Chemotherapy for democracy Rob Schofield

You’ve seen the ads that blanket TV and other media. An older adult playing games with their grandchild. A young woman diving into the surf with friends. A family enjoying a happy holiday meal together.

And then come the swiftly spoken warnings. “This medication may cause serious side effects, including internal bleeding; diarrhea; kidney problems; shortness of breath; fever; rash; dizziness; confusion; numbness of the arms or legs; double vision; sensitivity to light; changes in eyesight; persistent or severe muscle pain or weakness; muscle cramps; low red blood cells; bruising, memory loss and suicidal thoughts. Call your doctor if you experience any of these symptoms.”

For those of us lucky enough not to be plagued by a debilitating or life-threatening illness, the warnings that accompany these ads for newly developed pharmaceuticals can seem absurd — especially when they’re followed immediately by a cheerful announcer urging viewers to ask their doctor if the medication is right for them.

And yet, the hard truth is that many of these drugs are quite miraculous. Yes, the side effects can sometimes be dreadful, but as millions of cancer patients who have endured the havoc inflicted on their bodies by various forms of chemotherapy can attest, they are very often worth it when the choice is between life (and maybe a cure) and early death.

This simple fact of modern medicine must come to mind in the summer of 2025 as the United States finds itself staring face-to-face with an illness of a different kind — a political illness that poses the most obvious and serious threat to American representative government since the Civil War – the rise of authoritarianism.

In the early days of the first Trump administration, talk of the demise of democratic government and the rise of authoritarian dictatorship often seemed unduly alarmist. Today, however, as the Trump team deploys more and more police state tools and tactics and hundreds of once honorable politicians fall in lock/goose-step with what increasingly resembles a slow-motion putsch, the situation has reached a crisis level.

Nowhere is this situation more obvious than in the battle over another chronic malady that has long plagued the republic and that now — thanks to Trump and his minions — threatens to send it into a death spiral.

That plague, of course, is gerrymandering — the drawing of electoral maps to rig elections.

Gerrymandering is nothing new. The term was coined nearly two centuries ago. But with the advent of modern digital technology and the U.S. Supreme Court’s scandalous pronouncement a few years’ back that it is perfectly constitutional, gerrymandering has been transformed from an irritating illness into a metastasizing cancer that threatens to consume our democracy.

Right now, Trump loyalists control the U.S. House of Representatives by a tiny margin for one obvious reason: the partisan gerrymandering enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly that transformed the state’s U.S. House delegation from a 7-7 partisan split to 10-4 in favor of Republicans. Had the state merely continued to operate under the fair maps that led to that 7-7 split in the 2022 election, it’s likely that Democrat Hakeem Jeffries rather than Republican Mike Johnson would be the current Speaker of the U.S. House.

Even with this situation, however, most public opinion polls indicate that a significant surge toward Democrats is likely in the 2026 election — a surge that will give them control of the U.S. House and maybe even the Senate and thereby deal a huge blow to Trump’s dictatorial aspirations.

And this brings us to the current effort by Trump and company to cling to their anti-democratic control by unleashing a new and even more aggressive wave of gerrymandering — most notably in Texas — and the effort by Democratic Party leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom to fight fire with fire.

Good government advocates are right to find the situation maddening and deeply worrisome. The ultimate solution to the cancer of gerrymandering, after all, is to excise it from the body politic by enacting a national system of independent redistricting, and it’s understandable that many would view Newsom’s effort to replace California’s generally fair system with one that somewhat mimic’s Texas and North Carolina’s as a retreat in this critically important fight.

But as millions of people who have survived physical cancers and scores of other life-threatening illnesses via the use of modern drugs that produce difficult side effects can attest, there is often no other way to stop a disease’s march.

As Common Cause of North Carolina executive director Bob Phillips, a heroic longtime champion of fair maps, told Raleigh’s News & Observer, “we are in extraordinary times where you have a president who is overtly trying to take more congressional seats through blatant partisan gerrymandering.”

In other words, as regrettable and side-effect producing as it may be, the political chemotherapy being advanced by Newsom and other Democrats look, at this point, to be one of the best hopes for halting the nation’s slide toward an authoritarian police state and ultimately, enacting a national political health regime that would cure the cancer of gerrymandering once and for all. One prays the patient will survive.