadly, red-state America) into an undemocratic region. Since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Southern Republican politicians have gradually but aggressively eroded political power and rights for African Americans, Democrats, and liberals in their states. Freedom House earlier this year downgraded the United States from a full “liberal democracy” to an “electoral democracy,” arguing that checks and balances on the executive and other core characteristics of liberal democracy have diminished here. Whether the United States overall is a liberal democracy or can become one again, the states in the South are at best electoral democracies and are veering toward electoral autocracies.
And with the Voting Rights Act shuttered, this antidemocratic drift will only accelerate.
The drift has a long history. The South has been the country’s most antidemocratic region for most of American history. Only a few decades after slavery ended, the region had installed Jim Crow laws. Until the 1960s, anti-Black Democrats controlled most states in the South and often prevented African Americans from voting or holding political power. But the region’s politics improved from the 1970s to the early 2000s. As the Democratic Party became more liberal and tied to African Americans, Southern Democratic governors such as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton tried to advance policies that would make their states more just and equal. And even Republican governors like Jeb and George W. Bush courted African American and Latino voters, assuming that a more inclusive politics was inevitable, even in the South.
It wasn’t. In a process that started in the late 1990s and accelerated during Obama’s presidency, Republicans gradually won control of the state legislatures and governor’s office in most Southern states. “These states are now nearly as red as they were blue during the Jim Crow era,” author and former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer wrote a few years ago. Meanwhile, Black voters in those states overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates. So the South has become again a region dominated by one party that is hostile to Black interests. And as in the past, that dominant party has enacted an aggressively anti-democratic agenda:
- Preemption. States in the South often bar cities from raising the minimum wage, mandating that companies provide paid sick leave, enacting policies to reduce carbon emissions, removing Confederate monuments, or virtually anything else that is considered liberal. So Democratic voters in the South often elect mayors and city council members who have little power. Going even further, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been suspending locally elected prosecutors if he doesn’t approve of their practices.
- Low wages and benefits. States in the South almost universally have right-to-work policies that limit the expansion of union memberships and maintain low minimum wages. The states that have declined federal funding under Obamacare to cover people through Medicaid are largely in the South. These policies have a particularly negative effect on African Americans, who tend to have lower incomes.
- Freedom restrictions. Getting an abortion, receiving gender-affirming health care if you are under 18, and teaching critical race theory in a classroom are among the actions banned in many states in the South.
- Constant breaking with democratic norms. From Louisiana legislators recently voting to eliminate a position in New Orleans after a Black Democrat won it to Kentucky lawmakers threatening impeachment of judges whose rulings they disagree with to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp canceling a state Supreme Court election, Southern Republicans regularly take actions that are technically legal but violate democratic principles. Georgia Republicans are rushing to gerrymander the state now, because they fear Democrat Keisha Bottoms will be elected in November, putting Democrats on equal footing in redistricting.
None of these moves are the modern-day equivalents of poll taxes or literacy tests. It is obviously far better to live in the South today than in 1935, particularly as a Black person. And many of the anti-democratic practices in the South have also been adopted by Republicans in states they control in the Great Plains and the Mountain West too. But the Republicans in the South are most aggressive in constraining the political power and rights of those they disagree with. And unlike in very-white states such as Wyoming, these policies have terrible (and often intentional) racial impacts, privileging white residents over Black ones.
Most voters in Southern states are Republicans, and they are voting for the politicians who enact these policies. But democracy is not just about elections. A region where individual rights are curtailed, minority groups have little power, and local officials can’t decide policies within their jurisdictions isn’t particularly democratic.
Before Callais, the South was a region where there were plenty of Black politicians in office, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, but those Black officials had little power. Now, even that veneer of Black inclusion is being removed. While most attention nationally has been on Republicans in the South eliminating majority-Black congressional districts, they are likely to use the Callais ruling for redistricting at the city council, state legislative, and judicial levels in ways that will force even more African American politicians out of office.
I experience this Republican antidemocracy personally. I live in Louisville, one of the few blue areas in very red Kentucky. The Republicans who dominate the state legislature in Frankfort hate the choices we make here and are constantly overriding them. GOP legislators recently passed a law that reduces Louisville’s school board from seven to five elected members. No one in Louisville wanted that, since it’s already fairly hard to get in touch with a school board member. But the current school board includes three African Americans and generally supports liberal policies, so it’s an irritant to Republican legislators. (The Republicans have such a large majority in the legislature that they override Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s vetoes.)
And when the Republicans aren’t directing limiting democracy in Louisville, the specter of them doing so hovers over everything. Louisville recently had a mayoral primary where the two top candidates advanced to the general election: Shameka Parrish-Wright, a Black progressive city councilwoman who was a leader of the protests after Louisville police killed Breonna Taylor six years ago; and incumbent Mayor Craig Greenberg, a center-left Democrat. My policy views are close to Parrish-Wright’s, so I will back her in November. But I’m nervous about the prospect of her winning. If Parrish-Wright were elected, I suspect the Republicans in the state legislature would destroy Louisville as we know it, enacting all kinds of restrictions on the city and its government to essentially punish us for voting for someone they really dislike.
That’s “democracy” in the American South in 2026. If you are Black, a Democrat or both, you get to vote for officials who have no power—or will be stripped of power if they are elected because of your votes.
I regularly read writers, particularly in The New York Times, who praise red states for good scores on standardized tests for kids and low housing costs. These writers of course live in blue states and are really using those real and laudable Southern achievements to make a point about liberal failures. They aren’t focused on the realities of the South. I wish they were. America has an autocratic region. It’s the region where most of its Black residents live. It’s the region where I am raising my daughter, to be closer to the rest of my family. The region is going through another anti-democratic wave. It’s painful. The only potential silver lining is that the horrible fallout from the Callais decision will get liberals across the country to start paying attention to the South. It is happening here. And the first step to reversing democracy erosion in the South is to be fully aware it’s happening in the first place.
