Since becoming a parent 12 years ago, I’ve come to appreciate how thin the line can be between a toddler meltdown and a political fist-fight. Once you’ve spent enough time around small children, you start to recognize that the outbursts from toddlers and politicians have a familiar throughline.
We saw that dynamic in Virginia this week, where in the wake of a high-stakes redistricting fight, Democrats justified redrawing the map in a way that felt less like a defense of institutional choices and more like something overheard in a playroom argument.
The maps, we were told, had to be redrawn — aggressively, and in ways that combine heavily Democratic suburbs of Washington with rural stretches of the state — in pursuit of fairness. The mention of “fairness” wasn’t just a political talking point; it was baked into the text itself. The ballot initiative asked, “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness to the upcoming elections…?”
That wording could put the entire measure in jeopardy. David Ramadan, a former delegate and George Mason University professor, said Virginia’s constitution requires law and amendment language to be in plain English, and if it’s not, that could threaten its legal validity.
“Saying that this was a vote for fair elections is plain English, contrary to the ramification of the vote, and that is the argument that the opponents of the measure are making,” Ramadan said. “And I don’t think it’s going to fly. It did not fly in lower courts. It’s not going to fly in the upper court.”
Partly due to this objection, a judge in rural Virginia on Wednesday blocked the results of Tuesday’s state referendum.
Democrats tried to pull a fast one on voters, leaning hard on an opaque argument centered on their definition of fairness. Anyone who has mediated a dispute between children knows what happens if you allow screeches of “it’s not fair!” to be used as justification for bad behavior.
Redistricting has never been a non-partisan process, and both parties have taken advantage of it when they could. But “they did it first” is not a limiting principle; it is an accelerant. Once retaliation becomes justification, there is no natural stopping point, because every escalation can be framed as self-defense.
What we are left with is not a system governed by rules and norms, but one governed by grievance. Parents understand that if you allow your household to run like that, it quickly devolves into fist-fights and bickering, and voters know it too. Or at least, we should.
The fight isn’t contained to Virginia. In Florida, the rhetoric has devolved further, with Democrats warning of aggressive retaliation and Republicans responding in kind. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) taunted Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), saying, “Our message to Florida Republicans is F around and find out. If they go down the road of a DeSantis dummy-mander … the electoral tide is turning in Florida,” Jeffries said. The minority leader sounds like a schoolyard bully, not one of the most powerful politicians in America.
There was another path available, particularly in Virginia, where Democrats could have made the harder argument that the system is flawed but still worth stabilizing. That argument would have required accepting short-term disadvantage in exchange for long-term trust, which is why it was never seriously entertained.
Instead, we get the easier line, the one that reframes a strategic choice as a necessity and absolves the speaker of responsibility for the consequences: It’s not fair.
The appeal of that phrase is obvious because it taps into the instinct to even the score. But fairness is not achieved by mirroring the worst behavior of your opponent any more than order in a household is maintained by letting each child enforce their own version of justice. It depends on rules that apply even when they don’t benefit you, and on a willingness to abide by those rules anyway.
There is a reason we do not let toddlers run the ship: they lack the emotional maturity to consider anything larger than themselves. They need boundaries, consistency, and adults willing to enforce both.
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Our politicians are not supposed to operate on a lower level than our toddlers, and yet listening to the arguments coming out of Virginia — and increasingly, out of places such as Florida — it is difficult to escape the sense that the bar has been set exactly there, at the emotional logic of a playground dispute that never quite resolves.
At some point, someone has to decide that this isn’t good enough, because if the only standard either party is willing to uphold is that both sides get an equal turn at bending the rules, then what we are left with is not a system that produces fairness, but one that guarantees its absence.