“How the states have become 'Laboratories of Autocracy' — and why it's worse than you think: Former Ohio Democratic Party head David Pepper has a dire warning: Rigged state legislatures are destroying America”, Jan 15, 2022, Paul Rosenberg, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2022/01/
“How the states went nuts: Democratic backsliding in state capitals — and how to defeat it”, July 23, 2022, Paul Rosenberg, Salon, at < https://www.msn.com/en-us/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista:
These two articles both address the increasing emphasis by anti-democratic forces on achieving their political, social, and economic agenda by working in the various State Legislatures. This is not a new phenomenon, the real major push began after the Tea Party mobilization and electoral victories in a large number of State Legislatures and other state offices. The Republicans took something on the order of 1,000 seats in the 50 state legislatures in the U.S.from the Democrats. Much of this effort was bankrolled by the Koch Brothers (both of them were still alive back then) much of it through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and also much through their main political operation Americans for Prosperity. ALEC pushed model legislation, like open carry of weapons, that menace our well being and create more chaos and fear in our society. Both articles are, in fact, book reviews of books that take on the level of incredible dysfunction in the State Capitals and State Legislatures in much of the U.S.
The first article, “How the states have become 'Laboratories of Autocracy' — and why it's worse than you think: ... ”, reviews a book entitled Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines, written by David Pepper, points out that the oft-quoted right-wing propaganda line about the States being the “Laboratories of Democracy” is something that was, at best, partially true and that is not at all true now. The article states concerning that overused meme: “Obviously it comes out of this age-old term that Justice Louis Brandeis made famous but that many have used, a very idealized notion of states doing good things that then become models for the country. Clearly that's been the case sometimes. But as I argue in the book, in our history sometime(s) (sic) it's been the exact opposite. That's how we got Jim Crow. States have enough power that in the wrong hands they can do great damage, and the point of the title was to say that's what's happening now in very stark ways.”
The second and more recent article, “How the states went nuts: Democratic backsliding in state capitals — and how to defeat it”, that reviews a book by Jason Grumbach entitled Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, notes that while: “Trump has been characterized as an aberrant wrecking ball that disrupted American politics, Grumbach writes, 'it was the states that were the wrecking ball, clearing a path for Trumpism throughout the American political system.' His book refutes received wisdom about wisdom of American federalism: Rather than stabilizing and strengthening American democracy, the relative autonomy of states has played a significant role in undermining it, and the disconnect between abortion laws and public opinion disconnect is just one example of a broader democratic breakdown.”
While many who read and comment at The Class Struggle are justifiably dubious about electoral politics, the simple fact is that the bourgeois democracy is still semi-functional in the U.S. But there are well-funded and very well organized forces working to make the standard of operation of U.S. civil society a nightmare. They have already looted and gutted our public schools, imposed a reproductive health standard on a par with Iraq and El Salvador on poor women much of the country, set us up for ever increasing gun violence and intimidation to the point that sending one's children to school, once the safest place, is now frequently a frightening situation, and continued to further their financial interests using warfare, while the general population suffers from the socioeconomic consequences. We can expect this assault on our lives and well being to only increase in the future. The American Left is not strong enough, on its own, to confront and defeat the authoritarian and fascst forces that operate freely and with great success. We must form coalitions with movements we do not completely agree with if we are to, not only win, but in actuality to survive!!
These articles are not easy reading articles and are both relatively long, the first about 6,000 words and the second about 4,500. But they are well worth reading and integrating into your political calculus. TCS readers and commenters might even consider reading the books that the two articles reviewed.
How the states have become "Laboratories of Autocracy" — and why it's worse than you think
Former Ohio Democratic Party head David Pepper has a dire warning: Rigged state legislatures are destroying America
Early voters line up outside of the Franklin County Board of Elections Office on October 6, 2020 in Columbus, Ohio. Ohio allows early voting 28 days before the election which occurs on November 3rd of this year. (Ty Wright/Getty Images)
There's a booming literature on the erosion of democracy in America, as well as around the world, but David Pepper's book "Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines" stands out as arguably the most important for three reasons: It brings the subject down to earth, connects democratic erosion to corruption and the decline in America's quality of life, and provides a wealth of ideas about how to fight back to protect democracy.
The book's subtitle is well-earned. Pepper is a former city councilman, mayor, county commissioner and head of the Democratic Party of Ohio, as well as a lawyer who has won important battles defending democracy in court. This is no armchair account — it reads more like a well-organized set of field notes from battles seen first-hand.
