Thread by @jholbo1

A couple days ago I was listening to @SykesCharlie podcast about 'what went wrong in WI', i.e. how did a state R party that was rather resistant to Trump the first time out go completely nuts. 1/

I mean, when all this is over I fully expect Ron Johnson to publish 'If We Did It', a hypothetical account of how Trump supporters would have staged the insurrection - if they had been involved. If there even had been an insurrection. 2/

I think a somewhat neglected factor is the psychology of the gerrymander. Trumpism is most virulent south of the Mason-Dixon for obvious reasons. But WI is stand-out for its extreme, shameless gerrymander politics. 3/ jsonline.com/story/news/sol…

Dems (libs & progs) by no means fail to bewail the unfairness of having legislators pick their own voters, rather than vice versa. Procedurally it's indefensible. But a secondary, negative effect is it drives the 'beneficiaries', in this case R legislators, morally insane. 4/

Those who win by means of gerrymanders should see to it that they do not become gerrymanders themselves. 5/

The following is armchair psychology, not data driven, but see whether it makes sense. Step 1: rig it so as to guarantee you can win reliable majorities with only, say, 45%. Step 2: this allows you to be a more extreme party, which feels like satisfying 'purity'. 6/

Step 3: but this 'purity' results in you being ONLY able to win in a gerrymandered setting. R's are no longer the kind of party that could win a 'fair' election, since there is no longer a 'could get there from here' version of what R's have become that appeals to 51%. 7/

The tipping point between 'I could win this fairly' and 'there's no way I could win this fairly, but I can for sure win it' is highly consequential for fairness but also for psychology. Everyone wants to win, but one wants to be the baddie. Bringing us to: 8/

Step 4: Strategy and confabulation. Strategy: since you no longer foresee a future in which you appeal to most voters, it no longer is attractive to offer good things to most voters. Giving them good lives only makes them stronger, more likely to vote, hence vote against you. 9/

Confabulation: you are now basically thinking & governing as an alien occupier, rather than as a representative of the people. The game is not democracy but hegemony. For R's, the 'purity' of your cleavage to ideals of 'conservatism' has curdled into ethno-oligarchy. 10/

But it is psychologically impossible to admit this, since 'base betrayer of the high ideals this great nation was founded on' is not how R's like to think of themselves. So you try various dodges as ego defense. 11/

There are 'republic not a democracy' lines: I'm a Madisonian! This is nonsense, but the worst, yet most inevitable line is going to be 'it's not Us it's Them.' Namely, there most be some good reason we have gerrymandered ourselves into power, undemocratically. 12/

And that reason must be a true expression of the ideals of American democracy, the founding, all that good stuff. The only possible stories you can tell to square this circle, to massage your ego, are crazily paranoid. 'They' aren't real Americans. 13/

'They' must be cheating, so the gerrymander is only a desperate attempt to re-balance the scale that 'They' first put the thumb on. 'They' are aliens, brought in by Democrats to replace 'Us'. Nothing less than stuff this nuts would make your own anti-democracy strategy ok. 14/

So, having settled more and more inescapably into this gerrymander shape, mentally, you are more and more psychically in need of paranoid-style identity politics, to extenuate what you have done as on the up-and-up, normatively. 15/

So: 10 years after WI's extreme gerrymander, you would expect the state-level GOP to be in the market for vicious, paranoid style politics. The gerrymander is, by nature, a paranoid beast. It thinks everyone is looking at it like it shouldn't be there. Because, duh. 16/

Now, this is more complicated than I'm making it sound. Ron Johnson is a Senator, not a state rep, so he doesn't benefit from WI state-level gerrymanders. But he's part of the grand gerrymander on behalf of rural populations that is the Senate. 17/

If you wanted to design a deliberate body to foster tribal paranoia and toxic identity politics, a 'cooling dish' like the US Senate, given current skews, seems pretty good. And so we get the vote against the 1/6 Commission. 18/

There has been much back and forth about whether the R's are anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic. (Hint: they are.) This @willwilkinson piece is good, pushing back against @JonahDispatch. 19/ modelcitizen.substack.com/p/the-anti-maj…

Will makes the point that Goldberg is basically trying to encode his partisan preferences as beyond democratic revision. Which is true. That is what he is doing, and it's bad. But I would make a related critique. 20/ gfile.thedispatch.com/p/conservatism…

Goldberg is a con and that means he's got a huge ideological blindspot for the law of unintended consequences. (Because he thinks he's got a philosophy - conservatism - that protects himself from problems on this front. Conservatives are like dogmatic Marxists that way.) 22/

Will's piece responds to this earlier Goldberg bit in which he writes, "but a liberal society can be just with remarkably little democracy." The problem is that Goldberg, being a conservative, doesn't worry about instabilities induced by conservatism. 23/ gfile.thedispatch.com/p/major-proble…

If you try to run a liberal democracy with remarkably little democracy you are breeding for apologists & pols, in power, who are more and more illiberal. Because they will - like Goldberg - feel compelled to make out that things that aren't democratic are democratic. 24/

Conservatives see the logic of this sort of instability argument applied to other schools of thought - like liberalism. But it breaks their brains to apply the lesson home. The 'virtue' you are undemocratically preserving is corrupted in the act of preservation. 25/

I should just blog. end/