My mother was born in eastern Germany. She grew up under both a right-wing one-party regime (from 1934 to 1945) and a left-wing one-party regime (from 1945 to 1956). While those parties represented opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they used virtually identical methods to aggregate power. In the early 1990s, I spent 15 months in Russia where I saw for myself the devastating effects of one-party government.
That’s why I will never be a passionate champion of any political party, but I’ll go to almost any length to defend the ideals, institutions, and processes of democracy.
And that’s how I find myself among a group that is suing the Utah Legislature. By manipulating voting district boundaries to ensure that all four Utah districts would only elect Republicans to the U.S. Congress, the Legislature has disenfranchised Democratic voters in Salt Lake County for the next decade.
Many state legislatures, including the Democrats in New York, have recently used gerrymandering tactics to maximize their own power. The Utah legislators took their abuse of power a step further: They repealed a 2018 citizen initiative, eliminating the binding anti-gerrymandering requirements it created so the Legislature would later be free to reject a set of voting maps drawn up by an impartial citizens’ commission.
I’m suing the Utah Legislature because I don’t want to live in a one-party state. Our democracy works best — in fact, our democracy only works at all — when people with different viewpoints work together to find cross-partisan solutions.
I’m suing the Utah Legislature because in a democracy, a referendum is the purest expression there is of the will of the people. If elected officials feel entitled to overturn a referendum because they didn’t like the result, I can only conclude that those officials don’t understand the concept of democracy. Or perhaps they just don’t believe in it.
I want to live in a state (and a country) where multiple parties compete in a vibrant marketplace of ideas. I want to live in a state (and a country) where a robust system of checks and balances prevents any one person or group from gaining too much power. I want to live in a state (and a country) where elected officials understand that processes (like ensuring every citizen has a voice) matter even more than outcomes (like passing a specific piece of legislation or placing a certain type of judge on the Supreme Court).
An obsessive focus on outcomes leads politicians to say to themselves, “The ends justify the means,” as they use antidemocratic methods to aggregate power. Protecting our democratic processes, over and over again, will save us from tyranny. In a democracy, the process is everything.
When my mother was 10, she survived the firebombing of Dresden. Her house was hit by a bomb, and her family lost everything. After the war, my grandmother got a job in street construction and spent several years clearing away rubble. On weekends, she would take a train to the countryside and go from farm to farm, begging for half-rotten potatoes to feed her four daughters. A one-party regime with unchecked power had started a world war that killed her only son and destroyed her country.
On behalf of all the women and children who suffered under the one-party regimes of the 20th century, I’m here to say this: Concentrating all the power in one party is a catastrophically bad idea. It always leads to corruption. It always leads to abuse. In the short term, it’s oppressive to some portion of the population. In the long term, it has disastrous consequences for the whole population.
If the citizens of this country tolerate petty despotism in the form of gerrymandering, we risk opening the door to more egregious forms of despotism. The stakes always seem small at first. But if we shrug our shoulders when politicians — from any party — subvert democratic processes to gain a monopoly on power, we’re putting our country on a dangerous road.
There’s nothing good at the end of that road. If we get there, it won’t matter whether we’re suffering under a right-wing regime or a left-wing regime. We’ll all be suffering together. And we’ll all wish we’d tried harder to make our democracy work for all of us. In defending small acts of democracy, we protect our nation from excess and corruption. Stand with me. It’s not too late to choose a different path.
Stefanie Condie
Stefanie Condie is a marketing executive based in Salt Lake City. She is a member of Mormon Women for Ethical Government.