The gerrymandering wars is a flashing warning light for US democracy

After the extraordinary scene of Texas Democrats fleeing their state to forestall a rare mid-decade gerrymander, Texas Republicans nevertheless moved this week to approve a new congressional map. It is designed to give their party five additional seats in Congress in next year’s midterm elections, as requested by President Trump. 

California Democrats responded this week by rushing to advance their own plan to draw a new congressional map to counter Texas Republicans. Red and Blue states across the country are now predictably threatening to join this bare-knuckle political brawl. 

Although partisan gerrymandering has sadly become a routine practice pushing us further into tribalism and dysfunction, the current crisis should be seen for what it is: a flashing red warning light for our democracy. 

Indeed, if this race to the bottom continues, every aspect of our democratic system of governance could be captured by extreme partisanship, and every last vestige of trust necessary for that system to work could soon be lost. At that point, it may well be too late to change course. 

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) has proposed the best way out of the current standoff: a federal bipartisan embrace of independent commissions to draw electoral maps so that voters can choose their politicians rather than self-interested politicians cynically rigging the system to their partisan advantage.

That would solve the immediate crisis, but we must also confront the larger issue of extremism dominating our politics.

The truth is our democratic system has been completely hijacked to yield outsized power to the partisan fringes. These voters on the far left and right of the political mainstream view politics as an existential tribal struggle that must be won at all costs, and they thus demand that their elected officials engage in tribal warfare and scorched-earth politics. 

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Election Lies: Trump is preparing to deny another loss

Former President Donald Trump has escalated his long-running assault on the integrity of US elections as the 2024 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, using a new series of lies about ballots, vote-counting and the election process to lay the groundwork to challenge a potential defeat in November.

Nonpartisan democracy experts say they’re seeing many of the same warning signs that were blinking red before Election Day four years ago, when Trump flooded the zone with election lies and conspiracy theories that he amplified after losing to Joe Biden. His campaign of deception culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“The threats have not abated; they have only increased,” said Lindsay Daniels, a senior director at the nonpartisan Democracy Fund, which works to strengthen US democracy. “We saw a lot of activity in 2020 around peddling false claims and frivolous lawsuits. We are already seeing signs now, stage-setting, that these things may be attempted again.”

Trump has made at least 12 distinct false claims over the last two months that raise baseless doubts about the validity of a potential victory by Vice President Kamala Harris. (Recent polls suggest the race is very close, and Trump could certainly still win.)

Trump, who wrongly insists the 2020 election was marred by massive fraud, said at a debate in June that he will accept the 2024 results regardless of who wins “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.” A majority of Trump supporters in battleground states like Michigan, Arizona, and Pennsylvania now say they’re “not at all confident” or only “just a little” confident the results will be accurately tallied, according to recent CNN polling.

Trump has lied about the legitimacy of the vote counts in key states, the reliability of mail-in and overseas ballots, the size of Harris’ crowds at rallies, and more. Here’s a fact check of these and other claims.

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The Politics of Nostalgia: A critical examination of democracy

...It was not always so. The greatest philosophers of antiquity—Plato and Aristotle—both considered democracy a rather inferior form of political life. Plato has Socrates claim that democratic citizens are dominated by licentious passion rather than reason: “they call insolence good education; anarchy, freedom; wastefulness, magnificence; and shamelessness, courage” (Republic 560e). He says that it is the sort of regime favoured by children and women—i.e. those in whom reason is weak (Republic 557c). Aristotle distinguishes between good forms of government, in which the rulers have the common good of the whole city as their goal, and bad ones, in which they rule for their own private interests. He gives the name “democracy” to one of the bad regimes: that in which the poor rule for the private advantage of their own class (Politics 1279a-b). In the Christian Middle Ages monarchy rather than democracy was the most common form of government, and to many medieval thinkers this seemed perfectly reasonable.[1]

A very interesting read via The Young Fogey and Modestinus.
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Caution: This a long post and it's not light reading. Also it is heavily Roman Catholic in its reasoning, but many of the points are sound.

Ask me again why I am a monarchist

These are the people who will choose the next Congress and the next President of the United States.

Detroit's Death by Democracy

In 1860, an uneasy Charles Darwin confided in a letter to a friend: “I had no intention to write atheistically” but “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” What appalled him had fascinated entomologist William Kirby (1759-1850): The ichneumon fly inserts an egg in a caterpillar, and the larva hatched from the egg, he said, “gnaws the inside of the caterpillar, and though at last it has devoured almost every part of it except the skin and intestines, carefully all this time avoids injuring the vital organs, as if aware that its own existence depends on that of the insect on which it preys!”

Government employees’ unions living parasitically on Detroit have been less aware than ichneumon larvae. About them, and their collaborators in the political class, the question is: What. Were. They. Thinking? Well, how did Bernie Madoff or the Enron executives convince themselves their houses of cards would never collapse?

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