In defense of gerrymandering

So, this is just me thinking out loud about the American political system (hopefully in a mostly non-partisan way). I don't have a strong opinion on the topic, but I'm in the process of reevaluating a long-held belief.

E pluribus unum

When I was a child, the highlight of the week was the time between 8am and noon on Saturdays - Saturday morning cartoons. One of the highlights of Saturday morning cartoons was the School House Rock video series that joined commercials during breaks between the scheduled programs.

As a result of that series, I grew up believing two contradictory ideas about America.

1. First idea: American culture is maintained by the Great American Melting Pot. You start with the respect for liberty, independence, and equality that was instantiated by the American War for Independence, then you pump in a steady stream of immigrants, and you wind up with a unified society that upholds the values of the American Revolution. This idea is so deeply ingrained here that the national motto on our money even suggests this: E pluribus unum - "Out of many, one";
2. Second idea: State autonomy, or self-governance protected by the Electoral College (and the Tenth Amendment), made America stronger by enabling the states to act as laboratories of democracy, where the best governmental policies emerge over the course of generations through a competitive process of trial and error. Charles Tiebout referred to the driver behind this process as voting with our feet (aka foot voting). People change jurisdictions to the places with successful policies and leave the ones with harmful policies behind.

Why are these ideas in conflict? The melting pot is like baking a cake. You put in the ingredients, mix it up, set the right temperature, wait a while, and voila - a tasty desert. Everyone is happy, and nothing is wasted.

The second is a process of creative destruction. You bake twenty cakes, keep one that's delicious, but throw the rest away because they taste horrible, and maybe a couple of them even spilled batter all over the kitchen. One cook wins the contest and everyone else goes home empty-handed.

In point of fact, if we have 50 "laboratories of democracy" in our states, what we have is less like the melting pot that I understood as a child, and more like a Darwinian survival of the fittest. In this metaphor, America got stronger and more unified because our independent state-level democracies killed off the bad ideas. The ideas that survived were "battle tested".

The first is sustained, reproducible mediocrity. The second is unpredictable excellence built on top of a graveyard of failed attempts. You can have a melting pot or you can have laboratories of democracy, but you can't have both.

Both give us E pluribus unum, but the results - the unum are very different.

The political shifts

During the course of my lifetime, it seems to me that one of the dominant shifts in American politics has been a movement to reduce the uncertainty from the laboratories of democracy and to increase the influence of the Great American Melting Pot.

Unfortunately, given the currently divided state of American politics, I would estimate that despite the strongest of efforts, the Great American Melting Pot has not actually been strengthened in any meaningful way during these decades.

Gerrymandering

Later, as an adult, I learned about Gerrymandering. This is the process of drawing election maps based on the political affiliation of the residents so that the dominant party in the state legislature controls a disproportionately large number of political districts.

On its face, this idea seems anti-democratic. It seems that citizens are deprived of their voices. For many years, my own electoral district had a weird squiggly shape because of the way the Pennsylvania maps were Gerrymandered, and - until recently - I never really questioned the claim that Gerrymandering is a bad idea.

After all, who can sanction the idea that certain incumbent politicians are basically guaranteed to be reelected?

Recently, however, the states of Texas and California have brought the question back to the surface, and I'm rethinking my opinion in the context of foot voting.

If everyone is playing by the same rules, and the elections are conducted honestly, then maybe we can say that the system is fair - even if one side or the other is able to engineer a strategic advantage in some locations through the map design. Maybe the ability to Gerrymander the map serves a similar purpose to the electoral college by amplifying the most popular viewpoint in each state and reducing gridlock. Maybe this is actually a way to reinvigorate the states as laboratories for democracy?

Conclusion: Undecided

At the moment I am undecided.

Maybe Gerrymandering is as wrong and harmful as I had previously believed, or maybe gerrymandering is actually helpful. I'm not sure.

What I will say at this point is that it's no longer obvious to me that Gerrymandering is harmful and anti-democratic. I'm sure that my thoughts on this will continue to evolve as we see the real-world drama on the topic continuing to unfold. As JS would say, "stay tuned"