Neal Peirce (spelled thus), who coined the appropriate term "Citistates" in the book and now website of the same name, writes as one of the most perceptive experts on regional cities.
"Citistates" are the new centers of global activity and progress.
Because of the absence of effective nation-states, we return in our own 21st-century renaissance to the classic European renaissance era, when local and regional players led history.
Peirce has today posted a preview column that explains why the Supreme Court, under its actual chieftain justices John Roberts and Antonin Scalia, gutted the Voting Rights Act.
The reason is the Reactionaries' Southern Strategy Come Again (the race-based scapegoat strategy, that hasn't gone away, since the Civil War Between the States).
Here's Neal Peirce's lede:
North Carolina’s Political U-turn: Model of a Reborn Confederacy?
NEAL PEIRCE / JUL 26 2013
There was a time when North Carolina was a symbol of Southern enlightenment. Compared to the policies of the old “Solid South” – Democratic, conservative, fervidly anti-civil rights – the state embraced relatively progressive policies in such areas as education and race relations.
No longer.
In the new, suddenly solid Republican South, the Tar Heel state is racing to lead the pack in conservative anti-city and implicitly anti-black politics.
More coming over the levee-->
Peirce zeroes in on the key action:
Thomas Edsall, in a perceptive analysis on The New York Times’ website, says the Republicans’ success in gaining control of all 11 legislatures in states of the Civil War Confederacy represents a conscious effort to identify the Democratic Party as the party of blacks, and Republicans as the party of whites. The theory has been that “white” Republican votes would outnumber “black” Democratic ones. African-American political power is clearly being eviscerated in the process: In less than 20 years, the percentage of black legislators in the South serving in the majority party where they can influence policy (formerly the Democratic Party, now the Republican) has fallen from 99.5 percent to 4.8 percent.
To a degree, the policy is working nationally – witness the Republican takeover of legislatures in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, shifts all relegating black elected officials to the minority. By no accident, all the switched states are seeing strong pushes for voter-ID laws, restricted early voting and shortened polling hours – moves clearly designed to suppress the votes, and policy voice, of blacks, Hispanics and the poor.
So, this is the new front in a ferocious effort of the reactionary right-wing to stop the demographic and historical tide. They think they can hold up, if not hold back, the rising city-state, metropolitan center of new historical progress.
Think sand-bagging to stop the flood.Expect more sand-bagging to come.