Voters have let the parties take them for granted for so long that we all just accept that partisan gerrymandering will almost always work. It only fails when the party in question loses control of a subset of voters that they might have expected to win, as may occur in Texas this year. But a "dummymander" only trips up the party that drew it because statistics let them down unexpectedly in a limited instance. Voters in general plod along on such predictable paths that districting is destiny.
Does that sound like a free people to you? Does that sound like the outlaws and anti-heroes that Americans pretend to be? I guess pretend is the operative word.
As a "left-leaning" independent, I have been voting consistently Democratic, because a Democrat supermajority would be much more likely yield some of the programs progressives yearn for. A slim majority is just a tease, doomed to failure. The government needs to be strong and fearless, and be able to institute a well-chosen selection of solid policies to prove their concept long before it all gets pushed over by a backlash election just based on party label.
It's not that the Democrats are so great. It's that the Republicans are so...not. Look at them right now: they've let the current occupant of the Oval Office blunder around and shit all over the place, and for what? Seriously, I can only guess. I do not know exactly what the party in power thinks they are doing other than amassing as much wealth as they can and avoiding criminal prosecution.
If international law had any teeth, a whole bunch of them would be in serious trouble right now. Unfortunately, the rules-based international order has about as much real clout as the global environmental movement. "Heyyyyy!! You guyyyyyysss!! Stop it! Stop it now!"
Polling shows that the policies of the party in power are wildly unpopular, but when has that ever translated to a resounding ass-kicking electorally? We barely saved ourselves in 2020. The policies of the Biden administration were great economically, and represented a re-centering of the interests of ordinary citizens in place of the super wealthy, but the handicaps it faced from the pandemic provided just enough economic turbulence to give the GOP a talking point from which to spew lies about all of it. Then Hamas decided that they'd like Trump to be president, and Netanyahu agreed.
Voters have power, but it's all single-shot muskets. It's not dramatic while you're doing it, only afterward if it turns out that enough people agreed with you. If they didn't, it's frustrating at best and horrifying at worst. Right now we're living in "at worst." But that's the mechanism. You vote. It's the basic unit of citizenship.
Anyone content to remain rigidly partisan will continue to fulfill statistical probability. The country gets run by maps, not by people. Not by us people, anyway.
If you believe that the only way to clean up the political system is to collapse the country completely and rebuild from the ashes, you are incorrect. The collapse of this country would lead to such a long period of chaos and weakness that any transition to a better system for regular folks would take many generations. Doing it my way would only take a few election cycles, if we got our shit together about what really matters, and quit focusing on suppressing and persecuting LGBTQ people, controlling women, and imposing any kind of religion onto government. You're never going to get a perfect election. But if voters don't defy the maps and vote against the ignorance, greed, and incompetence of the current party in power we are headed down. Not "down a difficult road" or "down a dark path." Just...down.
