Have you noticed how often the GOP cheats to win? In the “old days,” cheating to win was often ascribed to the Democrats. That changed with Richard M. Nixon, who lied about a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. It wasn’t really a plan, of course, and the US exit from Vietnam was anything but glorious. And then came the Watergate scandal.” That was followed by the racism of the Southern Strategy, which focused on denying blacks access to the polls and encouraging whites to vote for racist policies. And that has basically been the GOP strategy since, as the “Southern Strategy” of appealing race-based fears works in many places besides the South.
Another way the GOP cheats to win is gerrymandering. Republicans have taken full advantage of redistricting to create districts that maximize their influence over elections, and this has been exacerbated by using computers to determine how best to take advantage of “likely” Republican voters. Without controlling judges and courts, however, gerrymandering would not be possible. And while gerrymandering is increasingly being challenged in the courts, undoing the effects of gerrymandering depends on having honest judges and honest politicians. This has all come to a head recently, of course, with the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court.
It was a Democrat, of course, who came up with the idea to stack the court with judges who would vote a particular way. Franklin Roosevelt wanted judges who would be favorable to his “New Deal” ideas. The Republicans have since taken control of the court one judge at a time and are currently doing everything they can to maintain and increase their advantage on the Court, while the Democrats are thinking about leveling the “playing field” by restacking the court to restore their advantage. Surely there must be a better way.
One of the sayings in academic circles is that “Academic politics are vicious because the stakes are so small.” Larger stakes, however, don’t seem to diminish the viciousness of the politics. The current politics in the States are about as vicious as politics can get without an actual shooting war. A long time ago, liberals were accused of being communists, and a Republican politician named Joseph McCarthy was especially vicious in conducting a “witch hunt” to ferret out communists by subjecting liberals to Joseph Welch, who, after extensive and relentless questioning, finally asked McCarthy, “Have you no mercy?”
Did you ever wonder what things would be like if our politics were less partisan and had more mercy? The main reason for partisanship is, of course, money: who is going to get most of it? Do those who do the work deserve it, or do those who have invested in the tools of production deserve most of it? What do you suppose would happen if political districts were set based on population without taking “likely voters by party affiliation” into account? What do you think would happen if taxes were based on a level “playing field”? It is, of course, difficult to determine what a level playing field would look like, but surely we could do better than the current system, which tends to reward those already rich more for doing less.
It is hard to know what a better system would look like, but throwing the current cheaters out and eliminating corporate donations to politicians would seem a good starting place. Take excessive profits out of the picture to help ensure that those we elect are serving because they want to make a contribution to the well-being of the country rather than to their own pocketbooks. We also have to do a better job of educating the public so that people won’t be so easy to fool. We’ve had the thought before, of course, and each time we tell ourselves that we won’t be fooled again. One of these days we have to do something to ensure that.