Perhaps most significantly, those battles have surprisingly little to do with Donald Trump. In an essay in "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," therapist Elizabeth Mika described tyrannies as "three-legged beasts," supported by the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole. In my review of that book, I quoted her on the last of the legs:
Tyrants do not arise in a vacuum. ... It takes years of cultivation of special conditions in a society for a tyranny to take over. Those conditions invariably include a growing and unbearably oppressive economic and social inequality ignored by the elites who benefit from it, at least for a time; fear, moral confusion, and chaos that come from that deepening inequality; a breakdown of social norms; and growing disregard for the humanity of a large portion of the population and for higher values.
Pepper's book provides a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation of how the general conditions Mika describes have been created in Ohio and many other states across America. And when Pepper writes about how to fight back, it's about fighting back against the conditions that made Trump possible, if not inevitable. Of course Trump himself remains a danger, but Pepper's book provides a roadmap for action that addresses the roots of the problem. This conversation with David Pepper has been edited for clarity and length.
Let's start with your title. What's the story?
It was funny — it was when I thought of the term that the book came to me. I was going to tweet the words out, "You know, these states are no longer acting like laboratories of democracy, but laboratories of autocracy." I didn't send the tweet, because the minute I wrote it I thought, "Boy, there's a lot more to say than this tweet." And everything flowed from that.
Obviously it comes out of this age-old term that Justice Louis Brandeis made famous but that many have used, a very idealized notion of states doing good things that then become models for the country. Clearly that's been the case sometimes. But as I argue in the book, in our history sometime it's been the exact opposite. That's how we got Jim Crow. States have enough power that in the wrong hands they can do great damage, and the point of the title was to say that's what's happening now in very stark ways.
But both words matter. "Autocracy" matters, as these states are hacking away at pillars of democracy that could lead to autocracy. But the "laboratories" part matters too, because they're always learning, they're always improving. So they are functioning as laboratories. Until you start adding some accountability and pushing back, they'll just keep going. So my hope is that "autocracy" wakes people up, but "laboratories" is a really important part of that title because it explains how they operate.
The first story you tell in your book is about a horrendous traffic jam caused by an Ohio secretary of state who tried to make voting more difficult in 2020 by limiting ballot drop-boxes to one per county. Why begin there?
I've been fighting the voting rights battle in Ohio for a number of years. The worst is still the purging of voters, but to have a secretary of state intentionally cause long traffic jams for the form of voting that he knew minorities and Biden voters were using, and lying over and over again about what the law actually, was such a troubling thing. And this was not your right-wing, Trump-type secretary of state. He had held himself out as more moderate.
So I tell the story because you look at the traffic jams that his one-drop-box-per-county policy created, and anyone with a commonsense response would say, "Don't ever do that again." But in a world of "laboratories of autocracy," as I tell in the story, the state legislature of Ohio, seeing those jams, began pushing for bills to have traffic jams forever by making that not just a policy decision, but state law. And what do we see at the same time? States around the country looked at those traffic jams and saw the effect on — let's be clear — Black voters waiting in long lines. So now we have the same effort in other states to minimize drop boxes and to do what happened here: Put the drop boxes where people are already voting early in person, which creates the maximum congestion possible. So it's a great example of how they behave as laboratories against democracy.
As you lay it out, the heart of the problem is the relative invisibility of state representatives, combined with their great power, which the public may not be aware of. Two questions: Why are state legislatures so powerful? And why is there so little awareness?
It's a the toxic combination: great power and total anonymity, at least for the average citizen. The power comes all the way back, from the founding. State legislatures were given a lot of power over our day-to-day lives — economic policy, energy policy, criminal justice, education, the things that we care about. Statehouses have a huge effect on those.
But in our system the Constitution and our overall balance of powers also give statehouses enormous power over not just state elections but federal elections. They draw the district lines, as we're seeing right now. They set the rules of elections. They have control, to some degree, over how the Electoral College is calculated. It's a huge amount of power. It's something James Madison worried about: My gosh, we're giving statehouses a huge amount of power. If they're in the wrong hands, undemocratic hands, they can threaten our entire nation's democracy.
What about the lack of awareness?
Most people can't name their state representative. They don't know what's happening in their capital city. Very few of the things that are happening are covered. You only have so much bandwidth as a citizen, so you know the president, the governor, maybe your congressman and your mayor. These people get lost anyway: the capital city is normally some distance away, these elections don't get nearly the attention. It just isn't on the radar.
