I don’t know if it’s a placebo effect, but in the week since I found out that my magic body is absorbing a part of a broken spinal disc and I might not have to have surgery after all, I’m feeling better every day. And with my returning health has come the ability to write more; I’ve already got enough good topics for three columns next week.
First up, though, regular readers know that I have an ongoing, long-term discussion and debate on all things political with a good old lefty friend of mine. This week he raised the question of the gerrymanders, expressing the opinion that SCOTUS and the Virginia state supreme court wrongly made it easier for the GOP to gerrymander in their favor, and harder for the Democrats to do the same.
Of course I explained – using logic, facts and wit – that he was 180 degrees wrong. Inexplicably, he has not yet rushed to agree with me. But after our most recent exchange, I came across a very good piece on gerrymandering on the American Thinker website. It’s written by Jeremy Egerer, and titled, “The Real Problem with Gerrymandering.”
My take on the subject has been that it’s a sleazy process, but in the real world, it’s hard to imagine a more moral system replacing it. Because after every census, districts have to be re-drawn, and the party with a majority of the legislature naturally does the re-drawing. And it’s more than we can hope for to ask fellow fallen humans to redistrict perfectly fairly, without giving at least some advantage to their party.
But Egerer makes an impassioned plea to the better angels of our nature, warning that gerrymandering is clearly cheating, and will almost certainly result in a race to the bottom, with increasingly draconian cheating that ends in an even more polarized and low-trust society than we have today. We’re on that path now, for sure.
Egerer points out that taking many voting integrity measures – requiring ID, counting only citizens in the Census, getting rid of massive mail-in and ballot harvesting – would help a lot. He also called for each state to create bi-partisan commissions to redistrict in a fair way. I’m cynical enough to see that as unlikely – I’ve rarely seen a “bipartisan commission” that didn’t devolve into an exercise in blame-shifting or a return to partisan bickering. On the other hand, the article points out that both CA and VA had recently created just such a commission, and in both cases the results were maps that were much fairer than you’d expect.
Of course, in the last 6 months both of those states blew those maps up, and pushed through a partisan gerrymander that was as abusive and corrupt as you’d expect from hacks like Newsom and Spanberger. So…yeah.
However, the article also introduced me to a term that I’ve never heard before, but which I’ll probably be using a lot in the future: “clock setting.” It’s the tendency of most people in arguments to tell the story beginning at the point that makes them look the best. Example: Two guys in a bar are arguing about something, and things get heated enough that Guy A insults Guy B’s mother; then Guy B throws his drink in Guy A’s face; then Guy A punches Guy B.
And yada yada yada, they both end up in the hospital.
Ask Guy A what started the fight, and he says it started when Guy B threw his drink in his face. Ask Guy B the same thing, and he’ll either say that the fight started when Guy A insulted his mother, or when Guy A punched him. Each guy “sets the clock” (i.e. starts the story) in a way that makes him look like the aggrieved party, and the good guy.
The same thing happens in arguments about war and politics. Pro Hamasniks wail that the evil Jews started genociding them on 10/8/23. (Never mind that that’s utter BS, since the IDF has killed by far the lowest ratio of civilians to combatants in the history of warfare, modern or ancient.) In other words, Hamas fans set their clock right AFTER hundreds of evil Hamas thugs raided into Israel, tortured, raped and slaughtered 1200 unarmed civilians, and took hundreds more as hostages to be brutalized and often killed.
And THEN the Jews started being mean to Hamas for no reason!
And when the Jews tell the stories of their battles with the hostile surrounding countries, they similarly start their stories at the point when jihadis attacked them, without all of the preliminaries from the previous years/decades/centuries/millenia.
Similarly, both sides of the gerrymandering debate conveniently set their clock/start their story so as to make themselves the retaliators rather than the instigators. Even such wise gentlemen as my lefty friend and I (!) did the same thing in our emails.
He took the Dem line that VA was righteously responding to TX’s prior action (which was hideously unjust), and I gathered the stats from five blue states and five red states to argue that prior to this year, the Dems had much more unfairly gerrymandered than the GOP had, and thus the recent red state gerrymanders were just leveling the playing field against the Dems, who cheated first, and cheated way more (disenfranchising 22% of conservatives on average, compared to the GOP disenfranchising 11% of libs on average).
Okay, of course I made the better argument, and I’ve got truth, justice and the American Way on my side. Expectedly!
But I think we can all profit from remembering the concept of clock setting. It can help us consider an argument in a more full and fair context, and it can also reveal to us the bias and ideological blind spots in our own arguments. Maybe most crucially, it might also help us recognize that at some point we need to agree to re-set the clock, so that old arguments and grudges can’t continue to poison the present and future.
For example, I think many of our racial tensions arise from wildly different times to set the clock. The most vitriolic black activists start the clock during Jim Crow, or before the Civil War, or even – for the most historically illiterate, who can be conned by a huckster like Nikole Hannah-Jones – in 1619. Most conservatives tend to start the clock around the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s, since those ended institutional discrimination, and happened before most Americans living today became adults, if they were even born by then.
Starting the clock too long ago is always going to be a hard sell, and an impediment to society-wide buy-in. For black activists to ever be paid reparations for slavery, they’re going to have to convince millions of people whose ancestors arrived in America after slavery had already been abolished that they should pay people whose great-great-grandparents came of age after slavery.
Spoiler alert: that is never going to happen.
However, often the best counter-move against someone setting the clock back very far is to set it back even farther. So when some condescending grievance study major lectures us about how we stole some land on the Eastern seaboard from the Iroquois and must give it back, we can point out that the Iroquois stole it from the Potawatomi, who stole it from the Shawnee, all the way back to the prehistoric Mound Builders.
So no, Elizabeth Warren, you can’t claim Boston, you phony old cracker!
(#wemustneverstopmockingher)
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Martin Simpson 