The greatest threat to our democracy isn't just Trump, but how he could get reelected | Opinion

When I was in high school, there was this cheer that my schoolmates and I used to chant at the top of our lungs at the varsity football games whenever our team wasn’t winning. It went like this:

Left is left and right is right! If we don’t win the game we’ll win the fight!

Regardless of what it said on the scoreboard once the game was over, we planned on winning that contest by any means necessary. Because we had no intention of accepting defeat.

But then, of course, there were always teachers and a number of other adults standing nearby, giving us the disapproving looks we craved. And so we rarely got the chance to follow through on our threatening taunts. Truth be told, we were mostly only interested in making loud threats, thumping our chests, and jeering.

But when I think back to that rather juvenile fight song, it makes me think of another rowdy group of juveniles: today’s Trump-worshipping Republican Party. On Jan. 6, 2021, when hordes of crazed Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election and de-elect President Joe Biden, they were effectively chanting that same song:

Left is left and right is right! If we don’t win the game we’ll win the fight!

They knew they had lost the game, so it was time to toss the rules aside and win by any means necessary, democracy be damned. Because who needs rules when chaos and anarchy can be so much more fun?

Gerrymandering to fascism sounds like a stretch. 2024 could show why it's not.

After all, democracy is for punks and losers, right? Democracy is for those not strong enough to take whatever they want, whenever they want, and stomp anyone in the way into the ground. Or simply toss them into concentration camps.

But fascism is for winners, buddy. For those who don’t know, fascism is defined by The Britannica Dictionary as “a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government.”

Because disagreement and debate can be complicated. When people disagree on things in public and then debate those disagreements, those exchanges can force people to think, and maybe even to challenge their own previously held assumptions. And not only does democracy permit disagreement and debate, but it actually allows regular citizens to openly challenge and criticize their elected leaders.

But who wants that? Better to just shut up and do what you’re told.

Better for who, though?

This brings me, at long last, to the problem posed by gerrymandering. You might think this is a bit of a stretch — from fascism to gerrymandering — and I wish it were. But the way things are going, it’s not. Because on its current course, the perverse effects of gerrymandering are following along in joyful lockstep with the Great American Tradition of steamrolling the less connected masses to perpetuate the rules and desires of the exponentially more powerful, connected, and wealthy few who could care less what they want.

Redistricting ignores the will of voters, tilts the board in favor of the powerful

In representative democracies like ours, gerrymandering “is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create an undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency.

The elected officials who claim that advantage are doing so on the state level, mostly as card-carrying members of the Cult of Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president who has openly and publicly expressed his intention to ignore all boundaries of democracy and punish all opponents and dissidents.

Trump didn’t need gerrymandered legislative districts to win. He had the Electoral College. Remember that Trump didn’t win a majority of voters in 2016 when he became president (George W. Bush was the last Republican presidential candidate to win both the election and the popular vote in 2004).

The skewed mathematics of the Electoral College makes it easy for the will of the majority to be ignored, which is why Hillary Clinton lost the election, even though she had 3 million more votes. The Electoral College essentially hands the power of presidential elections over to the states in a blatantly unequal fashion, totally blind to the actual size and demographics of populations.

Meanwhile, gerrymandering works furiously on the state level to ensure that those communities most in need of a voice and representation in government never get it by allowing those who represent minority views to consolidate power and run roughshod over the rest of us.

Michigan, at least, took a strong step toward dismantling the chokehold of gerrymandering, resulting in a statewide Democratic sweep in 2022. Unfortunately, the newfangled redistricting process also eliminated any Black representation from Detroit for the first time in decades.

Again, this turbocharged gerrymandering is being done in service of Trump. Not least because, should the Electoral College fail, his adherents hope state Legislatures can appoint him president. Republican elected officials in swing states like Wisconsin and North Carolina are determined Trump will be resurrected as their Dear Leader in 2024, free to elevate them to levels of power and influence commensurate with their demonstrated loyalty to Dear Leader upon his assuming the throne — and also to yank up democracy by the root so that he will never again have to listen to or be constrained by those dirty little American people.

In representative democracies, the people can’t be counted on to do the bidding of the rich and powerful. Gerrymandering tilts the board in their favor.

Michael Sozan wrote in Cap 20 earlier this month that the U.S. has been on a “long arc” toward a multiracial democracy that represents all Americans, even those who have historically been marginalized:

“Yet opponents of a more pluralistic democracy are erecting barriers at the federal and state levels designed to lock in political minority rule and slow the nation’s progress."

Another article by Sheldon Jacobson published two years ago on April 1, 2021, in The Hill offers the opinion that “The greatest threat to our democracy does not reside in the White House.”

“Last year’s campaign rarely mentioned gerrymandering, yet it presents the greatest threat to our nation’s democracy,” he says.

And the greatest threat to that threat is all of us. Because there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them; we just need to act like it. Remember the red wave? Me either. That wave killer was us.

Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters. Become a subscriber at Freep.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 2024 will put gerrymandering's chokehold on US democracy to the test