One summer in the 1980s when I was home from college, my grandmother pulled me aside and whispered, “What’s a nerd?” I was hard-pressed to come up with an answer except the obvious: “You’re looking at one.”

 I didn’t quite fit the bespectacled stereotype that was all over pop culture at the time—hence my grandmother’s question—but I’ve always been a nerd at heart. I once took a job at a library because I like the way books smell.

For about the last ten years, I’ve been editing books for a living, so unfortunately I don’t devour them for pleasure the way I once did. But running for state office—especially in Tennessee, whose government has taken an extreme antidemocratic turn—has reawakened the nerd in me. I’m constantly reading, trying to understand how our politically moderate state tacked so far right over the course of a decade or so, even as new cohorts of young voters were tacking farther left.

But there’s more to it than that. It’s all laid out in a book I’ve been reading, Laboratories of Autocracy, about how GOP-run state governments have abandoned democratic principles in favor of minority rule. (The podcast Gaslit Nation has a good interview with the author, David Pepper, if you want to get the gist.) But wait—there’s more.

Turns out that, by design, some states are less democratic than others. Tennessee is one of them. We don’t have citizen-initiated ballot amendments, for one thing. We get to vote for only one state-level office, governor, that isn’t affected by gerrymandering. And we give our governor a whole lot of power.

 As Tennesseans, even our leverage in the voting booth is limited. But that’s the leverage we have, and we sure as hell better use it. Especially now.

Allison
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