The former surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, drew national attention three years ago by proclaiming that growing social disconnection had led to a national “epidemic of loneliness.” Others have pointed to factors ranging from the emergence of faceless suburbs where neighbors scarcely know each other to the decline of the informal clubs and other organizations that has left Americans with nothing meaningful to belong to.
You can make a pretty good case for those arguments. But if you want to challenge them, you can point to all the interests and activities we can cultivate online, from bird-watching to chess to metallurgy to hobbies and preoccupations significantly smaller than those. If you enjoy collecting matchbook covers, you can easily enough find someone on the Internet who is equally intent on doing that and willing to share insight and discoveries with you. You probably won’t ever meet face to face, but a form of community exists.
Is digital social life a real substitute for physical community? There’s no simple answer to that question. But there’s one point we should all be able to agree on. The design of political constituencies is an important element in the maintenance of community. And that leads to another point: Gerrymandering is mixed up in it. You may consider that a bit of a stretch. I don’t.
For most of the last century, electoral districts were an important emblem of civic belonging. If you voted in a particular congressional district, usually for the same incumbent year after year, that was an ingredient in your identity. Some districts acquired common nicknames, like Virginia’s “Fightin’ Ninth.”
Of course, there was a lot wrong with this static political system. Districts in most of the country were blatantly unequal in population. Tiny rural constituencies often had the same voting strength as much more populous urban ones. Cities were badly disenfranchised. In the South, there was very little diversity of any kind within the confines of any voting entity, and no representation at all for minorities. But the districts were compact and comprehensible. Living in, say, the 7th Congressional District of Tennessee was a little like living in a Catholic parish on the South Side of Chicago. It was where you came from.
ALL OF THAT CHANGED, however, for a variety of reasons, some better than others. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1960s that congressional and state legislative districts had to be equal in population, or as equal as could be achieved. Cities and suburbs got the voting clout they deserved. But this could only be done by destroying the comfortable compactness that defined the old system. Counties and cities were split up and districts were given bizarre and baffling shapes to make the population numbers come out roughly the same for each district. Ordinary citizens lost much of their historic geographical link to the politicians who spoke for them in Congress or in the state legislature.
The 1965 federal Voting Rights Act, admirable in many ways, created a further erosion of the link between representation and community. To maximize minority representation, especially in the South, legislatures and courts designed districts that snaked confusingly across regions of their states, often linked only by narrow strips of land, to come up with constituencies that held enough voters to elect minority candidates. Voters at one end of a given district had little in common with those at the other end, if they knew anything about them at all.
All of this was happening at a moment when computer technology and enhanced demographic data were making it possible for each party to draw carefully sculpted districts that gave them just the electoral results they wanted. The U.S. Supreme Court, in refusing to take action against partisan gerrymandering, encouraged the parties to undertake ever more elaborate exercises in map-making mischief. This year’s court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act made that sort of mischief all but inevitable.
Perhaps the best current example of community-breaking political cartography has taken place in Tennessee, where the Republican-led legislature has redrawn the political maps of Nashville and Memphis, dividing the cities’ residents among Republican-leaning districts that eliminate the allegiance to common identity altogether. As my longtime Governing colleague Bill Fulton declared succinctly of the Nashville changes, “The result is that partisanship trumps community.”
THERE’S NO POINT in pretending that partisan redistricting is anything new, or even recent. The original gerrymander, as most of us know, was a squiggly and twisting monstrosity of a district in Massachusetts, the result of legislation signed in 1812 by Gov. Elbridge Gerry to maximize his party’s representation. One observer thought it looked like a salamander, so a new term was coined and persists to this day.
The practice of manipulating voting districts has continued ever since. When the 1920 census showed heavy urban population gains, rural Republicans in Congress refused even to recalculate state-by-state representation, lest cities capture an unprecedented advantage. So Congress wasn’t redistricted for an entire decade.
In 2003, U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay persuaded the Texas Legislature to create a mid-decade Republican-leaning map, without the benefit of any new census information. In the years since then, legislators in quite a few states have managed to push through DeLay-style remaps to create a blatant partisan advantage. Democrats and Republicans are divided roughly evenly in Wisconsin, but the GOP legislative majority has drawn district lines that have kept it in power year after year. In Maryland, a Democratic state, the legislature has carefully crafted district lines that create an even more lopsided Democratic advantage. In these states and many more, the prevalence of gerrymandering has eliminated any discernible attachment of ordinary citizens to coherent community representation.
So the rash of partisan redistricting efforts launched by both parties this year is an embellishment of a shady but legal practice that dates back two centuries in American government. Yet it is happening in so many places that it seems a perversion of the entire political process, especially when the Supreme Court refuses to do anything about it. Just two decades ago, according to political science researchers, there were about 50 congressional constituencies out of 435 that could legitimately be described as competitive. This year, the number may be more like 20. The other 415 will be safe districts for one party or the other, the result of partisan line-drawing.
As critics have repeatedly charged, the political system has all but eliminated partisan competition. And it has steadily eroded the relationship between constituency and community that used to be fundamental to the nation’s public life.
THE OBVIOUS QUESTION is whether there is anything practical that can be done about this. Remedies have been tried. Eleven states, for example, use commissions to draw congressional district maps, rather than leaving the job to the legislature, and most of the commissions are advertised as either nonpartisan or bipartisan.
The process has worked in some states. But it is inherently flawed. In most commission states, the legislature can override the commission’s work if it chooses to. Earlier this year, Democrats in the Virginia legislature got a constitutional amendment passed overriding the state’s nonpartisan commission to draw a new district map enhancing their party’s congressional representation, in retaliation for partisan actions by Republicans in other states. The Democratic gerrymander was thrown out in court, but the whole episode underscored just how fragile the commission remedy can be. Perhaps most important, it is almost impossible for commission members to ignore partisan considerations, even if they are directed not to think about them.
The one sure way to eliminate gerrymandering and the dearth of competitive districts is to enact some form of proportional representation in a state or a collection of districts larger than the current ones. A slate of candidates that drew 40 percent of the vote in one of these bigger constituencies would be entitled to roughly 40 percent of the seats within its boundaries.
There is quite a bit to like about proportional representation. Voting blocs that are now rendered silent within a constituency would find themselves with a voice in its legislative chamber. Competition would re-emerge at the district level.
But there is much about proportional representation that is not so attractive. With a plethora of interests taking a place in a legislative body, especially at a time of political polarization, there is a strong possibility of multiparty chaos and unstable majorities that would be made and unmade as often as every few months. Proportional representation has worked in a few European countries, where some form of national consensus exists. But it has led to instability and political unrest in countries that lack this consensus, such as Italy and Israel.
And proportional representation would totally unravel the few links between constituency and community that still remain. That would drive us further into the depersonalization of politics and social life.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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