Notice, further, that a party is specially organized to manipulate the people and their interests so as to keep them in line with what the party wants. It manipulates the people through determining how they are divided into electoral groupings, and it manipulates their interests through political propaganda.
The manipulation in the first case is achieved through the drawing of the geographical areas that a given representative will be elected to represent. Areas are drawn that, through creative geometry, aredesigned to catch that portion of the people a majority of whom can, because of their social class or wealth, be relied on always to favor the party drawing the area. Different parties collude with each other in this process and agree to parcel up the people into electoral groupings mutually favorable to each party’s interest. The process has come to be called gerrymandering. It is a word not in good odor, but it is hard to see why. If there are no interests but actual interests, and if representation is to be of these interests, there can be little sense in not trying to combine those with similar and compatible interests into the same electoral groupings so that they will be able to choose a representative who will answer to those interests. To leave interests arbitrarily distributed, where no harmony or pattern among them can be discerned or felt, is to ensure that the representation of them will be equally arbitrary, to the annoyance and frustration of all alike.
The manipulation of interests, on the other hand, consists entirely in the arts of the demagogue...
Political Illiberalism, 42-3
