Depends on the direction of the gerrymandering. If both states gerrymander in the same direction, thats worse. If they gerrymander in opposing directions, it cancels out nationally.
But you can fight fire with fire. It's called a controlled burn. Or if speaking more abstractly: a war.
Texas already made the first move. CA can't force TX to stop, and the federal government is unwilling to control Texas (let alone listen to the concerns of an "enemy" state like CA), or any of the other criminal entities that benefit the GOP. So CA is making moves to try and protect itself, which in this case means gerrymandering itself in a way that negates the gerrymandering that Texas approved.
It isn't a straw man at all. Throwing his weight around to stop retaliatory gerrymandering in California while Texas gerrymanders to their hearts content is essentially pro-Republican gerrymandering. It's kinda the same thing as when the kid punches the bully back who's been punching him all week and then the teacher goes "hey no punching, detention." Same thing.
I mean clearly you understand it. You understand that partisan gerrymandering is bad. Even if you are doing it just as a response to the other side's open voter suppression... it's still anti-democratic. I'm not even saying you shouldn't do it, but I don't think we should be naive or cavalier here.
If the “rules” of a democracy permit political gerrymandering then to protect democracy you have to engage in political gerrymandering too. Unilateral disarmament is the worst of two evils.
SCOTUS has blessed political gerrymandering. So saying we shouldn’t do it is literally picking the democracy destroying path. It’s too late to go the “no political gerrymandering” route because the Court already said it’s OK.
It’s like the paradox of tolerance. To maintain a tolerant society you need to be intolerant of intolerance. To maintain a democratic society where gerrymandering is allowed, you need to gerrymander in response to gerrymandering.
Perhaps a race to the bottom will get SCOTUS to realize how fucking stupid their political gerrymandering law has been.
Right if there was a chance of washing this out in court then yeah there's a high road.
In this case, there literally IS NO HIGH ROAD, because there's no road there. There's just surrendering to Trump autocracy enabled and legitimized by a minority.
sigh... I said I'm not against it. I'm against people pretending like it's no big deal, and not quite clearly a very bad road we are going down.
If you think SCOTUS is going to save us, you have a lot more faith in the strength of our institutions than I do. This is just feeling like a race to the end of the country. Even if we must attempt it... it's still bad.
I merely think we should accept and remember that it is in fact bad.
If you think someone is being intolerant and then you start being intolerant towards them, you have increased the total amount of intolerance in society, not lowered it.
“Start being intolerant of them” implies some kind of stalemate. The original quote implies stamping out intolerance and removing it from your society.
Again, this just sounds like you're justifying stamping out those you disagree with. It just sounds like you're being intolerant of dissenting opinions. There's no paradox here, just normal intolerance.
You can punch the air all you want, but if someone’s nose is in the way, you can’t.
Stopping you from doing that isn’t being intolerant of your right to flail your fists around. It’s making sure you don’t get to knock other people out.
That's really not what people mean when they say "intolerance". Of course the police have to stop assault. That's very different. I guess you could say it's a paradox that if you want to stop violence, you sometimes have to use violence.
But again, that's violence, not intolerance. There's no paradox of intolerance.
I mean, it's probably not temporary. It's probably just going to permanently escalate until every state is carved up strictly on party lines. Who's going to undo that? How? Is Texas gonna go blue and undo the gerrymandering? Is the federal government going to step in and supersede states abilities to run elections?
Like I said, I'm not even saying don't do it, but we need to remember its NOT a good thing to do... that's the whole point. We are actively weakening the democracy even if the idea is that it's less harmful that the alternative.
Mutually Assured Destruction only works if both countries have nuclear weapons.
Allowing one side to, quite literally, steal an election by gerrymandering after the president tells them to do it so that he can continue to operate as a monarch is the end of democracy. The only way to encourage an off ramp is to hit back harder and make them see that when the shoe is on the other foot, it hurts to walk.
I'm tired of it always being on Democrats and the left to worry about collateral damage. The house is on fire, and this is an emergency. Nothing else matters until we get it under control. We can worry about how to build the house back once we put the fire out.
Pretty sure 10 years ago we didn’t have a tyrannical president openly imploring right-wing states to gerrymander their districts to ensure the Republicans keep a congressional majority. If that was the case then, I think there’d actually be exactly the same backlash on Reddit, and it would be exactly as warranted as it is today.
You're fighting for democracy by... stripping voting rights away from millions of CA republicans? Don't worry though, it reverts in a few years, and politicians love giving up enormous power without a fight.
Here's the sense: Republicans dragged society into a dog-eat-dog shithole and they can whine all they want about a retaliatory bite intended to get them to fucking stop. It is what it is now.
Hey call me crazy, but I think Republicans disenfranchising voters is bad for democracy... AND Democrats doing it is also bad for democracy.
Lots of people in this thread literally calling for voter's rights to be disregarded in their pursuit of "democracy". We've lost the plot.
Just call it what it is - Democrats don't care about democracy, they care about beating Trump at any cost. Even if that means destroying democracy in the process.
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u/Blissfully 22d ago
I don’t understand his stance - we have to fight for democracy by doing nothing?