I ran into a few people who found as being a bit extreme the view I hold that gerrymandering is on the authoritarian spectrum. Well, it is authoritarian in its essence. It's about insulating the ruling party from changes in public opinion.

The essence of authoritarianism is that the ruling individual or party isn't going anywhere, even if the people really want them gone. The most extreme manifestation is a violent military regime. A "softer" version was the Jim Crow South.

This country did have a one party dictatorship in about a third of the country from the late 19th Century until the 1960s. We would've called it a one party dictatorship in any other country. That's what it was here. We need to accept that.

Gerrymandering is in that particular tradition. It's about thwarting the will of the voters to, in its most extreme forms, allow a party to retain power even if it decisively loses the battle for popular support. It can sometimes be as extreme as 60-40 splits.

When people wonder where some of the more bonkers manifestations of authoritarian thinking have come from in this country, normalizing the idea that it's okay for parties to consolidate their rule through unrepresentative maps is right in line with that.

If you're trying to make it functionally impossible, or at least very difficult, for the other party to ever gain power, is it any surprise that some people would go to the next logical step and say "Why run even a small risk that the other party can ever take power?"

Authoritarianism and autocracy aren't totally foreign to this country. We've had them to various extents at different points in time and at different levels of government. Gerrymandering is one of those soft manifestations we've decided to accept, though we shouldn't.