America Gerrymandered

We have heard often in recent years of the Republican party’s success in gerrymandering House districts to favor Republican candidates. What this means is that districts are drawn every ten years by the party in power in such a way that their incumbents profit by the odd shape of the district—i.e. one shaped to exclude opposing votes and include mostly favorable ones.

            The word ‘gerrymander’ stems from the first time the procedure was used in Massachusetts in 1812. At that time, Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill that redistricted state senate districts to benefit his party, the Democratic-Republican Party. When shown on a map, one of the oddly-contorted districts in the Boston area looked to some like a salamander. The word ‘gerrymander’ was coined as a combination of the name ‘Gerry’ and the last part of ‘salamander,’ to yield “gerrymander,” this combining of parts of two words being known as a portmanteau.

In modern gerrymandering, districts are drawn to both include mostly favorable votes for a party’s candidate, and to exclude unfavorable votes, or pack those unfavorable votes into one district. This latter tactic means that many votes are wasted—there are far more votes for a candidate in one ‘packed’ district than are needed to win. Another tactic involves splitting large, usually urban districts to redistribute their unfavorable votes into districts where they can be outweighed by large rural districts. All of these tactics have been used with great success in recent years by Republicans, who, as a result, now control most of the nation’s state houses. And since they control the state houses, they also control the subsequent redistricting that results in gerrymandering. Some gerrymandered districts have become virtually vote-proof: no amount of campaigning by a Democrat can outweigh the effects of the gerrymander, meaning that only a Republican can win.

            In sum, much has been written in recent years about the effects of truly outrageous gerrymandering on the House of Representatives. And all this is true. Republican majorities have controlled the House since at least the 2010 election and the 2010 census on which the current gerrymandering was based.

            Now, however, the electoral map of the United States is beginning to look like one big gerrymandered district. This has to do with the rigged system known as the Electoral College. The Electoral College system, promoted mostly by southern states prior to the ratifying of the U.S. Constitution, was designed to give smaller, rural, and especially southern states a greater voice (out of all proportion to their populations) in the new federal government. Nor was it just the Electoral College that helped in this; several other expedients were designed with the same objective. The first was the three-fifths clause that said that slave states could bolster their representation by counting 3/5 of their slaves when calculating how many representatives each could have, even though the counted slaves could not vote or otherwise take part in self-government. The Senate itself was another expedient: no matter how small in population a state might be, it would still get to send two senators to the United States Senate, thus affording it a disproportionate weight in blocking any legislation it or its party opposed. This also meant that the vote of someone in a sparsely-populated state like Montana would weigh far more heavily than a vote by a voter in a heavy-density state like New York. 

            The Electoral College was another major achievement of the slave states (see Time Magazine, Nov. 8, 2016: “The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists,” by Akhil Reed Amar). This was because, instead of voters casting their votes directly for a Presidential candidate, their votes were actually cast for the electors in the Electoral College, who then voted for the President. And each state’s electors (whose numbers in southern states were fattened by the same three-fifths expedient that gave them more Representatives in Congress) were bound to vote as one body for whichever candidate got the most popular votes in that state. In other words, the overall popular vote nationwide did not determine the victor in the presidential race. The majority of electors determined the winner, and it was possible, given the sizes of the states and their composition—including slaves—for a candidate to put together enough electoral votes to win even if he or she did not win the most popular votes overall (popular vote or no, Thomas Jefferson would NOT have won the Presidency in 1800 had it not been for the electors made possible by the many ‘slave’ votes in the Southern states). Though this rarely happened, and though usually the electoral vote majority reflected the popular vote majority, it was not necessary for victory.

            We have just witnessed this in the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump concentrated his strategy on winning certain safe states, like those in the South and Midwest, and also certain key states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania (how he and the Republicans managed this is another story of minority-voter disenfranchisment on a grand scale). His winning total in all three of the latter states combined was narrow, amounting to only about 100,000 votes. But Hillary Clinton won the electoral votes of much larger states like California and New York by big margins, giving her, in the end, a national popular-vote victory of nearly 3 million votes! And yet, she lost. How? The national gerrymander. The victory margin in the large states that voted for Hillary was huge—resulting in “wasted votes.” She didn’t need to win California by over 4 million votes. She only needed to win by one vote. All the surplus votes were, as far as the Electoral College was concerned, wasted. And like the ‘wasted’ votes in any gerrymandered House district, Hillary’s votes in California and New York and other large states like Illinois, were essentially ‘wasted.’ And they will be wasted for as long as we can foresee.

