A republic, if you can keep it

An essay on how America is full of dirty cheaters

Dear L,

Before any Republicans accuse me of being a hopeless idealist, a traitor, or another conservative milquetoast, I want to say one thing. And it’s that if anybody deserves to lose their vote, it’s Democrats.

A quick look at the cities they run proves they shouldn’t be allowed to run a dog park*. Detroit was called Motor City and The Paris of the Midwest. San Francisco was called The Golden City. Chicago was the Paris of the Prairie. Cincinnati was The Queen City of the West. Philadelphia and Boston were both called The Athens of America. Nobody calls them these names anymore — unless of course they’re being sarcastic.

Memphis, Portland, New York City, Seattle, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and even Washington DC were also known at one time as beacons of civilization — remarkable for culture, industry, and architecture. Now each of them is known for rape and murder, robberies and race riots, junkies, white and capital flight, bad schools, rotting factories, infrastructure on the fritz, and crazy people shitting on streets. And somehow, despite being full of third-worlders, white false Christs and killer clowns, they’re still some of the most unaffordable places to live in the US. A hell of a legacy for the left wing — or, more appropriately, a legacy from hell.

What this proves is that, if we require testing to drive a car, we ought to test people before letting them drive a city. This test should include basic economics, civics, and, in a city of 300,000 or more, a test about the structure of state and city governments. But this is almost beside the point. In any remotely democratic environment, stupid people have always been allowed to vote. And I remind you that people always think the person who votes against them is stupid anyway.

Thus the whole point of a republic isn’t to enforce all the most brilliant ideas. It’s to not let one arrogant and selfish group bulldoze all the others. It’s the belief that if any group oversteps its boundaries, the pain itself (and the ensuing anger) should lead the other people to fix it. In other words, the real question, today, in our republic, is whether stupid people should be allowed to cheat.

Because gerrymandering is cheating. And our states have been gerrymandered badly for a long time — most usually to benefit Democrats. But when Texas accused Democrats of leaving the border open, thus flooding Texas with illegal immigrants and giving representatives and electoral votes to New York and California, Texas redistricted to “balance things out” — one obvious cheat for another.

California responded by nearly shutting Republicans out. Then Virginia tried to shut Republicans out, and their state Supreme Court, with great reason, said they broke constitutional law in the way they tried to do it. The court said you had to do the wrong thing in the right way — and the federal Supreme Court agreed. They said there’s no federal right to stop anyone from shutting out the other party in any state. Amazingly, according to federal law, it’s only illegal to shut out a race.

This made things even hairier, because the entire South had already been gerrymandered to favor blacks. Now the whole South is trying to undo it, and whether right or wrong, the Democrats are crying foul — primarily because they’re losing. Democrats say they had to gerrymander the South because the South had a history of shutting out black votes. Which, if you look at a district map, is the same case Republicans could make about being entirely shut out of New England**. (Currently, Republicans comprise about 40 percent of New Englanders, and get zero elected representatives in Congress. Black people make up around 20 percent of the South — and before 2026, due to race-based gerrymandering, they picked about 15 seats. All of which went to Democrats).

I’m not saying Democrats have a good case against the South. I’m also not saying Republicans are all right. Some of the redistricting Republicans are doing — such as splitting Memphis into three distinct districts — is clearly a power play. What I’m saying is that if we don’t quit all this cheating, we’ll quickly find ourselves in a race to the bottom. Once we’re convinced that votes are either fake or don’t count, there’s no peaceful resolution available. You either make voting fair or it’s “taxation without representation.” And nobody should know better about how that ends than Americans.

The big obstacle we have to get over to fix all this, other than cheaters, is psychological — and it's called “clock setting.” Clock setting is when you start your story when the other guy struck first. It doesn’t say why he hit you, and thus pretends you didn’t do anything to deserve it. It’s a cheap move designed to wipe away your sins and rob the enemy of all merit — like saying your husband punched you without saying you hit him over the head with a frying pan first. Or like saying Christians tried to steal The Holy Land without mentioning the Muslims already stole it from Christians. Or saying what Germany did to Jews without explaining what communist Jews were trying to do to Germany (hint: it already happened in Soviet Russia***). In this case Democrats and Republicans both say the other drew first blood. I’m here to tell you why that almost doesn't matter.

Gandhi said an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind because once you start looking at the paper trail, almost everyone can accuse their enemy of drawing first or clock-setting. And once you go too far back in the chain of events everything begins to get silly. One moment you’re fighting because somebody socked you in the nose. And the next you’re arguing because Charles VI took Naples from Spain.

