The Redundancy of Redistricting by Race

0:00Irreverent news talk opinion satire. It's Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards and never for the life of me would I have ever thought I'd sit here behind a microphone in my mid-40s talking about gerrymandering between congressional congressional congressional. in the South. Usually it's the kind of topic that makes my eyes roll back into their sockets. Now just hang in there with me for a minute here because I'm going to try to think this through from a place where none of the weapons of identity politics even matter in the first place. No race, no gender, no religious dogma, just people, highly evolved, overly opinionated creatures who all eat, sleep, and poop a lot more than we like to admit.

0:37That's the baseline for me. Us humans are all pretty disgusting, and none of us are any better than the next. At least that's my misanthropic human-first approach to politics and life in general. So when I reluctantly look at this issue of gerrymandering in the South, I'm immediately confused because it all looks vastly more complicated on the surface than it really is. If the real goal of humanity is to move past dividing ourselves into categories of race in gender or religion, then why on earth does the current system involve leaning harder into those same categories? Because it feels like we're reinforcing the very lines that should have been erased decades ago.

1:16Like we're taking a broken system and gerrymandering, and instead of rejecting it outright, we're injecting the complexities of racism now into the equation as if somehow two wrongs make a right. The issues in who gets to draw lines based on race or gender or age or religion or sexual orientation or economic status, it's that the lines can be drawn up in the first place. If representation depends on how districts are carved up like a turkey, this isn't democracy or a constitutional republic. It's a system where outcomes are engineered by controlling how people are grouped. And that can be adjusted behind the scenes.

1:51Manipulated is probably a better word for it. You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship of self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working class is... Oh, there you go. Bringing class into it again. That's what it's all about. Now let me reset this for just a minute because the math just doesn't make any sense to me. We talk about democracy like it's one person, one vote, but then we build these systems where people get grouped in and sorted and counted in blocks like a demographic spreadsheet instead of individuals. Between these convoluted and manipulated congressional district maps and things like the electoral college, it starts to feel a lot less like my vote is my vote and more like I'm being assigned a value based on where I live and who I get lumped in with.

2:31Because that's the reality. All you are is another brick in the wall. And this is where it breaks for me. Because once you accept that grouping people is part of the game, then of course everybody's going to fight over how those groups are defined by geography and politics and race and whatever gives them leverage. But at this point, we're not really talking about representation anymore, are we? We're talking about optimization. We're not being counted as individuals. We're being herded together like cattle, sorted into groups, and sold off to the highest bidder and turned into hot dog meat. So when somebody like me looks at something like redistricting fights, I don't even know if the argument is really about fairness in the way that we pretend that it is.

3:11It's about who gets to define those groups and how much of those groups are worth when the math gets converted into seats. Trumpers today, wokesters tomorrow, and the problem never goes away because we were focused on who was representing us when we should be thinking about how to better represent ourselves. God forbid. It's practically heresy in today's world to say such things. Humans are insanely good at building incredibly complex systems. We design them, we refine them, release a new model every couple of years. But what we're not nearly good at is maintaining the old models. Once the novelty wears off, once the new shiny object comes along, we stop tending to the things that we built.

3:52And instead of fixing what's clearly breaking down, we just start building something new on top of it. The foundation, how we count votes, how we draw districts, how representation actually works, has been neglected for so long that it was hacked and hijacked by the most prolific kind of grifters to walk the planet. And now, instead of stepping back and repairing what allowed this to happen, we're arguing over how to operate within the compromised architecture. So the fight becomes who gets to game the system better, not whether the system itself still makes sense. And that's the part that keeps bothering me.

4:30Because the core mechanism is off. If it's counting groups instead of individuals, it's rewarding manipulation over representation. And no amount of fine-tuning of the edges is going to fix it at this point. Because we're not maintaining the system anymore. We're just competing inside the decay. So let's stop pretending that the system just needs a tune-up. It doesn't. It's on life support. We're operating in a horse-in-buggy version of government in a world already flying down the freeway in a Tesla Model S. And every time we get lapped, we start talking about adding another horse. Horses have fantastic laughs, don't they?

5:08It's the politician of yesterday who brings court fights and commissions and committees. That's not reform. It's hospice care. It's like living in a nursing home in your 50s. We built representative government when information moved at the speed of moving physical votes across the continent via the Pony Express, when it took weeks to communicate across states, when the idea of millions of people directly participating in decisions was physically impossible. That world is gone. Completely gone. Markets move in seconds. Public opinion forms and fractures in real time. And yet our system still insists on moving at the pace of scheduled votes, backroom negotiations, and maps drawn behind closed doors like it's 1787.

5:52It's absurd. The truth that nobody wants to say out loud is that people aren't losing faith because they don't understand the system, they're losing faith because they understand it perfectly. And it's too slow, too insulated, and too easily gamed to keep up with the world that we actually live in. The demand now isn't for better messaging or inventing new congressional districting maps, it's for immediacy, for a system that responds at something closer to the speed of modern life instead of dragging decisions through process designed for a different century. This is yet again another one of those issues where everybody is getting it wrong in my not so humble opinion, except for you, the listener.

6:35Like we're focused on rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and fighting each other about it along red and blue lines. If you honestly believe that liberals are the biggest threat to America, or if you think conservatives are the biggest threat to America, then the bad guys have already won. Because you've been maneuvered into a system that only benefits them, locked into a fight that keeps your attention exactly where they want it, while the system itself goes unquestioned. And as long as we stay trapped in this loop, we're going to keep running on an operating system built in 1776, pretending that it still makes sense in a world that left it behind a long time ago.

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