            In gerrymandered states, the cure for this type of “legal cheating” is for rules for redistricting to be changed—as they have been in California, say. There, an election commission, after each census, redraws districts based on logical and unbiased formulas that favor no one party. This means that the artificial effects of gerrymandering have been essentially eliminated. The same can and should be demanded by voters in every state.

            But the United States as a whole cannot be ‘un-gerrymandered.’ The Electoral College ensures that small states have an advantage in any election for the party that manages to secure just enough of their votes to win all of their state electors. It also ensures that large states with large urban populations are often guaranteed to produce large numbers of ‘wasted votes.’

            There is only one way to do away with the idiocy of a gerrymandered democracy that ignores the will of the majority of its people—that ignores the popular vote. The Electoral College needs to be done away with as an anachronism (and, some might say, a historical crime) that no longer serves a useful purpose. No politician these days could express his suspicion of the popular will, as was done early in our history. Neither can any politician express his disdain for the mass of minority voters, many of whom descend from slaves. They all have to pay lip service to the idea of rule by the majority—for that is what democracy means. Given that, they should all be held to their creed and forced into agreeing that the Electoral College is an inherently unfair system wherein, in at least two of the last three presidential elections, the will of the people has been thwarted. And this week we are again about to inaugurate a president whom the majority of the American people voted against. That makes the entire notion of American democracy a travesty. It undermines belief in the founding notion of this nation because a gerrymandered America is just as much a travesty and a tragedy as any dictatorship. And it must end if our much-heralded democracy is to survive as little more than a fond memory—or a sick joke.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Wisdom of the People

As I continue to reflect (or have nightmares) about the results of the presidential election, what keeps coming up is that truism one hears all the time: the wisdom of the people. We are told this continually as elections draw near: Democracy puts its trust in the wisdom of the collective, the people together, and it or they can always be trusted. Now the American people have spoken, and their collective wisdom has delivered the most powerful nation in history into the sweaty hands of Donald Trump—a man who has never held public office, a man who has been a huckster (real estate developer) all his life, a man whose training for the office of President amounts to his training in reality TV, a man who expressed shock and a bit of awe when, in his recent meeting with outgoing President Obama, he was given some hint of how very much detail being President of the United States involved. That it was a really big job seems never to have occurred to him; nor, apparently, did it ever occur to him that he would have to replace all the current workers in the West Wing with his own staffers! This emotional/ intellectual adolescent thought he would simply inherit the current staff from Obama. And for his first picks—someone must have told him he’d have to choose his Chief of Staff and a policy advisor—he selected that shining beacon of intelligence Reince Priebus (recently head of the Repugnant National Committee), and for chief strategist, Steve Bannon, the CEO of the slash-and-burn website, Breitbart News. This last appointment is particularly notable, because though Drumpf made no secret of his authoritarian and even fascistic tendencies in the presidential race, many hoped that as president-elect, he’d moderate his style. That he’d try to be the “president of all the people,” rather than the president of the lunatic fringe that elected him. Not a chance. Bannon is an unabashed white nationalist of the so-called “alt-right,” who has attacked even ideologues like Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard (hardly a liberal rag) as “a renegade Jew.” He has been for a long time devoted to positions advocating racial separation on the basis of the most rabid stereotypes. Even Glenn Beck compared Bannon to Hitler’s infamous propagandist, Joseph Goebbels (pretty interesting for a leader of a group that makes no secret of its anti-semitism). As to Breitbart’s manufactured news scandals—like the one that promoted the supposed selling of fetal body parts by Planned Parenthood, or the fake scandal that took down ACORN—see the recent piece by Adele Stans on Alternet (alternet.org, Aug. 19, 2016) to get an idea of their stock in trade.

