The South used to be the land of the Yellow Dog Democrat — someone who would vote a straight Democratic ticket even if the Democratic candidate were a yellow dog — but those days are long gone. There are still legions of Democrats down here, as well as a growing number of voters who are left of the mainstream Democratic Party, but they are clustered in college towns and growing cities like Nashville, where they live and work shoulder to shoulder with old-school conservatives and rabid Donald Trump supporters alike. Joe Biden won Nashville with almost 65 percent of the vote.
But thanks to a brutally gerrymandered election map, we didn’t send a moderate Democrat, one who could reasonably represent the interests of both Nashville liberals and Nashville conservatives, to Washington this year. Instead, the newly mutilated Nashville is represented by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected.
This particular injustice likely seems irrelevant to anybody who doesn’t live here. Occurring as it does among so many other political injustices in a nation moving rapidly toward minority rule, even the utter disenfranchisement of an entire American city is hard to get particularly worked up about.
But you ought to be worked up about it. You ought to be protesting in the streets about it because what is happening in Tennessee, and in so many other states governed by Republican supermajorities, goes a long way toward explaining what is happening in the U.S. Congress.
Andy Ogles, for example, is the newly elected congressman from Tennessee’s redrawn Fifth District, a seat held for two decades by Rep. Jim Cooper back when the seat still included all of Nashville. In Washington, Mr. Ogles immediately allied himself with the nihilist wing of the Republican Party, voting 11 times against Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the speakership. In Nashville, then, we have gone from being represented by a member of the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats to being represented by a founding member of what might well be called the Dead Dog Caucus. What else should we call legislators who have no interest in legislating?
In dismembering Nashville to create three Republican voting districts, in other words, the Tennessee General Assembly managed only to nationalize its own brand of chaos. And maybe that was the whole point.
Mark E. Green, an ardent Trump supporter who represents Tennessee’s Seventh District, which now includes parts of Nashville, is a vocal election denier. Mr. Green is one of 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text messages with the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the far-right flank of the party sought nominal justification to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Even after the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Green voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election. As Holly McCall, the editor in chief of the nonprofit news site the Tennessee Lookout, writes, such behavior from elected officials has “seeded our voting public with mistrust that continues to harm our democracy.”