June 19, 2006
More Democracy! III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz and I have been discussing what constitutes “democracy.” I maintain that the only thing necessary is that all law-abiding citizens of adult age be allowed to vote and that those votes determine the composition of the government and thus, indirectly, its policies. Mr. Zeitz maintains that many polities regard government-provided social services, such as pensions, health care, and higher education, as an inseparable part of “democracy.” I think they are an inseparable part of a social democracy, not all democracies. That’s why the adjective “social” is a necessary part of the term by which these types of democracies are denoted.
This country has been a democracy longer than any other (although, to be sure, what constituted a democracy in the era of the Founding Fathers—when the term had a negative connotation not that far from “mobocracy”—or of Andrew Jackson would hardly pass muster today). In this sense it has been “a shining city on a hill” to the rest of the world.
But it also is the inventor—and so far sole practitioner—of a grotesque perversion of democracy called gerrymandering. If democracy is where the voters choose their elected officials, gerrymandering is where elected officials choose their voters. By carefully crafting district lines to include the maximum of one party’s voters and a minimum of the other’s, they assure the election of the favored party’s candidates.
Gerrymandering has a long history in this country. In 1812 the Jeffersonian governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, combined with the Jeffersonian Assembly to create a district whose borders were drawn for no other purpose than the election of Jeffersonian candidates. When the great portrait painter Gilbert Stuart saw a map of the district in a newspaper office, he whipped out a pencil and added wings, claws, and eyes and proclaimed it a salamander. Someone suggested calling it a Gerrymander instead, and an enduring word and one of the most famous political cartoons in American history was born. (Elbridge Gerry pronounced his name with a hard G, like the G in “gear,” but the eponymous word has come to be pronounced with a soft one.) Gerrymandering was a minor lapse from democracy (although a perfectly legal one), on a par with ballot-box stuffing and graveyard voting, until the modern era, as it was, at best, an imprecise science. Computers changed that. Armed with specially designed software, politicians could carve out districts with exquisite precision. In 1980 Rep. Phil Burton of California was the principal force behind a gerrymander of California Congressional districts that he called, “my contribution to modern art.” One district had no fewer than 385 sides, as its border included or excluded individual precincts and even houses.
The politicians in state after state have done the same and the result has been deeply injurious to the American political system. New York State has what is by common consent “the most dysfunctional legislature in the country.” One big reason for that is that both houses of the legislature are so gerrymandered that they never change party. For more than the last 30 years, the Senate has been safely Republican and the Assembly safely Democratic. With completely safe seats, incumbents needn’t worry about their constituents’ opinions, which is the very essence of democracy.
To give an example of how big a difference gerrymandering can make, consider the 1992 election for Congress in Texas. A Democratic legislature and governor put in place district lines that, while Democratic candidates won only 49.2 percent of the votes, gave 70 percent of the Congressional seats to Democrats. When Republicans got total control of the machinery of state government a decade later, they created a gerrymander that did the same for them.
And with gerrymandered districts, general elections become pro forma. Thus the primary is the only important contest. Since many states restrict primary elections to party members, independents are effectively disenfranchised. And primary elections tend to be dominated by each party’s hard core, thus empowering the left in Democratic primaries and the right in Republican ones. The abiding genius in Anglo-American political systems has always been that it empowers the center, where the vast mass of the people are to be found. Gerrymandering, I’ve no doubt, is one of the reasons American politics has become so uncivil in recent years: The extremes, ever more influential, have become the tails that wag the dog of political discourse.
In recent decades some gerrymanders have been created with the ostensible purpose of redressing past (and some say present) racial prejudice by creating so called “minority majority districts” tailored to assure the election of black and Hispanic candidates. I regard this as, at best, well-meaning racism in and of itself, as there is little evidence, beyond assertion, that such districts are necessary to give black and Hispanic candidates a fair chance at being elected. Douglas Wilder had no trouble being elected governor (an office that can’t be gerrymandered) in the former Confederate state of Virginia. In the 1990s, Connecticut’s 4th Congressional District, with only a 4 percent black population, nonetheless had a black Congressman. (Hint: he was a Republican.)
This has, ironically, caused disaster for the left half of American politics. With many black voters pushed into particular districts, the remaining districts have become more and more Republican, and the once-solid South is solid once more, but for Republicans.
The Supreme Court has always shied away from stepping into this controversy, as it tries to avoid all political controversies. But it seems to this non-lawyer that gerrymandering flatly contravenes the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2 (as modified by the Nineteenth and Twenty-sixth Amendments), which says that if the right to vote is denied to any class of citizens, the state’s representation in Congress shall be reduced accordingly. With gerrymandering, millions of citizens are denied the right to vote in any meaningful sense. Sure they can show up at the polls and pull a lever, but it doesn’t matter one bit if they do so or not. Their votes are rendered meaningless by the deliberate action of the state legislature.
That’s wrong, unfair, undemocratic, and, most of all, un-American.
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