So if you want to know where to really begin a conflict, a better question would be where does it end? Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. This is because any idiot can start a war; but it takes a certain kind of man to make peace. And heaven can only be filled with the latter.

Thus the best solution to cheating in elections isn’t to cheat back, but to remove all grounds for accusation. It would be to end birthright citizenship immediately for children of illegal aliens. It would be to count only citizens on the census, thus denying extra representatives and electoral votes to anyone who wouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway. It would be requiring an ID at voting booths, giving everyone a federal holiday to vote, and getting rid of electronic voting. It would also get rid of ballot harvesting and (aside from the military) voting-by-mail — two common causes of legitimate suspicion. And finally, we should force every state to have a bi-partisan commission for redistricting, to ensure nobody is allowed to do any gerrymandering.

The alternative to this is cheat or be cheated. And to be frank, in the long run, on this level, I think the Democrats have a history of winning***.

Yours,

-J

*An important question might be asked here. If Republicans are so great, why do Democrats run all the biggest cities? Why, in the last 50 years, have they owned the most centers of industry and culture?

My answer is simple. You can’t turn a village into an industrial society with leftism. Leftism can only thrive where some other non-leftist has already built something great. Leftism is a taking of capital — not a making of capital. Unlike business, which creates products and services which didn't exist, leftism is a reimagining and repurposing of wealth that already exists. Thus leftists are strongest only where there is capital to take. By nature, leftism is parasitic.

A city can only get big because geniuses build big things. Then it attracts people who who can't dream stuff on their own, but need good jobs. Then, once the population swells, people show up who are allured by the anonymity, the opportunity, the novelty and sex of a big city, and can barely hold the worst jobs.

Once a city reaches this state, the geniuses usually get cocky and greedy and overstep their boundaries. The booming market drives home prices up, displacing the incapables and the natives, at which point the leftist shows up, calling attention to the crimes and/or indiscretions of the geniuses. And he woos the job-holders, the racial “minorities,” and the proletariat with promises of loot.

At which point the genius is either cut down to size, or he packs up his bags and high-tails it somewhere else.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says that in 2023 alone, more firms migrated to red Florida and Texas than any place else — a relocation of HQs numbering in the hundreds. And by contrast, no state lost more firms than blue California, Illinois, and New York. Among these illustrious losses over the years are Chevron, Tesla, Oracle, Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard, Citadel, McKesson, X (formerly known as Twitter), AECOM, FICO, Public Storage, Dutch Bros and SpaceX. Hollywood itself has fled to places like Canada and Georgia. JP Morgan has more employees in Texas than in New York now, and Goldman Sachs is building a giant campus in Dallas. Starbucks shifted thousands of jobs to Nashville. Boeing moved their 787 engineering and assembly teams to South Carolina. And Amazon is relocating thousands of jobs out of Seattle and Washington to avoid excruciating taxes.

According to Seattle's KOMO News, dozens of Washington’s major companies, including Alaska Airlines, Amazon, Costco, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PSE, Zillow, T-Mobile, Redfin, Virginia Mason, WaFd Bank, Weyerhaeuser, Puget Sound Energy, and the freaking Seattle Mariners, just sent a letter to the governor, begging him to revise the state’s new taxes and budget. They cited “the largest tax hikes in the state's history,” and “a threat to the state’s economic stability.” The response from Democrat leaders was that the big producers can suck it.

The Association of Washington Businesses now reports that one out of every four businesses is openly considering leaving Washington.

***Are leftists really better at cheating?

Leftism, at bottom, is the idea that the system is rotten and it has to be broken. Conservatism, at face value, is the idea that a system is worth keeping and has to be preserved. Thus one of us values process, decorum, and fair-play more than the other.

Leftists are made by definition to cheat. Conservatives are almost designed by God to be cheated.

****How involved were the Jews in the spread of communism? Orlando Figes notes, in his history of the Russian Revolution, that the chief rabbi of Moscow once joked The Trotsky's make the revolutions and the Bronsteins pay the bills.

**Because all this talk of districts and cheating is hard to picture, here are some pictures.

This is the map Virginia Democrats tried to use, which was shot down (thank God) by the state Supreme Court:

This is how rotten it was:

Below is the current shutout of Republicans in New England, which has been this way for a long time:

Below is a comparison between Republicans getting shut out in Massachusetts and Democrats getting shut out in Tennessee. Note: this is the Tennessee map before Republicans redrew it, splitting Memphis into three districts, and eliminating the last Democratic stronghold:

And finally, this is a map of what the South has looked like for a while, and what it could look like by the end of the year — right in time for midterms: