“If the United States is to deter a nuclear attack,” then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in a 1967 speech in San Francisco, “it must possess an actual and a credible assured-destruction capability.”

McNamara was elucidating a long-established defense concept known as “mutually assured destruction,” meaning that if one side has the ability to destroy its enemy but knows that it cannot do so without being destroyed itself, and that its enemy can and will act to do precisely that, stability is the result.

Something like that argument is being applied to gerrymandering, which is applying nuclear-level destruction to American democracy at both state and federal levels. And it is proliferating.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom used the phrase “fight fire with fire” when he said he

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