Tag Archives: gerrymandering

Bread And Circuses

“Bread and circuses” is a phrase referring back to the Roman Empire. Rome’s rulers distracted the public from corrupt and/or autocratic rule by giving the population free food and violent entertainments. They distributed grain to the poor, and provided entertaining distractions– chariot races, gladiatorial combat, and wild animal hunts, among others–to keep the masses from getting bored and restless, and to divert them from engaging in political activity. 
That time-honored tactic is still being employed.
In yesterday’s post, I shared my  observation that Americans no longer occupy a democratic system–that  gerrymandering, the Electoral College, Citizens United and various other elements of our electoral system have allowed the cult that is now the GOP to assume control of our government, and to rule without concern for the opinions of the citizenry. (Indeed, rather than a citizenry, we “voters” have more in common with subjects than with those who wield the power originally reposed in “We the People.”)
As the Trump administration takes shape, we can see that those who have secured the right to rule are the plutocrats. Assuming most of his proposed nominees are confirmed, America will be ruled (not governed) by billionaires pursuing further tax cuts and privileges–appointees ranging from obviously corrupt to ethically challenged and rife with conflicts of interests.
We have come to this sorry end of the American Experiment thanks to our current version of “bread and circuses.”
There have always been distractions and methods of promoting disinformation, but the Internet and the ubiquity of devices with screens that constantly occupy us have massively multiplied the diversions. Most readers of this blog are all too aware of the wealth of political propaganda promoted by Fox, et al, but that is a relatively minor aspect of the overall environment. Fox and its clones merely misrepresent the political world we occupy; it’s the growth of the entertainment world, the so-called “influencers,” the proliferation of celebrities who are famous for being famous (Kardashians, anyone?), that truly provides the “circus” that prevents most of us from recognizing the degradation of our own influence as citizens charged with choosing people to administer the powers of our governments.
Most observers of America’s political landscape recognize the decline of democratic decision-making. On this platform, I have repeatedly pointed out the very negative consequences of our structural deficits–especially gerrymandering, which allows legislators to choose their voters rather than the other way around. But it was only with the 2024 election of Donald Trump that I fully recognized what should have been obvious to me previously: American government is no longer even remotely democratic, and America’s economy is no longer an example of functioning market capitalism.
We are a plutocracy and a kakistocracy, and our economy is corporatist, not capitalist.
A kakistocracy is defined as rule by those least competent or suitable; corporatism–sometimes called “crony capitalism” –is control of the state by special interests. Honest observers have chronicled the country’s descent into those unfortunate categories for several years, only to be ignored by a population diverted by its own varieties of bread and circuses.
I will admit to being one of the people who didn’t sufficiently appreciate that descent. In my case, I focused far too much attention on the largely positive cultural changes that have allowed civic participation by previously marginalized folks–women, LGBTQ+ citizens and people of color–and far too little attention on the steady erosion of democratic citizenship.
The only salutary outcome of the 2024 election is the consequent inability of any sentient American to ignore the extent of that erosion.
Thanks in part to voters’ constant diet of “circuses,” Republicans were able to conduct a pivotal and monumentally successful gerrymander in 2010.–an actual, victorious, bloodless coup. The REDMAP program radically altered America’s electoral map, insulating the GOP and its wealthy donors from popular democracy. The book Ratf**ked “pulled back the curtain on that coup,”  explaining in detail how a group of Republican operatives hijacked democracy.
The question now, as always, is “what can be done?” Can We the People regain control of our government?
I will readily confess that I don’t know. Gerrymandering will continue to work so long as there are an adequate number of voters to be deployed who support the racism, misogyny and plutocracy championed by today’s GOP. The only “fix” I can envision is a significant reduction in their number.
It is possible that the pain likely to be caused by Trump’s administration will shake some folks loose. Meanwhile, it will behoove those of us who understand the problem to figure out how to break through the pervasive misinformation and distractions that keep too many voters content with being subjects rather than citizens.
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The Arrogance Of Power

As Indiana’s election looms, the enduring truth of one of Jennifer McCormick’s talking points is hard to miss: it’s time for a change.

Indiana has been ruled by Republicans for over twenty years. We’ve had Republican Governors and a Republican legislature–and for the past several years, a Republican super-majority in that legislature. For any political party, a persistent lack of balance–and thanks to gerrymandering, a perceived lack of any real competition–leads to corruption. (“Power corrupts” is as old and hoary an adage as “it’s time for a change.)

The problem with extended one-party rule isn’t simply that extremists can pass rules and push through legislation without considering contending viewpoints or public opinion–it’s that those exercising power come to believe that they can do anything they want, legal or not, without worrying about the consequences. Two recent stories–one from the Indiana Citizen and one from The Capitol Chronicle–are directly on point.

The Indiana Citizen reports on the continuing corruption of the Attorney General’s office headed by Todd Rokita. A Marion County Superior Court has sanctioned two state agencies and the lawyers from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office who represented them, detailing ongoing misconduct and ordering them to pay nearly $375,000. While the agencies involved are certainly not blameless, the responsibility for complying with court orders and responding truthfully to questions from the court and other litigants rests squarely on the shoulders of the lawyers representing them. 

