Politics & Power Quote by Thomas E. Mann

Mann’s sentence has the clipped, careful feel of someone trying to puncture a comforting civic fairy tale without sounding polemical. The target is the popular obsession with district maps as the master key to everything broken in American politics. Yes, configuration matters, he allows by implication, but he immediately widens the frame: partisan identity is not a thin preference that floats atop neutral facts; it is a thick attachment that actively manufactures “perceptions, beliefs and values.” That triad matters. He’s not talking only about vote choice or policy positions but about the cognitive and moral furniture people carry into politics. The subtext is blunt: you can’t redistrict your way out of motivated reasoning.

Then he pivots to incumbency, another under-discussed structural force that survives even perfectly drawn lines. “Advantages well beyond” is doing a lot of work: name recognition, fundraising networks, constituent services, media attention, and the quiet authority of already holding the office. Mann is nudging readers away from a single-cause diagnosis (gerrymandering) toward a more institutionally realistic one: polarization and entrenchment are produced by identities and incentives, not just geography.

Contextually, this reads like a scholar intervening in reform debates where technocratic fixes are marketed as political cure-alls. Mann’s intent isn’t to dismiss map reform; it’s to warn that the deeper machinery of party loyalty and incumbency will keep shaping outcomes even after the lines are “fair.” The line lands because it refuses the satisfying villain and points instead to the harder truth: the electorate and the officeholders are co-producing the dysfunction.