RELATED: The Roberts Court is destroying voting rights — winning back state legislatures is the only answer
And journalism is eroding too. You used to have more robust statehouse bureaus that would cover the ins and outs. You had local papers in the small towns and big cities. It all adds up to very low information about these places that are a source of great power. For those wanting to do damage, it's exactly what they want.
You write, "If the average voter doesn't know or care what state representatives can do, insiders and interests know exactly what they can do. That's dangerous." So what are some examples?
In Ohio, you see everything from massive subsidies given to the right players, and people getting in line for "state business," putting that in quotes — I talk about for-profit charter school scams in Ohio — who have figured out that they can get into the revenue stream, pull out hundreds of millions or more. You see individual legislators able to provide preferential tax treatment: The payday lenders got a sweetheart policy when they were helping certain legislators. I walk through all the ways that that these legislators can just give huge favors.
The general theme of these places, outside of extremism and anti-democracy, is a massive transfer of public assets and resources to private insiders. Public school dollars go to the private school donors who are starting scam for-profit schools. In other states, It's the privatization of the energy grid, so in Texas they couldn't even keep things going in the wintertime. Small towns not getting any infrastructure, because public dollars have been raided by the state to give out as tax cuts at the very high end.
If you add it all up, there's a massive movement of public resources and dollars to private insiders. That's why one thing that comes with broken government is a rapid decline in public outcomes. In Ohio, we're living it. A great state is finding itself ranked last or close to last in everything from higher education attainment to health care. It's because their M.O. with the statehouse is keep the private people happy and use public resources to do it, year after year.
I'd meant to ask you about how the decline in the quality of life is tied to the erosion of democracy. That's something that's completely disconnected in the national discourse. We've been hearing that Democrats' focus on voting rights takes away attention from kitchen-table issues, for example. But that's not the case on the ground, is it?
My book is trying to say that everyone suffers from this. It may in the short term feel good, if you have a majority. But as I explain later in the book, towns are dying because of the privatization of everything. There no winners from this, long-term. Everyone loses when you lose your democracy. When you go to small towns in Ohio that are largely Republican, they are suffering as much from lack of democracy as larger cities. Because they're not getting the health care, the infrastructure, anything else they need. And so ending gerrymandering actually would lift long-term outcomes in all these places, because these people would all of a sudden have to compete as well. They couldn't just give everything to the private players without any accountability, which right now is what they're doing.
Another category you discuss is overturning local governance. That's where the anti-democracy aspect blatantly comes to the fore, preventing people locally from passing laws. Could you expand on that?
Statehouses are the Achilles' heel of national governance. When local governments who are more attentive to public concerns pass laws about gun violence, for example, the statehouses have the ability to stop those local governments from being responsive. What they've done in Ohio on issue after issue — whether it's raising the minimum wage or gun reform — is that if the city of Cincinnati or the city of Cleveland or someone else tries to do something on those issues, they then pass a law that — by a misreading of Ohio law, I would say —allows them to stop any efforts to deal with that issue at a local level. So it's undemocratic in another way: Don't reflect your citizens' views at the state level and also don't allow local governments to represent their citizens either.
Just to be clear, on almost every issue I'm talking about they are doing the opposite of what their states actually want. Don't be fooled by the fact that Ohio voted for Trump by eight points. This is a state that supports common sense gun reform. This is a state that supports Roe v. Wade. It's a state that supports doing something on climate change. I can show you the polling on that. But the statehouses are basically places that, by protecting themselves through election rigging, can put in place deeply unpopular policies and never worry about being held accountable.
It's not just a problem with the special interests inside the state with help from the national GOP. There's also national organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the NRA and others.
These national players, the Koch Brothers, ALEC and others have weaponized the weakness of statehouses to serve their national agenda. They started out doing that with social issues, but then figured out it can be done, with even greater effect, on their economic interests. I go through how they've been crushing rural broadband for years: They don't want local governments to do it because they want someday to do it. The way I describe it is that they've privatized the legislative process.
So many of the laws that are being passed — attacking voters, gerrymandering, the abortion laws like in Texas — are being cooked up in ways that are shared all across the country. And every time one doesn't succeed, they learn from it and correct for it, and then other states will do the corrected form. And every time one of their approaches does succeed, other states will then model from it. So they've turned this into a national effort that people should find very worrisome.
One thing you talk about is how how people can go through a whole legislative career and never really have a competitive election, beyond maybe winning their first primary. What do people need to know about that?