According to the court, 

Respondents and their counsel committed multiple types of unacceptable misconduct on numerous occasions. They acted in an unreasonable manner with disregard for Petitioners, the Court and the orderly process of justice,” Joven wrote in the order granting petition for attorney fees and costs. “Further, Respondents failed to explain why the repeated acts of misconduct occurred and went uncured, failed to accept responsibility for the misconduct, failed to express remorse, and failed to identify steps that have been taken to prevent such unacceptable misconduct from occurring in the future.”

Worse, this evidently wasn’t the first time these lawyers had been sanctioned. Only a year before this case was filed, “the Indiana Department of Correction, its counsel from the attorney general’s office and the attorney general’s office itself were sanctioned in another case for making false representations to the federal judge, making false discovery responses and submitting a brief that contained false information.” In other words, despite that previous ruling, lawyers from the AG’s office persisted in conduct that violated their ethical and legal obligations.

Courts have also smacked down Todd Rokita personally. He hasn’t listened either.

Then there’s the case against Jamie Noel, the southern Indiana political heavyweight who who pleaded guilty earlier this month to 27 felonies. Noel’s corruption, and his cozy ties to numerous state Republicans, have been the subject of considerable reporting, but The Capital Chronicle has focused on the effects of that corruption.

When a life is on the line in the back of an ambulance, first responders are supposed to have the best tools available to give every patient a fighting chance, said former paramedic Crystal Blevins. But for many who worked at New Chapel EMS — the southern Indiana emergency service provider previously ran by now-convicted former Clark County Sheriff Jamey Noel — “the equipment and the medicine, a lot of the time, wasn’t there.”

“There was this lie being presented to the public about what New Chapel was giving — they weren’t fulfilling that promise. Jamey ran the service out of greed … telling us there weren’t funds for what we needed, and then we came to find out the money was there all along,” Blevins told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. …

Court documents indicate that Noel stole more than half of the taxpayer dollars provided to New Chapel by Clark and Floyd counties. In his last four years as leader, he pocketed at least half a million dollars in wages and spent $2 million more on vacations, clothing, Rolex watches, child support payments, his daughter’s college tuition and more, according to state auditors.

Noel served as the Clark County sheriff from 2015 until the end of 2022. He was also the Republican Party chair for both Clark County and Indiana’s 9th Congressional District. That made him the gatekeeper for southern Indiana’s Republican political hopefuls for the last decade.

Noel and Rokita are examples of the hubris that enables corruption. When a political party uses its legislative power to gerrymander the electorate and ensure its continuation of political control, that cronyism invites abuse by greedy and self-interested individuals who are confident that they are beyond the reach of angry constituents.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is definitely time for a change. 

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The Politics Of Lying

When I was teaching, Free Speech discussions would frequently evoke a question from students appalled by the massive amounts of disinformation enabled by the Internet and social media: “Can’t we at least outlaw lying?” I would have to explain that courts would have great difficulty determining the difference between what is a lie and what is a mistake, etc. The practical problems of such an effort would be insurmountable.

More to the point, the First Amendment rests on reliance upon the “marketplace of ideas.” Bad ideas and lies are to be countered by better ideas and facts. It is a theory that depends upon the participation of We the People.

It isn’t working very well right now, and I see no simple solutions. Neither does Bill Adair, who founded Politifact. In a recent essay for the Atlantic, he explored the failure of that fact-checking site to combat the firehose of propaganda and lies that  distort our political lives.

For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.

I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood.

After exploring some theories about why politicians lie–the calculus that they apparently apply to determine the ratio of risk to reward– Adair notes that today’s extreme political polarization encourages them to do little else.

Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.

Adair notes that partisan media, especially on the right, fosters lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. These outlets expect politicians to repeat favored falsehoods as the price of admission. If you’re not willing to participate in the twisting of facts, you simply won’t get to speak to the echo chamber.

Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”

Adair uses Mike Pence as an example of the way today’s political incentives change people. They had been neighbors when Pence was in Congress, and Adair saw him then as “a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth.” When he was Indiana governor, Adair watched his lies grow. “By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.”

The question, of course, is “what can we do?” Here are Adair’s closing paragraphs:

If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.

But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.

Amen.

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We Need More Of This

Anyone remember Howard Dean and his fifty-state plan? Dean was a 2004 presidential candidate, and is remembered primarily for his insistence that Democrats should run candidates everywhere–that failing to mount campaigns even in heavily gerrymandered districts that were sure losers was a strategic error.

I agreed with Dean then, and I’m even more convinced of the wisdom of his advice now. As I’ve repeatedly noted, gerrymandering is a vote suppression tactic. Failure to even offer an alternative candidate is participation in that suppression.

