The Politics of Zodak

There’s something that I think progressives misunderstand in the struggle for voting rights. They’re not wrong about their own position, but by failing to understand their opposition, they’re putting themselves at a disadvantage in winning the argument.

See, it is rightfully curious that so many conservatives can, with a straight face, insist that it is bad for democracy to ensure that people be able to vote – that it is more democratic to reduce the franchise, and that elections where more of the population vote are inherently unfair, illegitimate, or “rigged”. For the most part, I think progressives assume this is simply down to conservatives being lying sacks of shit who want to win by hook or by crook. And certainly that does describe a politically powerful segment of the current elected and, ahem, emeritus leadership of the Republican party, I don’t think it properly accounts for the opposition.

Frankly, I think you’ve got maybe 25%-30% of the Republican party who just outright believes that they should win every election by hook or by crook and elections be damned. And if you find that number insulting, remember, 27% on a survey is basically the “crazification factor”. There is no statement so completely inane, insane, outrageous or wrong that 27% of respondents won’t earnestly agree with it.

The trouble is that on top of that 30%, there’s another 30% who are wrong in a subtle broken-computer-in-a-60s-sci-fi-story sort of way. And it’s a hard kind of wrong to disillusion them about. To wit, they don’t know what “fair” means.

These are the people who will tell you that weather forecasts are inherently bullshit because “There’s always a 50% chance of rain: either it will rain or it won’t.” Because… Well, because they learned probability in middle school from a teacher who didn’t like math and haven’t given it a lot of thought since. Their mental model of what “fair” means is “like a coin-toss”. They have no other understanding of the concept of fairness. So they’ve internalized a notion that any time there are two options, “fairness” dictates that one option is chosen half the time, and the other option the other half. They like the idea of different parties controlling the White House and the legislature. They like the idea of alternating between Republican and Democratic presidents. They think that’s “fair”. And so, if they think that getting everyone to vote will cause one side to win way more than the other, in their mind, that is unfair completely regardless of the reason. Even if the reason is, “Because way more people want the Democrats in power,” that doesn’t change the fact that their notion of “fair” requires a near-equal divide of power between the parties, and thus more people voting is less “fair”.

I’ve had people tell me, on the issue of DC statehood, that it is reason enough to oppose it that it would create an extra blue state without creating a red state – they seem to believe that there is a requirement that states be added in red-blue pairs. Never mind that the current numerical distribution of states isn’t even. If we want things to be “fair”, it has to be a coin-toss.

And this attitude is not limited to Republicans, but the Republican leadership understands it and knows how to exploit it; the Democratic leadership doesn’t. So the Republicans say, “We want to gerrymander the districts so that each side will consistently get about* 50% of the seats,” and their audience says “Well that sounds fair.” The Democrats say, “We will balance the congressional districts so that they accurately reflect the 60-40 split in the population,” and the audience is outraged that the Democrats are trying a power grab to ensure they get 60% of the seats rather than the 50% which fairness dictates. (Hey, what’s that asterisk? Nothing, nothing. Well, it’s “When we say ‘about 50%’ we mean ‘We will consistently get 51-60, they will consistently get 40-49’,” but never mind that)

And the more the Democratic leadership says, “We just want it to reflect the actual distribution of poltical views,” the more both sides hear, “We’re not happy with a roughly-50-50-split and want more.”

This notion that fairness requires an equal probability of victory might sound strange given how closely it approaches the idea of “If the Republicans don’t have a majority of the people on their side, we should give them subsidies Affirmative Action From Each According to his Means To Each According to his Needs an advantage to make it fair.” But that’s not how they see it. Of course it isn’t.

But maybe it could be?

The title of this article is a reference to a character from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Due to the slipshod ’80s toyetic “We don’t give a crap about continuity, just sell the toys,” nature of the franchise, there was some confusion between different parts of the franchise whether the character of Zodak was a hero or a villain (I think it was originally just because he had clawed feet). Also whether it was “Zodak” or “Zodac”. As the franchise settled down and tried to wrangle some kind of continuity out of this weird-ass Conan rip-off, they settled on the explanation that while Zodak might be personally sympathetic to the side of good, his official loyalty was to the balance between good and evil, and thus he was duty-bound to help out whichever side was losing. Which was usually the bad guys, because He-Man villains were, for the most part, incredibly stupid.