Last month, Democrats in New Jersey were on the cusp on implementing a plan to essentially gerrymander their way into impregnable, or at least, highly secured, power in the state. The plan went awry when enough people on both sides of the aisle paid attention to the effort and those leading it chose to back down rather than risk paying an unknowable public and political price.
If there’s one thing readers of The Hot Screen have picked up on in the last couple years, it’s probably our belief that political and moral imperatives dictate that the Democratic Party needs to defend and expand democracy in our country. This is both necessary in pragmatic terms, to win back power, and in identity terms, in that a Democratic Party that fails to do so would not be worth supporting. Such a strategy necessarily includes opposition to all forms of voter suppression, whether it be arbitrary purging of voter rolls, restrictions on early voting, or, of course, gerrymandering that thwarts the ability of citizens to elect the officials of their choosing.
What transpired in New Jersey has only fed fuel into our righteous fire. “Beware any politician who wants to avoid a fair fight” is a basic lesson that only grows more and more prominent as a guiding star in how to think about our shared democratic future. Within the Democratic Party, there is clearly a battle being fought out between certain establishment politicians who’d love to cement their hold on power, alongside those who think fighting dirty is acceptable in order to defeat Republicans and move forward progressive causes, and those who understand that undemocratic means will bring neither accountability nor real progressive change. A politician who is guaranteed of re-election is a politician that much less inclined to really listen to her constituents; obviously, such gerrymandered seats also stand in the way of the voters’ will when they decide it’s time for a change.
The fight in New Jersey also caught my attention because it was an unpleasant illustration of a topic covered in a book I’ve discussed previously, How Democracies Die. The authors describe a cycle in which competing political parties begin to change the rules of the game to tighten their hold on power, each move prompting the opposition to mimic it lest they find themselves out of power permanently. This cycle can be driven by, and further drive, the idea that the opposition is illegitimate, which justifies moves to stymie its future election. When both major political parties embrace such tactics, the dynamic can be very difficult to reverse. How Democracies Die cites plenty of examples from around the world; it’s chilling to see even the possibility of such a cycle begin here.
But I think we can cautiously say that the New Jersey story has had a happy ending, at least for now, and shows that a Democratic grassroots awareness of the perils of gerrymandering is only growing. A New Jersey activist quoted by Politico makes the point very well indeed:
“What got us emotionally upset was that here we had fought hard in a certain set of values that we thought Trumpism was an affront to: Lack of transparency, poor policy, power grabbing. We saw Republicans doing that all over the country,” said Sue Altman, a board member of the group South Jersey Women for Progressive Change. “To see our own party kind of make hypocrites of us and to turn it around and do the same thing in New Jersey.”
We couldn’t agree more with this sentiment. We already have one party that has become untethered from democracy, and even that’s one too many.