Where to Draw the Line
On Indiana's multiple personalities and the artifice of borders.
Hey all. I’ve been trying something a little different here the last couple weeks. In order to keep a steady stream of content coming your way, I’ve been releasing interviews on Tuesday with a follow-up essay coming out on Friday.
And on Sunday mornings, I’m hosting a new talk show featuring a panel of guests from around state. HoosLeft This Week brings together a range of Hoosiers from the democratic socialist left to principled never-Trump conservatives. MAGA Republicans lie and argue in bad faith. My hope is, without that element around, the rest of us can discuss the full range of what is possible in our state once we overcome the current crisis. The new show airs live on Project Next’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch streams at 10:30am ET. I hope you like what I’ve been up to and, if you appreciate the extra effort, hope you’ll consider a paid subscription.
I recently spoke with Tracie Martin, an organizer with NWI Takes Action. If you missed that, check it out here:
We discussed her inspiration for getting involved, the logistics and strategy of a protest movement, and the importance of avoiding burnout. We also talked about some of the obstacles to effective organizing , the struggle of coordinating with other groups, and maintaining empathy for our political opponents.
One of the obstacles to organizing in Northwest Indiana is that, in many ways, it’s like you’re not even in Indiana. Decision makers in Indianapolis pass laws that intimately effect your life, but your local media - Chicago - doesn’t cover it. They’ve got plenty of their own problems with state government down in Springfield. I know people in the Louisville metro and in the greater Cincinnati area that share a similar struggle - it’s hard to garner visibility for your movement when the big city in another state dominates your local media. For the plethora of radio, television, online, and print options that come with living in a large metro area, you’re still kinda living in a news desert.
Now, I have a confession. Growing up in Northwest Indiana, I never felt like a Hoosier. I don’t think I felt like a Hoosier until I matriculated to Bloomington when I was 18. Even now - and I’ve been down here for almost 30 years - I still feel like an outsider sometimes. I mean, what even is a Hoosier? We’re bound together by these imaginary state lines that don’t really reflect our day-to-day lives. Do you ever think about that?
Downstate Illinois Republicans and their Indiana counterparts have been thinking about it. At the beginning of May, Governor Mike Braun signed a law creating the Indiana-Illinois Boundary Adjustment Commission. It’s a stupid political stunt that won’t come to anything, but what if they kinda have a point? Both states are comprised of several unique cultures that our borders, as drawn, do not represent.
Political boundaries - state lines, electoral districts, national borders - are often completely arbitrary. Sometimes this leads to weird geographical quirks, and other times leads to decades-long armed standoffs involving nuclear weapons. Look at the Middle East, where in the wake of World War I, British and French diplomats carved up the former Ottoman Empire. The lines drawn then - without much regard to existing cultures or communities of interest - reverberate to this day in the form of sectarian violence. Hell, the British promised Palestine to three different groups of people - when it was never theirs to give away in the first place- and the effects of those decisions reverberate in the form of bloody conflict to this day. White dudes drawing imaginary lines, without intimate knowledge of the people living within them, has led to serious real-world consequences.
But this is not a situation unique to European colonizers in the Global South. In America, we have our own problems caused by capriciously-drawn imaginary lines. I mean, before we even begin to look at borders on maps, think about the lines of demarcation that bake imbalances into our constitutional system. There’s the boundary splitting the Congress into two houses - the Senate existing as a way to temper that pesky will of the people. Then, the Electoral College is like razor wire coiled atop that border, reinforcing the anti-democratic bias in the legislative branch and extending it to the executive.
Then there’s gerrymandering, which adds a layer of political chicanery to the theoretically-most egalitarian branch of government, the House of Representatives. Here, legislators fence voters into districts that best serve the interest of partisans - not the population. Right here in Indiana, for example, George Washington University political scientist Christopher Warshaw accuses Hoosier Republicans of “one of the most extreme gerrymanders in history.” Sure, the Indiana GOP consistently receive more votes than Democrats - about 56% statewide - yet they hold 70% of the State House, 77% of our seats in Congress, and a whopping 80% of the State Senate. Our political maps don’t reflect lived reality - Indiana is a purple state.
