Sorry for how long this post will be. I tried to be succinct.
Your arguments about gerrymandering were all about the intentions. The term gerrymandering implies intention. Without intention there is no gerrymandering.
Of course people who gerrymander have the intent to gain a partisan advantage, but it's the partisan advantage that is the problem, not the intent in and of itself. If people had the intent to gerrymander and never carried through on it, I wouldn't care.
But you tell me we aren't talking about intention, we are just talking about anything that gives one group disproportionate influence, as we see in the Senate.
I've mentioned several times that nothing I've posted here with you is about anything but gerrymandering the US House (and maybe the state legislatures, but let's keep it simple). Other bodies in the US gov't have other concerns. I'm going to start a new post in this thread (soon, I hope) that will expand on this.
This is a line of reasoning that applies to all bodies.
Well, I guess the time is now, actually.
We have a choice between viewing our political system as one in which the end is power for power's sake, and all the levers and influences and institutions and norms are things to be manipulated for the end of gaining power. You have articulated something close to this perspective several times.
On the other hand, we can choose the value of democracy and the will of the people as the end, and our political system as the means to achieve that end, insofar as that is possible. And, when circumstances require, we must limit the ideal of the value of democracy. Rarely is a value expressed purely. Free speech must be limited for certain reasons, etc.
There are various institutions in our gov't that are not very pure expressions of our democracy - the Senate, the electoral college, etc. - because the founders/we have decided that there are necessities - preventing too much power from accumulating in one person or institution, for instance - that require those values to be compromised.
But the US House is the place where the most pure expression of the electorate is found. And that is precisely why my arguments are only directed at gerrymandering the House (although similar considerations apply to state legislature elections). There is no reason to prevent the direct will of the electorate to be expressed in House elections, other than partisanship, which is something the founders saw to be a danger, and boy were they right. There *are* reasons beyond partisanship that the Senate, the electoral college, term limits, etc., are instituted.
If we are just against disproportionate influence, then we are against all sorts of things.
I'm not (necessarily), see above.
Do the big cities and states not have advantages in terms of finance and power to allow them to influence politics?
First of all, I think you mean "people in big cities and states, right?" It's not the city itself as a governmental entity. Secondly, it's not the states, because I'm only talking about US House gerrymandering. Thirdly, see below about not balancing both sides of an issue, but balancing institutions and letting elections decide issues.
Is the Democrat attitude to the border and illegal immigration a partisan issue that should be stopped because ultimately it will result in them having more supporters, or do we exclude that from the calculus?
This has nothing to do with gerrymandering. Really different considerations apply. If it helps, Dems can be partisan, too. Heck, we see that with gerrymandering, of all things. It's just that the Repubs do it a lot better.
What people tend to do is fixate on the imbalances that disadvantage them and regard that as unfair, and look at the imbalances that assist them as necessary and inevitable parts of life.
I'm not "people," I'm me, making a specific argument against gerrymandering. Please address my argument.
OK. When you stated your axiom you were talking about the purpose of the action and what it was attempting to achieve. If indeed intentions are off the table, then I withdraw this objection.
OK
Yes, I caught that in my post and changed it to redistricting. We got out of sync. I meant redistricting.
check
Within the state you have similar interests to balance as between states. At the end of the day, it's a compromise about balancing interests.
It's not the interests that have to be balanced in a political system, it's the sources of power that have to be separated, balanced, etc. If some group of voters or politicians have an interest in a policy in which everyone's nose gets cut off, nothing has to be balanced: an election on that issue, or an election for public office where a candidate holds or is against that issue, will resolve the issue just fine.
The compromise happens in constructing the institutions. It's about the process, not the end result. If the process is proper, then we let the chips fall where they may (this includes everyone, including the minority, having certain rights that cannot be trampled by the majority).
This is another common difference in the ways these problems are looked at. You want to look at this one factor in the organisation of elections and have it justify itself as "fair" in isolation. It's not an isolated factor though. It's a compromise balancing a bunch of different things pulling in different directions. No compromise deal is fair if you look at it as individual lines that give more to one side of the deal than another.
Actually, I made the point above that, when House elections are looked at in the context of all the other institutions, we see that it's the House that is the place in which the will of the electorate gets to be expressed directly and immediately, as opposed to the longer terms in the Senate, and primacy of the states in Senate elections, etc.
And, again, the reason why the pure and direct will of the electorate is compromised in other institutions is for specific, practical reasons. Gerrymandering, on the other hand, produces partisan advantage.
Two other random points:
Previously you have characterized some aspect of my position as a moral one, but I disagree with that. It is certainly not moralistic, if that conveys a more clear implication. I see it as choosing the
value of democracy, as distinct from a moral position; limited where it must be, but defended when it needs to be, and it needs to be defended against gerrymandering given the situation I've just outlined.
The other thing you're trying to do is to draw larger implications, imagining that my fight against gerrymandering reflects a larger influence - of technocracy (and my position isn't that: it is a coincidence, not a necessity, that the solution to remove partisanship from redistricting is a mathematical solution), or of a desire for pure, direct democracy in every institution, etc.
Republicans and Democrats should just agree to frame issues according to Democrat moral assumptions, because they are neutral and nonpartisan, and then Republicans and Democrats can fight it out to their hearts content about how to implement Democrat ideas.
