Voting Without a Choice
A must-read editorial in the Washington Post.
Gerrymandering has produced districts that where, due to strategic reallocation of funds to contested areas, one side or the other has essentially ceded all ground. It represents the destruction of local politics, and the reduction of discourse to the lowest common denominator. Why? Because at the national level of politics, only the lowest common denominator applies.
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Ross
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You, and the author of that
You, and the author of that article, are too right. While it is natural for factions to seek advantage, the extent to which gerrymandering has taken over and affected the larger political atmosphere is disturbing. I remember the house district where I first voted back in Ohio was shaped like a very thin, very long kidney, and included parts of four different counties on opposite sides of the Cleveland metro area. This kind of thing is reprehensible.
I can't help but wonder if
I can't help but wonder if there isn't a simple mathematical solution to this...we generating the boundaries by computing the center of a system of masses defined by population...
It might be the only way to reverse the horrible effects of gerrymandering.
It's worth a try, as the
It's worth a try, as the system we have now is fubar.
Agreed.
Agreed.
We hear so often that all politics is local-- examples being the barrenness of the national landscape in the 1850s, the local drives that led to the Reagan revolution, etc. Yet anymore, gerrymandering of districts has sacrificed local choices and initiatives in favor of national party interests.
The way I see it, local politics these days are like textbooks. A few influential constituencies, like CA and TX in the textbook worlds, make a fuss and require the national distributors to pander to their whinery. Since local cohesion has been undermined by gerrymandering, there is no efficient way for local debates to create local issues, and then drive election results.
Thus, the debate is shaped by lowest-common-denominator marquee issues and fabricated crises that have little to do with, say, the actual needs of Birmingham AL, Bowie MD, or Cleveland OH.
Maybe it's because I've been reading Tom Paine, but this makes me worry that democracy in the US is horribly decayed.