The Trumpian redistricting project
President Trump has successfully molded both parties into his image, and that is a bad thing for the future of the country.
G.K. Chesterton once said that if we do not know why a fence was erected, we should assume that it was put there for a good reason and our first inclination should be not to tear it down. This would be a good lesson for the nihilistic "burn it all down" elements on both the Right and Left that have little respect for traditions, institutions and norms. Before 2015, conservatives were, well, conservative. They wanted to conserve the status quo or go back to a previous status quo - perhaps by eliminating large government programs. The problem with Trumpism is the desire to just tear everything down, and certainly to dispense with norms that both parties have abided by for generations.
One of these norms is redrawing district boundaries. The state of Texas is redrawing its Congressional district map to add more Republican districts, and states run by Democrats are vowing to gerrymander their own maps. The norm of only redrawing district boundaries once every ten years with new census data has been completely destroyed in just a couple months, something I would not have thought possible a year ago. This pressure has extended to Indiana, which had previously been a model for the nation. I explained why that is a bad idea last month.
Republicans did a similar mid-decade redistricting here in Monroe County, Indiana back in 2005. Republicans had just gone from a 5-2 majority to a 4-3 minority on the Monroe County Council after losing two at-large seats they won in 2000. Republicans argued (correctly) that Democrats had drawn districts to benefit them in 2001, and the new districts would be better. The redistricting failed. Republicans went from holding three of four district seats in 2006 to holding only one in 2007. Redrawing the districts in the middle of the decade was a significant departure from norms. It antagonized people and did not gain Republicans anything long term. It actually harmed the party. I was wrong to support it.
The excuse for the 2025 redistricting battle from both Republicans and Democrats is that "the other side" is doing it, so "we" must do it also. As one Democrat told The Hill, we have to play by their rules:
I'm sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight. We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We've got to stand up and fight!
This is literally the same message we hear from the most aggressively Trumpian elements of the Republican Party, and has been especially common rhetoric from the "alt right" since 2015. President Trump has successfully molded both parties into his image: No compromise, never back down, never apologize, and be as aggressive as possible.
Here is the problem with that mentality: It is actually a good thing to have norms, whether they be norms of decorum, rhetoric, or (in this case) legislative procedure. Yes, I understand the argument that each party has to meet the tactics of "the other side" to remain competitive, but as the years and decades pass, we will regret destroying these norms and we will wish we had not done that. Hopefully this realization comes before we have bloody street battles between Left and Right, as we have already seen in some (thankfully isolated) cases. What we need now is to have "normies" from both sides to come together and oppose the radicalism of the extremes of their parties.