It's so much worse than people realize. In Ohio we have a 99-person statehouse, and Republicans have rigged it so that they'll have somewhere in the low to mid 60s of seats, no matter what. In 2018, it was 50% Republican, 49% Democrat statewide and they still had a supermajority of seats, and 60 of those seats have averaged a double-digit win, most of those by 20 points or more. So a strong majority of these people have never been in an election that you and I would say was a real election. Maybe they won a primary at one point, but many were appointed, and never even had the primary.
People just don't understand how bad it is. We're talking about, for the first time since back before the civil rights era, people whose entire existence in power has been devoid of democracy. They haven't talked to swing voters, they've never worried about the next election. You literally have an entire generation of people in charge of statehouses who have never experienced democracy the way I did when I ran and won my races.
This leads into something else I wanted to ask about, how they have increased power in part by taking it away from governors, secretaries of state, from the independent judiciary. What's happening here that don't people realize?
This gets back to how much power they have that's hidden. They have levers both political and budgetary, and many can override vetoes, That's allowed them to run over the likely moderating influences of statewide officials. To win as governor in Ohio in the past you had to be more moderate, more like George Voinovich or Bob Taft. You weren't a right-wing nut. People who run for those offices try to be more moderate, and they get run over by the statehouse.
Our current governor tried to be reasonable on COVID for a few months, but they stopped everything he tried. They almost impeached him. Now he's as irresponsible as any of the others because the statehouse basically has too much control over the key functions of government. So statehouses end up being able to to run roughshod over governors, over the people the public actually knows. They don't realize that the unknown statehouse member, in the end, is trumping the governor again and again.
This leads into something else I wanted to ask about, how they have increased power in part by taking it away from governors, secretaries of state, from the independent judiciary. What's happening here that don't people realize?
This gets back to how much power they have that's hidden. They have levers both political and budgetary, and many can override vetoes, That's allowed them to run over the likely moderating influences of statewide officials. To win as governor in Ohio in the past you had to be more moderate, more like George Voinovich or Bob Taft. You weren't a right-wing nut. People who run for those offices try to be more moderate, and they get run over by the statehouse.
Our current governor tried to be reasonable on COVID for a few months, but they stopped everything he tried. They almost impeached him. Now he's as irresponsible as any of the others because the statehouse basically has too much control over the key functions of government. So statehouses end up being able to to run roughshod over governors, over the people the public actually knows. They don't realize that the unknown statehouse member, in the end, is trumping the governor again and again.
As you make clear, in Ohio there was the Tea Party wave of 2010, in reaction to the Obama coalition, where they took action to undermine that coalition's electoral power, and similar things are happening now in response to the 2020 election.
It's why I resist when people say, "The Big Lie is making statehouses act crazy." No — they've been doing this long before the Big Lie. When there's an election they don't succeed in, they learn from their failure and then do everything they can to change the thing that cost them that election. It's not just about the presidency, it's about their own self-preservation.
In 2008, after the Obama coalition in Ohio won the election for Obama, it also won Democrats the statehouse. That really peeved them. They had gerrymandered the statehouse and Obama comes in with this huge coalition of urban young voters, electing Obama and elects a Democratic statehouse. The minute they have a chance in 2011 to tear apart that coalition — not by a good campaign, but through changing the laws — they do it. They're purging voters left and right, and despite huge errors in the purging process, they never stop. They attack early voting again and again. For years they targeted the key constituency groups that made up the coalition that had defeated them, and by 2016 it was clear just how well that worked.
As you make clear, in Ohio there was the Tea Party wave of 2010, in reaction to the Obama coalition, where they took action to undermine that coalition's electoral power, and similar things are happening now in response to the 2020 election.
It's why I resist when people say, "The Big Lie is making statehouses act crazy." No — they've been doing this long before the Big Lie. When there's an election they don't succeed in, they learn from their failure and then do everything they can to change the thing that cost them that election. It's not just about the presidency, it's about their own self-preservation.
In 2008, after the Obama coalition in Ohio won the election for Obama, it also won Democrats the statehouse. That really peeved them. They had gerrymandered the statehouse and Obama comes in with this huge coalition of urban young voters, electing Obama and elects a Democratic statehouse. The minute they have a chance in 2011 to tear apart that coalition — not by a good campaign, but through changing the laws — they do it. They're purging voters left and right, and despite huge errors in the purging process, they never stop. They attack early voting again and again. For years they targeted the key constituency groups that made up the coalition that had defeated them, and by 2016 it was clear just how well that worked.