            So we come back to the ‘wisdom of the people.’ What do we say about the approximately forty-two percent of women who voted for Drumpf rather than the first female candidate for president ever, Hillary Clinton? Was this their display of wisdom? I heard one of these wise females interviewed recently, and what she said baffled me: “Oh we don’t take those things he said (grabbing women by the pussy) seriously; no one’s perfect; we can see his basic goodness beneath it all.” Good grief. You of the moral majority, you fundamentalist Christians who take the Bible literally, you who weep and wail over the death of aborted ‘persons’ (but not grown-up persons who are starving)—you don’t take the confessions of a serial groper seriously? What, pray, do you take seriously?

            Which is the real question here. What does engage the wisdom of the people, what do they take seriously? Judging by the man they voted for (and white men, in despair over losing jobs and industry in the Rust Belt, voted for a billionaire who said he was on their side?), they don’t take information seriously. They don’t take facts seriously. They don’t take logic seriously. They don’t take consistency seriously. They don’t take experience in government seriously. They don’t take what a candidate actually says seriously. What the hell do they think elections are about? Apparently, they think it’s all about “telling it like it is.” Which is to say, slamming the poor, the weak, the undocumented, the city-dwellers, the ones with different hair or skin color or head-dress or costume or housing or anything that doesn’t conform to the trim, white-fenced way of life they are nostalgic for. And we are supposed to imagine that people who think like this—if they can be said to think at all—are repositories of wisdom and should be taken seriously. Should be relied upon.

            Well, I’m sorry. We’ve tried that one a few times too often recently, and what have we gotten? Morons in the White House. Casual lying and war in the White House. Ronald Reagan, the B-grade actor who knew how to sell refrigerators for GE (though at least he had a stint as Governor to hone his cruelties on) running a secret war with Nicaragua. And George W. Bush, the C-student at Yale who scorned any book-learning that wasn’t a fundamentalist bible, but who had ‘gut feelings’ about the things that mattered—like the WMD allegedly hidden in Iraq. And now, this new moron, Donald Drumpf, who listens only to the sound of his own voice, and sometimes, apparently, to the voice of the racist supremacist Jew-baiter, Steve Bannon.

            And what’s really too bad, is that if the people would only shut up a bit and listen to the real wisdom with which they are endowed, they might actually be trusted. Yes, people really do have innate wisdom. It’s not always easy to access; it’s rarely obvious; and it doesn’t always have to do with their conscious judgment of products or politicians. But if you listen carefully, if they could listen to themselves quietly and without prejudice, they really would, most of them, find the difference between what’s important and what isn’t. What’s real and what isn’t.

            And in fact, the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that despite the short- term havoc that will surely come of it, this subterranean people’s wisdom actually functioned in the 2016 election. What I mean is this. The outcome of the election really isn’t about Donald’s big win, nor the big win of the Repugnants in the Congress and in State Houses, nor even the blunders of the Democrats. The outcome is about the underlying rage over the capitalist system that has resulted in what Bernie Sanders has recently referred to as the Oligarchy. Which means, simply, that the system is rigged so that those at the top get richer while all the rest get poorer. Those at the top get not only richer, but their wealth grows without their having to do any ‘real’ work other than leave it invested—in contrast to the poor slobs who have to work two jobs to keep up with their mortgage payments, if they still have a mortgage. And with that always growing wealth (unless you’re Drumpf, who has managed to go bankrupt several times) comes always growing political influence—which in turn makes it more inevitable that the wealth will concentrate and grow still more (see Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century). That’s oligarchy: increasing concentration of wealth by the few, and power and political influence by the even fewer. This is almost inevitable in capitalism—as we’ve seen in the so-called ‘recovery’ since the 2008 collapse. Those with money invest and profit from the growth that capitalism needs to survive, which generates more money to invest. Profit is king, and growth is an absolute necessity. And those two things—profit and growth—work in tandem to exploit and degrade and destroy the conditions needed by most people and all other life forms to live.

