We had an illustration Tuesday night of one of the most crucial questions in our current politics and the one that will determine whether civic democracy can have a rebirth in the U.S. Gerrymandering is a bane to civic democracy because it dilutes the expression of the popular will by building district lines around partisan advantage or to diminish the power of disempowered minorities. Democrats spent much of the 2010s and 2020s fighting a legal and legislative battle against gerrymandering. But the Roberts Court has chosen to legalize every manner of gerrymandering, making the current a destructive race to the bottom.
Democrats had a choice. They could express effete outrage and a meaningless devotion to broken norms and principles and agree to wage elections on a permanently tilted plane. Or they could decide to play by the rules Republicans had forced on everyone. They did just that and it was unquestionable the right decision by every measure. It really never seemed to occur to Trump Republicans that Democrats would fight on the playbook Republicans created. There’s a special comedy to this because anyone familiar with the facts on the ground knew that Republicans had already used gerrymandering much more aggressively than Democrats. So there was much more juice in the gerrymandering lemon for Democrats if and when they decided to employ tactics Republicans have been using for more than a decade. It’s worth Democrats considering how deeply Republicans had internalized the beneath that Democrats would simply never respond in kind.
If you’re worried about where this goes long term there’s a simple solution: Ask any Democrat who supports fighting the redistricting wars to vote for a national redistricting law. This isn’t some notional outcome. It should be and I believe is still at the top of any Democratic reform agenda: non-partisan electoral districts. What usually goes unreported is that even the Virginia gerrymandering referendum, which has caused MAGA tears to flood X, mandates that the state go back to the non-partisan rules after the 2030 census. (Voters passed the measure on Tuesday, but the state Supreme Court still has to hear several legal challenges against it). If Republicans now suddenly see the shortcomings of the rules they and their corrupt judicial allies created then they can join with the new Democratic majority next year and pass a national anti-gerrymandering law. It’s really so simple. You need to acquire power by every legal means in order to enact change.
This is a critical moment because it previews equally critical decision points in the future. There is no possibility of a civic democratic revival in the United States without abolishing the filibuster and reforming the corrupt Supreme Court. These both now exist as either substantial (in the first instance) or total (in the case of Supreme Court corruption) impediments to democratic self-government in the United States. I’ve been giving a lot of thought of late to just what kind of new social contract can be devised to succeed the ones created in the New Deal and early Cold War eras. I have only a very limited insight into what that might be. What I understand much more clearly are the structural changes required to create any rebirth of a civic democratic future in the U.S. We’ve spoken about them plenty before: abolish the filibuster and reform the corrupt Supreme Court. These are the sine qua non reforms without which small-d democratic self-government in the United States is really no longer possible.
The question now is whether Democrats can bring the same fight and clarity to these questions as they did, to the surprise of many, to redistricting. I’ve noted a number of times that it’s critical what kind of majorities Democrats elect if they elect them. The most important spectrum is not conventional left and right but clarity about the need for structural reform and indifference to kinds of false propriety that stand in the way. The irony is that it may be harder to get Democrats united behind these reforms even though the positive case is much more straightforward. Aggressive partisan gerrymandering is a bad thing which Republicans have forced on Democrats as the only path to maintaining and expanding political power. The filibuster is an affirmatively bad thing which primarily places limits on Democrats. Supreme Court corruption has remade the Court not simply into an effective veto on the kind of expansive government Democrats once championed but now, far more straightforwardly, on any Democratic government at all. The current Supreme Court is nothing more than another legislative filibuster, housed in the judicial branch, and crusted over with Harvard and Yale JDs to make it look pretty to the gullible.
What happened Tuesday night and which has happened more generally in the redistricting wars comes down to a simple question of aspiration: can the majority of Democrats learn how to acquire and use political power effectively and be willing to do so? The redistricting battles suggest the answer is yes, more than a lot of people thought. Killing the filibuster and reforming the corrupt Supreme Court are the next critical, sine qua non tests.