Politics From The Fifth Dimension

Here's an article from the New Yorker on the reasoning behind the politicians forcing the shutdown.  He likes to call them the "suicide caucus," which is clearly the label he hopes will stick. That's unfortunate because it undermines his argument that they are in fact acting rationally, given their circumstances.

It all comes down to gerrymandering. That's the art of manipulating a district's boundaries to give your party's candidate am advantage.  Here in Canada, as in most countries, that can't happen because the electoral districts are laid out by noon partisan bureaucrats. But in the USA the districts are laid out by committees of politicians. So they try to fix things to their own advantage. That's the answer to the enigma of why congress has the approval rating of steamed brussels sprouts, yet most of the members get re-elected every time.

The Daily Show made a similar point this week, implying that gerrymandering lets politicians have consequence-free careers.  I believe the way they explained it was to say that the Republicans refusing to pass spending legislation could drown kittens and they'd still be re-elected.  But that misses the point that the politicians' actions are actually popular within their districts.  So they do face consequences, but it's the consequences of a very specific segment of the electorate.

A better way to explain it would be to imagine that these politicians come from a parallel universe where the U.S.:

• has very little immigration
• is still not very urban
• has an even older population
• has far fewer black people.

When you picture that alternate America, it's not so surprising that politicians will go to the wall to stop Obamacare.  And I think that's the most interesting/disturbing part about this: the huge changes in society produced by small changes in demographics.  After all, it's not like these hard-core Republican districts have no immigrants or African-Americans, just a lower percentage than the country as a whole.  But shifting a few percent in the demographics changes the balance of power enough to make actions others find radical to be mainstream.  It's another reminder of just how much people can disagree with one another even within one society.