            This, I believe, is what this election was about. People, even ordinary people, knew in their bones that something was wrong. And the representative of the system that was drowning them was Hillary Clinton—she whom Drumpf accurately described as having been in the system for thirty years, and never changed it. Not quite accurate: she and her husband as President did change it, but the change drove the Democratic party away from its traditional constituency, the working class, and always increasingly towards the moneyed class, Wall Street and the corporate and financial leaders who kept getting richer. That being the case, the sole avenue left for the increasingly desperate workers was towards Drumpf. Even though he himself has always been of the moneyed class? Even so. The only option for anyone who wanted to throw a monkeywrench into the workings of the existing system—even though few would have said that it was capitalism—was to vote for Drumpf. And I have to admit, that I, with my predilections for logic and reason, could not see it. Yes, I did vote in the primaries for Bernie the socialist for precisely the reasons given above: disgust with the capitalist system that appears to me to be rotten to the core and driving us towards armageddon. But when Bernie failed to win the nomination, I opted, first, to vote for Jill Stein because of my inability to stomach Clinton, but then opted to hold my nose and vote for Hillary because the danger of a Drumpf victory made that seem necessary.

So I didn’t at first see what the election was really about either.

            Only now, after having tried to write ironically about the wisdom of the people, do I see that the real issue in this election was not racism or sexism or xenophobia, though they’re all very much at work. The real issue, the deep issue has always been a popular uprising against a dinosaur of a system that is leading most people into poverty and powerlessness. And further, a system that is leading the planet into the catastrophe predicted by climate change (better expressed as ACD, anthropogenic climate disruption). As Naomi Klein noted in her recent This Changes Everything, capitalism in its current form cannot coexist with the natural environment. If carbon emissions driven by the power of fossil fuel keep increasing as they are now, we’re all cooked. And carbon emissions are, as Drumpf has demonstrated with his promise to unleash American coal and oil producers full bore, fundamental to capitalism’s unyielding drive for profits. What has blinded most of us to this truth is our focus on the surface. On the candidates. On what we can see they clearly intend. All the while, the real subterranean drive actually has little concern with the individual candidates. The real point was to subvert or destroy the system, change it, perhaps, to something more concerned with human thriving. Whether this will be socialism or a blend of capitalism and socialism as seen in the Scandinavian countries, or something entirely other, is beyond my powers of prognostication. What I am maintaining, though, is that the current system—the one that has brought us the obscene levels of inequality we now see in this nation and elsewhere—must fall, one way or the other. That, in my opinion, is what the wisdom of the people saw (though they didn’t have to consciously know it), and have now brought us. Or at least the first stage of. Sadly, having had to elect Drumpf, they will end up bringing us a great deal of pain before he’s done. For Drumpf is a blunt instrument, a vulgar instrument. The so-called dictator always is. But he actually, in the end, has little to do with it. He will go by the wayside, his adoring admirers will have had their fill of him very soon, and, unless I miss my guess, hang him by his thumbs. After that, we shall have to wait and see. But again, that is not the real issue. The real issue is capitalism and the ruling class and what will happen to both in the coming years. And whether, as it dies, it can change in  response to the crisis that is ACD, or not. Whatever the outcome, we all of us will be deeply involved in that outcome.  

            In fact, we already are. And it’s going to be a rough ride, with the blood of innocents paying for it as always. All we can hope (and work for) is that at some point, the movements that have been preparing us (Occupy, and Bernie, and Standing Rock) will survive and thrive and dismantle what has become so toxic and bring to birth something more humane and human-centered. And isn’t it an indication of how far we’ve strayed that “human” and “humane” should sound so radical.

Lawrence DiStasi

What a Revolting Development

When I was a kid, one of the phrases I heard most often from my father was: “What a revoltin’ development this is.”  I only recently found out that he got it from a popular radio program of the 1940s, The Life of Riley, starring William Bendix. Last night, that phrase came to mind when it became clear that the Drumpf of the yellow hair was—beyond all imagining—actually going to be elected president of the United States. It had been brewing all evening, but I kept hoping that sooner or later, a few of the contested states were going to drop for Hillary Clinton, and she would pull out the victory everyone had predicted. It never happened. First Florida went to Trump. Then North Carolina. Then Ohio, and you could almost hear the groan among the commentators. When Pennsylvania, seesawing all night between the two contestants, was called for the Drumpf, it was all over but the shouting. The most revolting development of our time had happened. And I have to confess, when Drumpf reached 269 electoral votes—with Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona still not called, but leaning his way—and the media announced that the presumptive winner had left his hotel and was heading towards his crowd growing more and more ecstatic in anticipation of his victory speech, I turned off the TV set and went to bed. I simply could not bear to see that lecherous grin gloating over the greatest prize a stone-cold narcissist sociopath can garner. I couldn’t bear it, and still may have to turn off the TV whenever it comes on (I did this often when George W. was speaking; similar idiot grin, similar reaction).

