THE ARC OF HISTORY DOESN'T SEEM TO BEND TOWARD JUSTICE, BUT WE CAN HURT THE UNJUST

I found myself thinking about gerrymandering when I was reading this New York Times roundtable featuring Nadja Spiegelman, the opinion section's culture editor, and two fellow lefty thirtysomethings, streamer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Their subject: shoplifing and other crimes against capitalists, up to and including CEO murder.

Nadja Spiegelman: ... Would you share your Netflix password?

Jia Tolentino: I do. With anyone.

Hasan Piker: I also do....

Spiegelman: Would you get around a paywall on an article you’re trying to read?

Piker: I do it every day on my stream.

Tolentino: I support it when people do it for my own work. I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.

Spiegelman: Would you pirate music from an indie band?

Tolentino: Is it 2005 and I’m using LimeWire? Because yes.

Spiegelman: I feel like every millennial has at some point.

Tolentino: I mean, I feel like, fundamentally, Spotify is kind of deleterious to the musician livelihood, and I use that, but then I go to the shows....

Spiegelman: Would you dine and dash from your local diner?

Tolentino: Never. Never! Tip 35 percent. Come on.

Piker: No, I wouldn’t do that. If I saw somebody doing that, I’d probably pay for their meal.

Spiegelman: Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library?

Tolentino: Never.

Piker: No.

Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?

... Piker: I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.

They agree that the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong, but that stealing from a Whole Foods is okay -- though as Tolentino says about the latter,

The ideal world is not one in which this continues and this increases to somehow even it out, right? The ideal world is one in which the theft from above is broken by regulatory means and/or bottom-up means, like unionization.

And as for Thompson's murder, Tolentino says:

I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that. I don’t know why I thought that Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a unified message toward universal health care. I don’t know why I expected that. I don’t know why I was disappointed that it didn’t happen.

It's bizarre reading some of this in the Times, but I don't want to focus on the fact that well-remunerated media figures are boasting about stealing lemons from Whole Foods, as Tolentino does early in the conversation.

What seems significant to me is that the panel is discussing these options because actual justice seems unattainable. Neither Thompson's murder nor any other healthcare outrage has gotten us closer to universal health coverage in America, and, in fact, the Republican trifecta in Washington has taken health insurance away from many people and closed many rural hospitals. Tolentino thinks unionizing a Whole Foods is preferable to shoplifiting from one, but, as she says about the retail theft,

As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.

We might be on the verge of electing a Democratic Congress, and maybe a Democratic president after that. But will real change come from that? While discussing Thompson's murder, Piker makes a familiar argument:

Democrats are failing. Are they feckless because they’re just bad at politics, or is it something more indecent? And that their fecklessness is simply cover for their ulterior motives, which is participating in this grand design. They’re funded by the same corporate lobbyists that Republicans are funded by, especially when it comes to private health care providers, and they have a vested interest in the continuation of private health care. There is consensus in American politics, when it comes to the continuation of the private health care system, that the system must be private.

By disempowering Republicans, we might prevent terrible things from happening -- the utter elimination of the social safety net, a total war on undocumented immigrants, and so on -- but it seems as if the best we can do is prevent the arc of history from bending toward injustice as much as it does under Republican rule.

And that's what I'm thinking about as I think about Democrats' success in responding to GOP gerrymandering with gerrymandering of their own. It's not justice -- it's our injustice in response to their injustice. It's stealing from Whole Foods because Jeff Bezos is sickeningly rich in an era when we can't tax Bezos and his fellow multi-billionaires at anything close to an appropriate level, or compel him to treat his workers decently, even though we know he can easily afford to.

On voting, this is admirable:

This is expert trolling from Jamie Raskin. If Republicans are suddenly angry about losing in the gerrymandering wars, then they're welcome to join him and Dems in passing bans on gerrymandering in the next Congress, he tells me: newrepublic.com/article/2093...

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— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) April 23, 2026 at 8:23 AM

But will this ever happen? And if it does, how much will we further discredit American democracy -- something we care about even if Republicans don't -- before we reach an anti-gerrymandering truce?

But I don't see an alternative, because we're so far from bending that arc toward justice right now.