That's exactly what they're doing with Jan. 6. That was another failure. What are they gonna do? Figure out why they failed. They have three years to fix it. They're going to go about fixing it through statehouses.
Right. That's already well under way. How would you describe what it looks like?
I think it's a combination of things. The bottom line is, here's what it won't look like: people storming the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2025. What did they learn about Jan. 6? It was too chaotic. It was too late. It looked too illegitimate. The key to all this is that it has to look legitimate for them to really win. Storming a building does not look legitimate.
But what were they right about? That state legislators play a big role when it comes to the Electoral College. Not just through through traditional voter suppression, in rigging these districts through gerrymandering. They can also try different ways to maximize their chance of winning the electoral college long before you get to Jan. 6 so it looks legitimate, unlike Jan. 6 did last year.
That's exactly what they're doing with Jan. 6. That was another failure. What are they gonna do? Figure out why they failed. They have three years to fix it. They're going to go about fixing it through statehouses.
Right. That's already well under way. How would you describe what it looks like?
I think it's a combination of things. The bottom line is, here's what it won't look like: people storming the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2025. What did they learn about Jan. 6? It was too chaotic. It was too late. It looked too illegitimate. The key to all this is that it has to look legitimate for them to really win. Storming a building does not look legitimate.
But what were they right about? That state legislators play a big role when it comes to the Electoral College. Not just through through traditional voter suppression, in rigging these districts through gerrymandering. They can also try different ways to maximize their chance of winning the electoral college long before you get to Jan. 6 so it looks legitimate, unlike Jan. 6 did last year.
One thing that happened after 2012 is that they proposed — of course, only in the states where it would benefit them — that you calculate the Electoral College based on congressional district, not the overall popular vote. That would flip Michigan, in a world of gerrymandered districts, at least, basically superimposing gerrymandering onto the Electoral College count. Wisconsin would also be a great example. It's a very gerrymandered congressional map that would take a state where a Democrat wins overall but if you go to the congressional districts, Republicans win the electoral vote majority. There is some precedent for that right now, because you get votes in Maine and Nebraska out of congressional districts. There's also a potential legal challenge going back to the one person, one vote principle. But that's something they've already talked about and there have been bills proposed in some states to do that.
RELATED: Beware the "Independent State Legislatures doctrine" — it could checkmate democracy
That's something we've seen floated in the past. I actually wrote about it in 2014. But there are new and even wilder ideas you talk about.
This was fringe only a couple years ago, the idea that legislators can basically do whatever they want when it comes to the Electoral College. If there was a close election, and they claimed, like Trump tried to do, that it was illegitimate, the legislature could simply say, "We think that's the wrong result, we're going to change the outcome." If you read some of these new Supreme Court justices' thinking, going back to Clarence Thomas in Bush v. Gore, that was sort of what this John Eastman memo was about: A state legislature can step in and determine the Electoral College vote, and no one can challenge it. I guarantee you, that sort of legal thinking is currently being circulated around the states, and some are pushing it forward as law itself, and potential secretaries of state are running on it.
So they're going to do the traditional stuff. But they're also going to do everything they can to figure out this Electoral College stuff again before you have a vice president counting the votes on Jan. 6. That's why we need to be ready for the next battle. I'm glad we honored and thought seriously about the anniversary of Jan. 6, but the best way to think about it is to stop the next version, which will be far more sophisticated than what we saw one year ago.
That's a good lead-in to talking about the third part of your book, which is about ways of fighting back. And you start with talking about the Guarantee Clause, which not enough people know about.
It's the only part where I risk being academic. My goal was to make sure this is very readable, but every single thing I just talked about was of great concern to the founders. I know some people will say, "Well, the founders did terrible things," and yes, they did. But they also wrote the Constitution. They thought "rich interests" or monarchical interests would take the very powers I described in statehouses and use them to take over the country. They were so worried that they put in the Constitution something called the Guarantee Clause, which literally says, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government." It's in the same area as protecting against foreign invasion. Meaning the federal government must step up and protect that every state in this country has essentially what we call today a small-d democratic government.
To me, that should shape what happens in Congress. This is not just some other policy debate. When you take an oath to the Constitution of the United States as a U.S. senator or House member or president, you are taking an oath to guarantee that every state in this country has democratic governance, just like you'd stop a foreign invader. That's why when I watch this debate over the filibuster, it shapes the debate. "Shall" is the strongest word in law, "guarantee" is about as strong as it gets.