            Now it’s the next morning and the feeling of nausea has still not left me. And I’m writing to try to expiate the feeling of horror and depression and despair over the future that hangs over a huge portion of the entire country (more people voted for Hillary, it now appears, than for Drumpf; though once again—think Bush v. Gore and three others, Adams, Hayes and Harrison—that devil’s pact to maintain the slave states in control, the electoral college, has made a mockery of democracy and the idea of one person, one vote). And speaking of slave states in control, the visual of that electoral map displayed on most TV coverage, with the entire center of the country blanketed in red, reminds us again, if we needed reminding, how big a role racism has always played in this nation and played once again in this election. It would not be too much to say that this vote by the mostly white electorate really was the expression of the pent-up hatred that has gripped this nation for the past eight years, hatred of the fact that a Black man occupied the White House. Now the racists (and I love how Drumpf’s defenders always insist his supporters aren’t racists; they’re just Americans who want a “fair shake”) have their revenge—though how long their glee will last is another matter entirely. Because they are going to be confronted by the fact that their chosen savior, Drumpf, will not be able to accomplish even a small portion of what he’s promised—solve immigration? bring back all the lost jobs? make the nation majority white again? tell the corporations and the rest of the world to fuck off? Not going to happen. And then there’s going to be some weeping and gnashing of teeth by the poor boobs who have been conned once again.

            But I digress. What I really want to say is that our worst nightmare has come to pass. Plato, some two thousand years ago, warned that the logical progression in government is the inevitable progress from democracy to tyranny. That is what this feels like to me. I wrote a piece when the primaries were first starting called “Demagogues Rising” in which I referenced a novel predicting that the masses would be inclined, in the dire conditions of massive displacement of people from wars and global warming, to opt for the apparent solutions of dictators and dictatorial governments. At that time, I thought it might be Bernie Sanders versus Drumpf in the election, but the point is the same. In the conditions that are looming—and all people on this planet, whether they can articulate it or not, are feeling the coming era of masses on the move, masses displaced by rising seas and dire climate changes—most people will opt for the (putatively) strong leader over the conventional one every time. Or, as George Lakoff might put it, over the strong father over the nurturing mother. And that  is what has just happened: masses of Americans have chosen a man who has promised to build walls to keep out the wogs, has promised to deport or keep from ever breaching our borders immigrants who appear to be Muslims and/or possible terrorists, and to erect crippling barriers to trade in the attempt to put America first. Shades of the 1930s in Germany; in Italy; in America itself, which had a huge movement, the America Firsters, who lobbied to keep the U.S. out of any more of Europe’s wars. Had it not been for Pearl Harbor, they might have succeeded—at least for a time. Now Drumpf has promised to revive those same sentiments, and has ridden those sentiments straight to the White House. It is terrifying. As is the prospect of his Supreme Court nominations—which will poison the high court for decades. As is the prospect of his Justice Department—which will poison the very idea of ‘justice for all’ for god knows how long (Rudy Giuliani as Attorney General?). As is the prospect of his apparent policy relative to carbon, coal, and global warming, which he seems to think is a hoax (Forrest Lucas, head of Lucas Oil, as Interior Secretary?). The greatest menace ever to threaten the human race, and he, and his whole party, think it’s a hoax. Which means that the entire planet has now taken a step closer to armaggedon with the election of this ignorant huckster and demagogue.

            And it is making me sick just thinking about it. Boobus Americanus indeed.

            So I don’t know folks. I have nothing comforting or palliative to offer. It’s as bad as it looks, and may be much worse. We’ll only know as the sick drama we seem to be trapped in plays out in the coming months. Meantime, all each of us can do is work locally while we think globally, work together when we can, and try to limit the damage. Because the way it looks the morning after, there sure as hell is going to be damage, and the only questions now are how much? and how long, o lord?

Lawrence DiStasi