Sure, sure, euphemisms and whatnot. I'm sure there's some out there, but would you happen to know of any that's actually approaching decent?
As Bay 12's own Gerrymander Commander, I accept this challenge.
Gerrymandering is both a necessity and an inevitability. Inevitable because any faction that refuses gerrymandering will be superseded by those that accept it, and necessary in order to create the conditions for the democratic process to exist. In an ungerrymandered democracy, the whims of the day allow for massive changes in the power holding groups of the nation during any and all elections, even if the shift in belief was something along the lines of an October Surprise or a pervasive rumor spread as truth.
In societies, the ruling government requires continuous stability, and that means that replacement of power blocks can only safely occur over generational spans. Otherwise, you'd see things like people who actually believe their own hype becoming more and more common in ruling bodies because their hypeness excites those dissatisfied with government performance. Donald Trump is amongst the greatest examples of what could happen when gerrymandering is not present to make electoral results more predictable.
Think of the McCarthyist era. Any incident of mass hysteria badly timed right before elections means the truest believers of that hysteria have a much better chance of replacing professional politicians. Even most politicians who engage in these kinds of things are really just doing so for votes, and so radical attempts at upending society will be mercifully rare no matter how much they use it rhetorically. If you want proof of that, look no further than the makeup of the Supreme Court since Roe v. Wade. If the main body of the Republicans
really wanted to execute abortion doctors and put pregnant women who attempted abortions in comas until the birth of their child, then why didn't they? They've had control of Congress and the Presidency with wide authority to elect whomever they wanted, so why not use abortion law as a litmus test? The worst we got from them is Clarence Thomas, and even he gets to put on his act because he knows his dissents have no risk of becoming law.
That sort of political meta-stability is why we need gerrymandering. It's a check back against idiocy, and idiocy has fell a great many societies before America. The Supreme Court can get surprises, and on a bad day a determined idiot can get the Presidency, but as long as Congress stays stable it'll all mostly work out. We have a formula that has managed to retain the power of an empire that could have fallen a long time ago, and condemned a great number of people who are now alive and prosperous to suffering or death. The whole world relies on America to be the rock of politics, unshakable and never prone to levels of change that cause instability.
I'm not speaking against democracy here. Democracy is a great thing, and it contributes to that very stability because it lets the people who decide how society is run know what the public thinks. It's an excellent check-back against going all Caligula and assuming whatever you believe is all that matters in the responsibility of running a nation. But let's not pretend that the benefits of democracy mean we need to let everyone decide everything all the time. You've read Youtube comment sections, you know how that sort of thing can go.
The way we do things now doesn't suppress the people's power, it
actualizes that power in a shockingly efficient manner. When the people want something, it gets done - at the right time. It's the nature of all political factions to say "faster, not good enough", but that doesn't mean that it's actually not good enough. Changing too fast ruins the potential of change. Take the liberalization of the USSR. If Gorbachev had known better, he could have avoided the hardliner coup attempt and the USSR would have stayed on the path of gradual quality of life improvement it had been experiencing. His commitment to radical reorganization lead us to the chaos of the 90's, where Russia was lead by
Boris Yeltsin and oligarchs were allowed to run rampant. And look at it now! Putin is up his own ass rearranging the government as his personal fiefdom and like half of the Russian population thinks gay people should be lynched while the other half thinks they should only be stepped on until they stop acting gay.
Compare this to the USA, where same-sex marriage was legalized at a mere 55% approval, just high enough to let those opposed know they don't really have a chance to reverse it, and thus accelerating acceptance of LGBT further, at a rate that works. The same thing happened in pretty much all the individual states that offered equality and protection to LGBT folk at the same percentile.
And for that sort of thing, for that sort of total change in societal acceptance without regression or revolution you can thank our shadow helper gerrymandering, the check against the fourth branch of government, the public.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1581852 times)