Democracy’s New Lines

It’s time again to redraw our political boundaries, and already the howls resonate, particularly from past beneficiaries: Why do we need to draw new lines? What’s wrong with the old ones? Why can’t we just leave things alone? Wherefore redistricting?

Perhaps a more instructive question is, why, each decade, do we even bother making an accounting of every living man, woman and child in the nation?

The answer is that in addition to providing statistics for social scientists, the national census and resulting process of redistricting force us to breathe new life into our political processes by redefining our notions of community and self-governance.

Redistricting is the process of examining the communities of the governed and checking to see whether the old political boundaries still fit the emerging communities to be served by them.

As each 10-year census defines our changing nation, so too must redistricting occur to ensure a legally defined and meaningful relationship between the electorate and its governing representatives.

Unfortunately, instead of welcoming redistricting, we often regard it as a subversive attempt by a community perceived as illegitimate to thwart the very political system it was designed to reinvent.

Forgotten is the fact that those who founded this country’s system of government were all too aware of the civil wars that ensue when naturally occurring demographic shifts in the population of the governed are ignored by those in power.

To ensure that the United States would never face this calamity, census data collection was institutionalized to force the nation to reevaluate the mechanism by which the cherished one-person, one-vote principle is implemented.

The Founding Fathers were not quaintly ignorant of the fact that competing groups seek to influence government for self-serving reasons. Indeed, they understood that, on a fair and equitable playing field, these competing self-serving interests would balance out to produce the common good. The legal criteria by which political boundaries are redrawn are concomitant to this process.

No less a statesman than Thomas Jefferson noted the existence of competing minority communities of interest, and indeed extolled them as necessary for the continued growth and progress of our democratic nation.

Without differing communities of interests--defined by such things as socioeconomic status, geopolitical and topographic boundaries, age, language and category of employment--the new and varying opinions that lead to democratic input into the political process would be locked out. The resulting government inevitably would grow dangerously stagnant.

Imagine, a 2001 version of our nation’s 1790s government, composed solely of a very few wealthy, middle-aged, male farmers living within 50 miles of the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. California’s electricity crisis would receive even shorter shrift.

The allotment of congressional and electoral votes is the direct result of federal redistricting. Increases in federal funding for health, education and social services can also be directly traced to an acknowledgment of the results of census data.

And, what’s good for the federal government is good for the state and its political subsidiaries. Should California matter in the national scope? Then why shouldn’t the power of the greater Santa Ana area’s electorate matter county-or statewide?

Should the high-tech business interests of Silicon Valley or the biotech firms of San Diego receive equal consideration with those of the Midwest’s farming interests?

Then why not make provisions to make local government inclusive of the interests of an emerging immigrant and other working-family community alongside the already included interests of the upper middle class and white-collar workers?

An inclusive and representative government pertains to all of us. When government works as planned, it works for all.