Threats to democracy are real, but they don't include every bad thing.
When we attach the "threat to democracy" label to actions that aren't threats to democracy, we diminish the importance of actual threats to democracy. MAGA Republicans have misused this phrase with claims like, "court packing is a threat to democracy" or “prosecuting Trump is a threat to democracy,” but more often I've noticed the misuse among progressive and Democrat leaders.
During George W. Bush's presidency, there was a cottage industry of books and articles full of dire warnings that Bush would usher in a new theocratic state. It was absurd, of course, but many on the left seemed convinced that democracy was nigh. The same arguments would attach themselves to Republican presidential nominees John McCain (more due to his veep pick) and Mitt Romney. By the time an actual threat to democracy was nominated, Donald Trump, is it any wonder that too few took these arguments seriously?
I was reminded of this as I recently watched Democrats again misuse the "threat to democracy" label. This time the issue is gerrymandering.
Texas Republicans aim to redraw the boundaries for it's U.S. House of Representative members, with the expectation that these new boundaries will add five more Republicans to the House. Under the Constitution, these boundaries must be redrawn every 10 years after a census to reflect the population shifts. The TX GOP wants to do this between censuses.
Gerrymandering is when state legislatures draw district boundaries in a way to give their party an advantage in the next election. There are two ways to gerrymander — 1) packing, which puts a lot of your own party's neighborhoods into one district to create a very safe seat, and 2) cracking, which breaks up opposition party neighborhoods with the goal of preventing them from having a safe seat. Packing is the safe bet while cracking is more of a gamble (because you're adding opposition party voters to your party's districts) but with the potential for greater reward. (You'll see why this is important later.)
Proponents of gerrymandering reform (count me among them), argue that districts should be compact, follow other boundaries (like city and county lines) as closely as possible, and increase competitiveness (close to an equal number of Republicans and Democrats). Even if we had nationwide reform, these goals would be in conflict and difficult decisions would need to be made.
Gerrymandering often (though not always) makes elections less competitive. When elections are competitive, candidates pay more attention to the will of their voters. So debates over gerrymandering and appropriate reforms are grounded in democratic principles. But we may differ on which principles and how to apply them, and everyone within that debate is still pro-democracy because redistricting itself, even when heavily gerrymandered, requires the principle of one-person, one-vote.
Gerrymandering has been around since 1812 but has yet to lead to the downfall of our democracy, and using the tools of democracy to gain a partisan advantage is not confined to gerrymandering. Gerrymandering between censuses is also not unprecedented. Courts have upheld and even required this in the past. In fact, Texas is being sued over its current district map, which would also require mid-century redistricting if successful. The suit claims the current district lines dilute the voting strength of non-white neighborhoods, but the Texas Republican plan would likely increase the number of Hispanics in the House.
Here's another kicker: the Texas Republican plan would make the districts more competitive — one of the main things that gerrymandering reform advocates say we want. This is because they're using cracking, rather than packing, to try and create more Republican districts. Recall, this method has the potential for greater reward, but also includes greater risk. The plan could backfire and Democrats could win some or all of them, especially in a midterm with an unpopular Republican president.
And then the greatest hypocrisy in all of this gerrymandering talk is the Democrats who say the Texas Republicans' actions are a threat to democracy while at the same time advocating mid-century redistricting in blue states to counter the move.
Keep in mind, all of this is happening while actual threats to democracy are taking place, many of which we've covered previous newsletters and will continue to do so. Debates over gerrymandering are important and worthwhile, but let's save our "threats to democracy" talk for the real deal.
Responding to First Things and Meghan Basham
First Things recently published an article about us containing much misinformation. I explain here:
Is the age of popular democracy ending and the age of rule by kings returning? Some Christians hope so.
First Things recently published an article by Mary Harrington suggesting, even celebrating, the end of popular democracy, and the return of rule by paternalistic monarchy.
Will Sommer: “We Found It! The Flimsiest MAGA Conspiracy of All Time.”
This month, huge swaths of the right-wing media audience have latched on to allegations that Barr schemed with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and conservative pundit Armstrong Williams to hatch the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump and eighteen other people. It’s a very colorful story, complete with gold bars, burner phones, and foreign bribes. And it appears to be based entirely on the word of an accused fraudster whose dishonesty is so legendary that it has become a sort of popular meme in her home country of Brazil.
At the heart of the claims against Barr are some very credulous “reports” from undercover right-wing video operation Project Veritas, formerly the outfit of James O’Keefe. The sole source of the claims is Patrícia Lélis, a Brazilian national fugitive wanted by the FBI and last known to be hiding out in Mexico.
Lélis alleges that as Armstrong Williams’s employee, she became privy to a scheme conceived by Barr to orchestrate Trump’s prosecutions. Those plans were put together in meetings at Williams’s Virginia office, she alleges. Ignoring the fact that Merrick Garland, not Bill Barr, was attorney general at the time, Lélis says that Barr secretly met with Jack Smith and Fani Willis to hatch plans to bring a RICO case against Trump and more than a dozen other defendants, which she described as Barr’s enemies list (more on that later). For good measure, she claims that Barr had prior knowledge of the FBI’s August 2022 raid of Trump’s home.
So far, Project Veritas has released three videos focused on Lélis’s allegations. In those videos, she’s billed as a “whistleblower, who is hiding abroad and fearing for her life.”
In this battle, I have until now chosen to be a non-combatant. While I always found Haidt’s worries to be plausible, I also felt that we didn’t yet have enough evidence to be confident that things were really as bad as he feared.
And then I came across a truly jaw-dropping chart.
That chart, published by Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch and based on his analysis of data from the extensive Understanding America Study, shows how the traits measured by the personality test most widely used in academic psychology have changed over the past decade. The OCEAN test measures five things: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Decades of research have demonstrated that some of these traits are highly predictive of life outcomes; in particular, conscientiousness (“the tendency to be organized, responsible, and hardworking”) predicts everything from greater professional success to a lower likelihood of getting divorced. Extroversion (a tendency to be “outgoing, gregarious, sociable, and openly expressive”) is associated with better mental health, broader social networks, and greater life satisfaction. Meanwhile, neuroticism (understood as a propensity toward anxiety, emotional instability, and negative emotion) is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, such as higher rates of depression, lower life satisfaction, and poorer overall mental health.
With these facts in mind, you will quickly realize why Burn-Murdoch’s chart demonstrates that something very, very concerning has been happening to young people.
David French: “Why a ‘Paleo-Confederate’ Pastor Is on the Rise”
I’m going to share with you two remarkable quotes, both from the same evangelical pastor. First, here is a reflection from 2009 on the Civil War and the Confederate States of America:
You’re not going to scare me away from the word Confederate like you just said “Boo!” I would define a neo-Confederate as someone who thinks we are still fighting that war. Instead, I would say we’re fighting in a long war, and that was one battle that we lost.
And lest you think this pastor has only a passing interest in the Confederacy, consider these words, from a 2005 book called “Angels in the Architecture”
When the Confederate States of America surrendered at Appomattox, the last nation of the older order fell. So, because historians like to have set dates on which to hang their hats, we may say the first Christendom died there, in 1865. The American South was the last nation of the first Christendom.
These words were written by Douglas Wilson, whose home church is based in Moscow, Idaho. He has described himself as a “paleo-Confederate” — he believes that Southern slavery was wrong, but that the Confederacy was otherwise “right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war.”
He’s the founder of a church, a denomination and a publishing house. He’s influential in both the Christian home-schooling and the Christian classical school movements.
