'Gerrymander'

The curious word in the title is the American English term for referring to the redrawing of electoral maps with the goal of favoring the interests of a particular party. This practice is called gerrymandering, which is exactly what Trump has forced in a total of fifteen electoral districts, with the purpose that the results of this Tuesday's legislative elections allow him to maintain the majority he currently holds in the lower house of Congress. We said that Trump has forced a gerrymandering because the territorial redistribution was not "due" until 2030, when the census will have to be updated. But it seems that the maneuver must have had quite limited success, because it only gives three safe seats to the Republican Party. It also gives an idea, admittedly, of the anxiety with which Trumpism and the MAGA movement – and the minimaga in the provinces, of which we have a good number around here – are facing these midterm elections.

The word gerrymander, as we were saying, is curious. It is a compound word that fuses a surname, Gerry, with the tail, never better said, of the noun salamander, that is to say, salamander. Thus, a proper name is joined with an amphibian with a lizard-like appearance that has black skin with yellow spots that secretes a poisonous substance. In the absence of an equivalent word, we could translate it as the Gerry salamander. 

This that seems disconcerting is not so much so when we know that the Gerry to whom allusion is made is Elbridge Gerry, a governor of the state of Massachusetts (do you remember? Catalonia was supposed to be the Massachusetts of Europe; we are almost there) who at the beginning of the 19th century had the electoral districts redrawn with the aim of benefiting his party, the Democratic-Republican Party, also known as “Jefferson's party” because the man who became the third president of the USA was its founder. When the map had been made according to the redesign of good old Elbridge Gerry, one of the districts in the Boston area took on a shape that was the object of political satire in the press of the time because they said it looked like a salamander, and this was reflected by the cartoonists. This maneuver did not prevent the Gerry salamander from becoming vice president of the USA, and a founding father of the country, like his fellow party member and founder Thomas Jefferson.

Trump is not sinuous like a salamander, but frontal like a boar, yet he has used gerrymandering to try to cushion the blow that he is very likely to take this Wednesday or this Tuesday –depending on when you read this– at the polls. If this impact does occur, the shockwave it could have within the Republican Party, within American politics and, of course, also within European politics will be significant. It could also signal the beginning of the decline of the one who is the reference figure of anti-democratic involution. The commander-in-chief of this illiberalism that parasitizes institutions and democratic logic precisely to corrode democracy, just as the wood-boring beetle eats the olive tree, the pomegranate tree, the holm oak, or the carob tree from within.