I hate writing about gerrymandering.
That’s because the practice of drawing maps for legislative districts to give one party a distinct and unfair advantage over the other can be hard to explain. If I go into too much detail, I know that many readers will bail or reach for the No-Doz before they make it even a third of the way through the piece.
I also know that many readers, especially those who are intensely partisan themselves, will respond with specious bits of reasoning that argue either that gerrymandering is impossible or that attempting to conduct elections in a way that truly reflects the will of the people is in itself a form of gerrymandering.
Such determinedly ignorant arguments make my head hurt.
Encountering willful stupidity often has that effect on me.
So why, then, am I writing about gerrymandering again now?
Because … it matters.
It matters a great deal.
It matters so much that we Americans may not be able to solve any of the big problems confronting us as a nation if we don’t solve the gerrymandering one first.
That is what makes President Donald Trump’s efforts to further—and possibly illegally—gerrymander states such as Texas, Missouri and, yes, Indiana so distressing.
And the response of Democrats in states such as California and perhaps Massachusetts to respond in kind only compounds the distress.
There are some important things that should be said about this at the outset.
The first is that any president who resorts, as Trump has, to such manipulations of the map in a desperate attempt to hold onto power has made an implicit admission that should be politically fatal in a self-governing society.
That admission?
That he doesn’t have the support of the people he’s supposed to lead and that he cannot hope to win that support from the people other than through political skullduggery.
Perhaps this should not be surprising.
Trump has run for president three times now. In none of those elections did he ever capture more than 50% of the popular vote.
His high-water mark came last year, when he won 49.85% of the vote against an opposing candidate who had only a little more than 100 days to pull her campaign together. Even then, a shift of 121,000 votes in three key swing states would have made Kamala Harris president.
The last time Trump was president, his party was shellacked in the 2018 off-year elections. Two impeachments followed that drubbing.
This doubtless is part of the reason he’s so set upon securing congressional seats, legally or illegally, this time around. The other part is that his public approval rating is even lower at this point in his presidential term than it was in his first term—when he led the GOP to that pounding at the polls.
Democrats’ determination to fight fire with fire and gerrymander more in response is understandable, but is nonetheless regrettable, too.
Because it buys into and even supports Trump’s essential argument—that political power is the end goal in our self-governing society, not the means by which free people achieve common goals and resolve differences.
Our system is premised on a belief that, through truly representative government, people of good faith can work together and find ways to balance competing interests.
That’s why the best lawmakers in our history—starting with the powerhouses James Madison and Alexander Hamilton who gave shape to our foundational charter, the Constitution—were skilled negotiators adept at finding common ground.
Gerrymandering’s greatest evil is that it strips free people of the power to choose how they are governed.
But its second-greatest evil is that it thrusts forward into positions of leadership unyielding ideologues and rabid partisans who have no more capacity for making deals and balancing interests than the average pet rock does.
For them, as it is for Trump, our system of government is a zero-sum game in which the sole point is winning, not a brilliant and sophisticated means of allowing an increasingly varied population of free human beings to find ways to live together in a world that grows ever more complex.
Donald Trump has pledged for years to make America great again.
Gerrymandering won’t do that.
It just will make the challenges before us harder to meet, much less master.
And it will drive greatness further from our grasp.