But what about the state lines themselves? Where did those borders come from? 17th Century claims by the Crown on Indigenous peoples’ land, broken treaties, Jefferson’s imposition of the straight-line parallels and meridians Public Land Survey System in the old Northwest Territory and later Louisiana Purchase, surveying errors, wars of conquest, compromises over the spread of chattel slavery, and sometimes cynical political expediency. Is this not just gerrymandering on steroids? I mean, at least when our state reps draw a shitty partisan map, we know who the bad guys are, can theoretically replace them in the next election, and rectify the situation with a fair redistricting effort after the next census. State boundaries reflect decisions made - and not always for the right reasons - decades, even centuries, ago. We are penned into fences erected by ghosts.
What I’m saying is, the maps that determine our political fates in the 21st Century may not have even accurately represented conditions on the ground when they were drawn, and they certainly don’t express the way we live today.
Indiana, unlike other states, was largely settled from south to north. River towns along both sides of the Ohio River were intimately intertwined. The first white colonizers migrated from Kentucky and Tennessee, settling the rolling hills of Southern Indiana. The area from Cincinnati to Louisville, Evansville and points inland, to this day form a unique culture with its own dialect that confounds and delights linguists, called the Hoosier Apex.
The Region beats to a Chicago rhythm. Their economy is deeply intertwined with that of the Windy City. Commuter trains flow west into Illinois, not south to Indianapolis. When the 219 talks about “downtown,” they’re not talking about Monument Circle; they’re talking about the Loop. This area of the state was settled later, and by people from New England and the Mid-Atlantic, then diversified by Southern & Eastern European Catholics and African-Americans during the Great Migration. Hammond has far more in common with Aurora,Joliet, or even Milwaukee than it does with New Castle or Vincennes.
I even think places like South Bend and Fort Wayne are more like Toledo and Detroit than Bedford or Lawrenceburg.
Central Indiana is its own thing - a completely contrived, inorganic, man-made construction even more so than these other regions. Indianapolis was a planned community from the start - based on the Washington DC we spend so much energy hating, designed by the understudy of its architect, and chosen because it was, literally, in the middle of nowhere. Building and maintaining the seat of state capital attracted investment and an influx of people to serve the burgeoning community - and so on and so forth for generations out into the suburbs and beyond - proving that government is inherently stimulative, and not a drag on the economy, but that’s neither here nor there.
What is important is that we - with all our cultural differences - from the Rust Belt through the Corn Belt and into the Bible Belt - are fenced into this thing called Indiana together. I’ve had the honor of meeting people from all across this wildly divergent state and to call many of you friends and comrades. I’m not in any hurry to break up with anybody - I just want to see our political reality best address our lived reality. Researchers, Demographers, and Mapmakers have toyed with various iterations of a more equitably-drawn America, one whose borders are drawn for people, not land.
This isn’t about whether you pull for the Pacers or the Bulls; the Cubs, Sox, Reds, or Cardinals; the Bears, Colts, or Bengals - it’s actually a neat experiment to think about where those various fanbases intersect - it’s way deeper than that. Arbitrary lines dictate resource allocation, infrastructure planning, and even fundamental human rights. Every artificial border is a checkpoint, a potential toll booth, an entry point for corruption. Think of regional planning commissions, governors from different states appointing prominent donors with potential economic interests, cushy gigs for relatives.
Our state lines are stupid. They’re historical accidents, drawn in eras of different priorities, different technologies, and vastly different demographics. In many ways they reinforce disparities present at the time they were codified. They predetermine our political fates in ways that can be just as distorting as a carefully gerrymandered district, but on a much larger and more intractable scale - dividing natural communities of interest and forcing unnatural ones together.
I’m not calling for independent city-states, a breakup of the Union, or anything like tech bro utopian “Network States.” If anything, I’m asserting that the sovereign nation - upon whose grace the fifty states exist - grants too much power to its arbitrarily-drawn subdivisions. And you could expand this to rethink borders worldwide, so many of which exist to reinforce ancient power structures. All the people, together, could come up with something that far better addresses human needs.
I know we can’t just redraw the map tomorrow, but the Right is already living in a “post-constitutional” world - the least we can do is begin thinking beyond the artificial constructs that have bound us. When we come out on the other side of this authoritarian moment, we have a real opportunity to remake our political reality, recognizing where the real lines of community interest lie. Until then, we’re trying to solve 21st Century problems with 18th Century tools.
Hoosiers might not be one cohesive unit. We might not fit a narrow stereotype. But we all know this - community is a lot more than lines on a page.