When I was in high school, there was this joy that my classmates and I would sing at the top of our lungs at college football games whenever our team didn’t win. It happened like this:
Left is left and right is right! If we don’t win the game, we will win the fight!
Regardless of what was written on the scoreboard after the game was over, we planned to win this contest by any means necessary. Because we had no intention of accepting defeat.
But of course, there were always teachers and a number of other adults nearby, giving us the disapproving looks we craved. We therefore rarely had the opportunity to follow through on our threatening provocations. Truth be told, we were mostly interested in making loud threats, chest-thumping, and jeering.
But when I think about this rather juvenile fight song, it makes me think of another group of rowdy young people: the Trump-loving Republican Party today. On January 6, 2021, when hordes of crazed Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election and impeach President Joe Biden, they were actually chanting the same song:
Left is left and right is right! If we don’t win the game, we will win the fight!
They knew they had lost the game, so it was time to throw the rules aside and win by any means necessary, democracy be damned. Because who needs rules when chaos and anarchy can be so much more fun?
Gerrymandering toward fascism seems overdone. 2024 could show why this is not the case.
After all, democracy is for punks and losers, right? Democracy is for those who are not strong enough to take what they want, when they want it, and crush anyone who gets in their way. Or just throw them into concentration camps.
But fascism is for winners, buddy. For those who don’t know, fascism is defined by The Britannica Dictionary as “a way of organizing a society in which a government led by a dictator controls people’s lives and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.”
Because disagreements and debates can be complicated. When people disagree on topics in public and then debate those disagreements, these exchanges can force people to think, and perhaps even question their own prior assumptions. And not only does democracy allow for disagreement and debate, it actually allows ordinary citizens to openly challenge and criticize their elected leaders. Let’s look at the later conclusion here – something like, we are even more likely to disagree and debate.
But who wants that? Better to keep quiet and do as you are told.
Better for whom, though?
This finally brings me to the problem posed by gerrymandering. You might think this is a bit of a stretch – from fascism to gerrymandering – and I wish it were. But the way things are going, that’s not the case. Because, in their current evolution, the perverse effects of gerrymandering happily follow the great American tradition of rolling over the less connected masses to perpetuate the rules and desires of a few exponentially more powerful, connected and wealthy people who don’t care about this. that is happening. They want.
Redistricting ignores the will of voters and tilts the council in favor of the powerful
In representative democracies like ours, gerrymandering “is the political manipulation of boundaries of electoral districts with the intent to create an unfair advantage for any party, group or socio-economic class within the constituency.
Elected officials who claim this advantage do so at the state level, many as members of the cult of Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate who has openly and publicly expressed his intention to ignore all state boundaries. democracy and punish everyone. opponents and dissidents.
Trump didn’t need gapped legislative districts to win. He had the Electoral College. Recall that Trump did not win a majority of voters in 2016 when he became president (George W. Bush was the last Republican presidential candidate to win both the election and the popular vote in 2004).
The Electoral College’s skewed math makes it easy to ignore the will of the majority, which explains why Hillary Clinton lost the election even though she had 3 million more votes. The Electoral College essentially hands the power of presidential elections to the states in a blatantly unequal manner, completely blind to the actual size and demographics of populations.
Meanwhile, gerrymandering works fiercely at the state level to ensure that the communities that most need a voice and representation in government never get it by allowing those who represent the minority opinions to consolidate their power and trample on us.
Michigan, at least, has taken an important step toward dismantling the gerrymandering stranglehold, resulting in a statewide Democratic sweep in 2022. Unfortunately, the new redistricting process has also eliminated all black representation from Detroit for the first time in decades.
Once again, this turbocharged gerrymandering is done in service of Trump. Not least because, if the Electoral College fails, his supporters hope that state legislatures will be able to nominate him president. Republican elected officials in key states like Wisconsin and North Carolina are determined to have Trump resurrected as their beloved leader in 2024, free to elevate them to levels of power and influence commensurate with their demonstrated loyalty to their dear leader upon his accession to the throne – and also to tear democracy out by the roots so that he never has to listen to or be coerced by these dirty little Americans again.
In representative democracies, the people cannot be counted on to carry out the orders of the rich and powerful. Gerrymandering tips the scales in their favor.
Michael Sozan wrote in Cap 20 Earlier this month, the United States took a “long road” toward a multiracial democracy that represents all Americans, even those who have been historically marginalized:
“Yet opponents of a more pluralistic democracy erect barriers at the federal and state levels designed to lock in the power of political minorities and slow the nation’s progress.”
Another article by Sheldon Jacobson published two years ago on April 1, 2021 in The hill He believes that “the greatest threat to our democracy does not reside in the White House.”
“Last year’s campaign is rarely mentioned gerrymanderingbut it represents the greatest threat to our country’s democracy,” he says.
And the biggest threat to this threat is all of us. Because we are much more numerous than them; we just have to act like it. Remember the red wave? Me neither. This wave killer was us.
Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast. Send a letter to the editor to freep.com/letters. Become a subscriber on Freep.com.
