A Quick Story About How Leftists Are Sometimes Republicans' Best Friends
And there's something in here about journalism, too
Texas Republicans are trying to gerrymander a House map that will give them five additional seats with zero additional votes. This could spark a nation-wide gerrymandering war, which will be like the war in Sudan in that most people will never even know that it’s happening. But if Texas implements the new map and California responds, then we’re one step closer to having our representatives chosen by computers, and not even in a dystopian Black Mirror way that — though nightmarish — would at least be kind of cool.
Gerrymandering is not new. The name comes from Vice President Elbridge Gerry, who — despite being a key figure in the Revolutionary War, signing both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and being second in charge in a well-regarded administration — is today remembered for inventing squiggly maps. But hyper-partisanship and computers have greatly expanded what’s achievable through gerrymandering: It’s theoretically possible to create a California map that would send 52 Democrats and 0 Republicans to Congress despite the state being about 40 percent Republican. And worse still for Republicans: That map would be enacted by Gavin Newsom, who is already sending dick-swinging tweets like “FAFO”1 about a potential gerrymandering fight, so this map would get Republicans a blue wave and several news cycles of Gavin Newsom at his defiant sassiest.
At the John Oliver show, we did a piece about gerrymandering in 2017. The piece was my pitch, and I was one of the two lead writers. The story I have to tell about that piece is about how the researcher assigned to the piece — a leftist — pushed hard to make the piece more about Democrats. Which, of course, is the Republican talking point: “Democrats gerrymander, too.” And that talking point is true in the most basic sense — Democrats are absolutely guilty of gerrymandering — but portraying gerrymandering as an issue where both sides are equally guilty is the type of bias-through-emphasis problem that I’m always complaining about on this blog.
About this researcher: She is very far left and positively hates Democrats. She had a Joe Biden voodoo doll in her office and was constantly pitching anti-Biden pieces. She never met a Hillary Clinton “scandal” that she didn’t try to get on the show — it’s only by the grace of God that no John Oliver piece exists about the Uranium One bullshit — and she once accused me of being unwilling to believe conspiracy theories about the government because I had been a federal employee for nine years. Which I guess is partly true: I am, indeed, slow to believe tales of an evil puppet master government because I mostly encountered well-meaning people in coffee-stained shirts too snowed in by emails to execute a global conspiracy to oppress the proletariat.
And let’s be blunt about the relationship between liberals and leftists: We hate each other. We are not the same thing — we come from different philosophical traditions and often have different goals. But there’s just enough overlap in our goals that we’re frequent coalition partners, because neither group can form a majority without the other. So, we’re in a shotgun marriage teeming with mutual disdain; leftists think that liberals are pantywaists, liberals think that leftists are morons, and both perceptions are basically correct.