If democracy and rule of law mean anything, it is that certain norms and principles cannot be violated even for what you consider a good cause. If you had to reduce all illiberal thinking to a single sentence, it would be: “The ends justify the means.”
And yet this ugly sentiment is becoming the unofficial credo of the country’s two political parties.
That is the lesson of Virginia’s ballot measure Tuesday, in which voters approved a Democratic plan for mid-decade congressional redistricting that turns a fair and balanced map into what The New York Times calls “as extreme a gerrymander as exists in the United States.” Instead of favoring Democrats in six of 11 districts, as the current bipartisan plan does, the new one gives Republican voters—as much as 46 percent of the electorate, based on the 2024 presidential election results—the edge in just one district. It does so by linking blue strongholds in the Washington, D.C., suburbs with culturally, economically, and geographically remote patches of the GOP-dominated Virginia countryside.
Some say one misshapen district resembles a crab; the one residual red district, a lobster claw. One thing is certain: This is not what democracy looks like. By Wednesday evening, a judge had sought to block the new map, suggesting that the process that birthed it was void from the start. But that only means we’re in for months of bitter feuding and appeals, after which the map may stand.