For a long time, most voters remained unaware of the effects of gerrymandering (for that matter, most voters remain unaware of the extent to which America’s obsolete electoral systems subvert democracy). Raising that awareness is the first step toward countering and correcting those systems, so I was encouraged to read about a campaign in North Carolina recently profiled in the Washington Post.

The article was titled “She’s running with all she’s got for a seat she can’t win. That’s the point.”

Kate Barr is a blur of activity on the campaign trail this fall. She’s a fixture at local Democratic events, delivering fiery stump speeches. In her neighborhood here in the North Carolina Piedmont, many lawns display her Barbie-pink yard signs. She has branded T-shirts and sweatshirts and glittery stickers.

Wherever she appears, her opening salvo is always the same: “Hi. I’m Kate Barr. And I’m your losing candidate for state Senate District 37.”

Barr’s campaign is making a serious point: aggressive gerrymandering erases competitive elections and leaves voters without a real choice. North Carolina is a competitive state. It has a Democratic governor. But thanks to gerrymandering, it has a Republican super-majority in its legislature. (This will sound familiar to Indiana voters…) During the last round of redistricting, the legislature redrew Barr’s previous district, marrying the suburban area she lived in with a reliably rural, Red district. (Again, Indiana residents can relate…)

Davidson went from being part of a district centered in Mecklenburg County — where Donald Trump lost by 35 percentage points in 2020 — to being part of Iredell, which he won by about the same amount.

“Why am I losing?” Barr asked, warming up the crowd at a community center in her district ahead of a campaign appearance by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein one recent day. “In a gerrymandered state like North Carolina, it means representatives are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their representatives.”

The article concedes that Barr’s decision to build her entire campaign around certain defeat is “unconventional,” noting that–among other things–she sells a “LOSER” T-shirt on her campaign website. But it also notes that–shades of Howard Dean!– “the strategy of running Democrats in districts in which they are sure to be beaten has spread across the country after decades of ceding state legislative races to Republicans.”

Both parties draw district lines to their partisan advantage — a tactic known as gerrymandering. But about twice as many state legislatures overly favor Republicans compared with Democrats, according to a 2023 study by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Running “sure loser” candidates and giving the “sure loser” voters a reason to come to the polls has been shown to improve the performance of the top of the ticket. It makes the majority party spend time and money they wouldn’t otherwise have to spend. And if focuses on a result of gerrymandering that has been aptly called “a highway to extremism.” That’s because gerrymandering acts to magnify a state’s partisan advantage.

The effect has been on particularly vivid display in some red states in recent years as legislators who have little to fear from a general election pass laws that are to the right of what their voters might support, experts say. Reproductive rights restrictions, school book bans and voting limitations have gone largely unchecked at the ballot box. Meanwhile, policies with wide support, like certain anti-gun violence laws, have gone nowhere.

You can see that extremism in Barr’s sure-to-win opponent.

Barr’s opponent, incumbent state senator Vickie Sawyer, who ran unopposed in 2022, has supported policies such as North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban — which was enacted after the legislature overrode the governor’s veto — and constraints on discussing sexual orientation in elementary schools. At a recent forum on aging, Sawyer brought up unprompted her support for a bill that would require sheriffs to detain undocumented immigrants who have been charged with a crime, even if they have made bail — “so they can’t kill our children,” she said.

Sawyer sounds a lot like the culture warriors in Indiana’s legislature.

The good news for Hoosiers is that statewide candidates can’t be gerrymandered. The current GOP statewide candidates are  worse than Sawyer, but they can–and must– be defeated.

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Why Democracy Is At Risk

The punditry keeps telling us that democracy is at risk. There’s a reason why that is.

Yes, Donald J. Trump (aka “the former guy”) poses an existential risk to American democracy. But let’s be honest– crazy Donald and Project 2025 are only threats because of the actual, underlying reason for the erosion of our democratic processes: the systemic distortions that continue to promote minority rule.

I have used this platform to pontificate about several of those distortions, from the Electoral College (hugely undemocratic) to the current form of the filibuster (significantly undemocratic), but especially (and yes, repeatedly) gerrymandering.

In one of Heather Cox Richardson’s recent Letters from an American, she explained more eloquently than I have the degree to which partisan redistricting–aka gerrymandering–mutes the voice of the electorate. As a result, I’m quoting her explanation at length.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s.

Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.

And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.

But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject.

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction…. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system.

There is much more, and I encourage you to click through and read Richardson’s letter in its entirety–or, for that matter, if you are not now a subscriber, to become one. As a historian, she provides an illuminating historical context to the problems we face.

One of those problems is that, in a democracy, many voters–perhaps most—fail to recognize the immense importance of the systems within which We the People operate. Only when those systems operate to facilitate fair play and to provide a level playing field are the people we elect incentivized to heed the will of their constituents.

Richardson says there are two possible outcomes to today’s corrupted system: the election of Republicans who will follow the Project 2025 playbook, or a voters’ revolt sufficient to dislodge its beneficiaries and prompt reform of the cult that has replaced the GOP.

In November, we’ll know which of those outcomes we’ve chosen.

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