Mother Jones - May 01, 2018

MAY  JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 5

TO OUR READERS

YOU’VE BEEN

HACKED

We’re only beginning to understand how our

democracy was rigged—and what we can do about it.

BY MONIKA BAUERLEIN AND CLARA JEFFERY

one of the most important pieces of political

prognosis of the past decade appeared in the Wall

Street Journal on March 4, 2010. It was a look ahead

at that year’s midterm elections, the first chance

for voters to render a verdict on a new president

whom many Americans disliked to the point of

considering him illegitimate. The author was Karl

Rove. (Yeah, remember Turd Blossom?) The bland

headline: “The gop Targets State Legislatures.”

The piece dispassionately noted that while Wash-

ington was “fixated” on whether the election would

deliver a rebuke to President Barack Obama, the

most significant votes were being cast way down

the ballot. That was because 2010 was a census year,

meaning that over the following two years, legisla-

tures in dozens of states would redraw electoral dis-

tricts. If Republicans could pick off just 107 legislative

seats in key states, they would be able to deny Dem-

ocrats a majority in the House for a decade to come.

Consider Texas, Rove went on: “Democrats had a

17-13 edge in the state’s congressional delegation after

the 2000 elections. Republicans won control of the

Texas House in 2002 and redrew the state’s congres-

sional map. As a result, the gop now controls 20 con-

gressional seats in Texas while Democrats control 12.”

(Rove was being coy: That redistricting was a signa-

ture endeavor of a Texas ally, former House Majority

Leader Tom DeLay, financed with boatloads of dark

money to create a Republican “permanent majority.”)

The strategy worked. Republicans—buoyed by

the tea party and Rove-ified campaigns staked on

racial and cultural dog whistles—took over state-

houses and redrew the maps. And before long, states

where a majority of voters had chosen Democrats

nonetheless ended up with mostly gop lawmakers.

(In 2012, Republican candidates in Wisconsin gar-

nered less than 49 percent of the vote but won 61

percent of seats in the state Assembly.)

This is how you hack elections when you can’t

persuade enough voters to actually choose your

ideas. It may be legal (and has been practiced, at

some point or another, by both parties), but it’s also

a perversion of the core tenets of democracy.

We’re living in Rove’s world now—a world where

a majority of voters have chosen one party but the

other party governs. It’s because of the district

lines that Rove’s compatriots drew that President

Donald Trump has no counterweight in Congress.

And it’s this mercenary approach—if you can’t win

on the merits, hack the system—that we now see

playing out across the board.

This is the spirit behind the mendacious, manip-

ulative messages Trump’s campaign and its allies at

Cambridge Analytica served up to Facebook users.

It’s the spirit behind the National Rifle Association’s

decision to go all in on anger and fear while coddling

the Kremlin. And it’s the driving impulse behind the

White House’s push to hack another vital piece of

democratic infrastructure: the census.

On that last issue, as Ari Berman shows in this

magazine, nearly every decision the administration

and its allies in Congress have made has served a

single goal: a tally that inflates the share of white

people in the population and undercounts com-

munities of color. A whiter census will skew the

allocation of congressional seats and even affect

the makeup of Electoral College votes (which are

divvied up via the same population math). It will

also shift trillions in federal funding. Make America

White Again, you might say—a last-ditch effort to

deny the nation’s true diversity and vigor.

Which takes us back to Karl Rove. Eight years

ago—it feels more like 80—it was hard to tell ex-

actly how far the hacking of our democracy would

go. We didn’t know that a demagogue would show

up prepared to cozy up to Nazis and Klansmen and

make common cause with a foreign adversary. We

didn’t know that a major US company would bury

evidence that its users’ data was stolen and used

to manipulate voting. We didn’t know that anti-

democratic redistricting would give us a Congress

unwilling to exercise the most basic oversight.

But we do now. And we also know there are a lot

more dots to connect, more rocks to turn over. That’s

what we do here at Mother Jones. You can see it in this

issue—from Ari’s census story and Andy Kroll’s deep

dive on Cambridge Analytica to our timeline on the

nra-Russia dalliance and our investigation of how

much further Russian attacks could go.

We can do this because support from our readers

(especially folks like you holding this magazine who

subscribe or donate) gives us independence from

advertisers and platform behemoths (including,

yes, Facebook). And that’s never been more im-

portant. Thank you. Q

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

CLARA JEFFERY

CEO
MONIKA BAUERLEIN