ENOUGH ALREADY WITH PENCILS IN KNIFE FIGHTS

JIA LYNN YANG WRITES OF DEMOCRATS in The New York Times, August 15, 2025: “Will the battle over Texas’ gerrymandering lead to a new era for the party?” An interesting question, indeed.

Pencils to Knife Fights. Yang recounts, “When Texas Republicans announced last month that they would redraw congressional maps for the explicit purpose of picking up five seats currently held by Democrats, they shocked the Democratic Party into action. Within days, Eric Holder, the former attorney general who has spent his post-White House career fighting to end gerrymandering, said he was done playing by the rules. It was time to rig the maps, too.” 

She continues, “Other leaders have also unburdened themselves. ‘I’m tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back,’ Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York said as she fully embraced ultra-partisan gerrymandering in her state. ‘With all due respect to the good government groups, politics is a political process.’ ”

Yang quotes Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee: “This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to the knife fight…. we’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.“

Image from The New York Times.

A Morality Tale. “Perhaps,” Yang says, “this moment mollifies some of those [Democratic] voters. But it also undermines the moral story that the party has been broadcasting about itself through multiple election cycles—that the Democratic Party is the party that follows the rules, even when no one else does.”

She relates, “While Republicans—in the Trump era, especially—may engage in degrading democracy for partisan ends, Democrats insist they are answering a higher call, with fealty above all to principle and procedure. As Michelle Obama famously put it in 2016 at the Democratic National Convention, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ ”

Not that Democrats have always gone high: “Naturalization Mill,” by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1868.

A Change of Attitude. Yang observes, “Recent developments around gerrymandering suggest that the party is beginning to surrender an attitude that has defined it for decades…. For generations, the Democrats’ love of procedure has wound its way into the party’s voter base, its leaders and its governing philosophy. To really change would require a return to a party that barely exists in living memory.”

From Tammany Hall to Technocrats. “For more than a century,” Yang recounts, “a more ruthless, transactional model dominated Democratic politics, for better and for worse. But since the 1970s, the experts with the pencils have come to run the show…. These are voters with college and graduate degrees—the winners of the meritocracy—who now form a large portion of the party, as it bleeds support each election cycle from the working class.”

“Whether these Democrats know it or not,” Yang says, “they are also trying to uphold a distinguished tradition of political reform, dating to the turn of the 20th century, when the original Progressive movement took aim at the Gilded Age corruption that dominated the country’s politics.”

Mention of this Gilded Age and its corruption cannot help but remind me of Trump. 

Yang recounts, “The party has not completely lost touch with those outside the professional class. Most poor Americans still vote Democratic. The trouble is that they don’t show up at the polls nearly as much as those with money.”

Corrupt Voters Vote More. “This was not always so,” Jang relates. “Measured by voter participation, the most corrupt era of American politics was arguably also the most engaged. Voters felt more connected to their parties in part because they could expect a hand if they lost a job or a bit of money for meals if they were hungry.”

These days, perhaps, fear of retribution plays a role as well.

“In the late 19th century,” Yang recounts, “turnout during presidential elections averaged 77 percent.”

By the way, the 66% turnout rate in 2020 was the highest since 1908, and 2024’s rate of 64% was the second highest, tied with 1960.

Back to the late 19th century, Yang notes, “It was especially high among the working class, immigrants, young people and Northern Black voters. After middle-class reformers swept through, voter participation dropped by nearly one-third, especially among the working class, and never recovered.”

Yang Concludes: “For decades, many of the best minds in the Democratic Party have said that they knew what they were doing, if only everyone else would do as they were told. When not enough voters listened, and their opponents began to break the rules, they appealed to the legal system. The legal system did not listen. Now the path of procedure seems to have reached its end point. As Democrats try to put down their pencils, they will find out if they remember how to use the knives.”

For the good of us all, let’s hope they remember soon. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025