So when I watch these people fuss about, "Well we we can't do it unless a bunch of Republicans do it," no! Your oath is your oath. You took an oath to uphold the Guarantee Clause, which means if there are states in this country who are falling away from democracy — and many of them are, like mine — you have to do something about it, or you're violating your oath to the Constitution. There is no better grounding to carve out the filibuster for voting rights and democracy than the Guarantee Clause. It's telling you that, as a senator, you have a duty to protect democracy.
So you have like 30 steps in terms of things that can be done, and that's too many for us to go into here. Pick one or two themes, because there are some echo in different steps in different ways.
I read a lot of books. and I normally put them down and they might have been interesting but I don't do anything. So I really wanted to say, "If you put this book down and don't do anything different, I've failed." I try to break this down into not just the big stuff but something people can do every single day in their corner of the world to lift up democracy, because that's what it's going to take.
I start with the federal stuff and it's essential, but not enough, that the federal government protect voting rights. The Freedom to Vote Act in the Senate right now does so much. I also say the federal government has to do some other things that I won't go into here, but there's no protection against corruption in states are locked in by one party, so we need a lot more corruption enforcement from the feds in states like Ohio. A lot of the way democracy is being attacked is actually through substance, like that crazy law in Texas. I think we need to federalize rights that are getting caught up in these antidemocratic efforts, be they labor rights, be they Roe v. Wade.
But then then I'm going to the next level down, which is not through law, but politics. I believe we have to really rethink politics right now, and those for democracy — and I don't think that's only Democrats, although Democrats are the big part of it — have to reorient our thinking. This is a long battle for democracy, the way that John Lewis and the suffragists thought about it way back when. It's a long battle.
What does that entail?
It should dramatically change how we fight that battle. We will lose that battle if all we do on our side is fight in swing states every couple of years for certain Senate seats and Electoral College votes, while they're fighting democracy in 50 states every year. We have to rethink our approach, to do what they're doing. Democracy must be protected in every state, every year, in every office that has some lever over democracy. We have to make that adjustment.
That sounds hard, and one thing we must do is decide what resources must follow that adjustment. If you took a rounding error of the billion dollars spent to win a presidential election, for example, and divided that up among 50 states over four years, you would actually have serious investment in those statehouse races and other races. Now my guess is some of those big donors would say "This is crazy. We can't do that and not give to the presidential race." And my answer would be, "That's what the Koch brothers did, and it worked." Not only will you protect democracy much more effectively, you'll do better in the presidential race down the road as you built up some support.
That's already been proven in Georgia, hasn't it?
Stacey Abrams lost in 2018, but remember her speech where she didn't concede, but she acknowledged she had lost? She said "We made progress," and people probably looked at her and went, "What? You didn't win!" Well, she knew she had registered more voters and inspired more voters — every door-knock was a new voter excited. She was right, and two years later Georgia was blue. Stacey Abrams has thought about democracy as a long game in Georgia her entire life, and that's why she succeeded. She didn't give up on everything after one bad cycle. She knew it was a long game.
A long game also means that individual candidates at the statehouse level, for example, even if they lose are contributing, and they need to be rewarded and praised for that. Too often we let a candidate run in a bad district and when they lose we walk away. If it's a long game and they're on the side of democracy, they need to be celebrated. Their run could in the long run be the difference in lifting other candidates. I go through many examples of how that happens.
In a big-picture frame, there's a lot of disagreements to be had on a lot of issues, but don't let disagreements on those issues lead to civil wars among those who all support democracy. One of the things I go through in the book is that so much of what I'm talking about are lessons learned from what led to Jim Crow. Going into Jim Crow, a lot of people who agreed on stopping things in the South — stopping the KKK and the resurgence of white supremacy — let all their disagreements on other issues get in the way of that, and they ultimately lost.
My point here is, if there are Republicans we disagree with that support democracy, welcome aboard. We'll figure the other stuff out later. But if you're for democracy, we need to work together. That's why I've actually really enjoyed — for all the criticism, the Lincoln Project has been very good at spreading the word about what I'm trying to say. That also means that progressives and moderate Democrats, yeah, we disagree on the issues. But if we're on the same page on democracy, to unify there is much harder than any disagreement you allow to get between you.
I worry that we're going to get into 2022 and we know the Senate seats and House seats are important, but if we don't do everything else we're not getting to the root cause, which is the statehouses, the most undemocratic institutions that eating away at everything else.
There's new talk of, "Well, we won't pass a voting rights act, but we'll do the Electoral College Act." If we fall for that, it's because we're not thinking about the long game. If we say, "Yeah, we'll correct for the presidential election, but we'll let you get away with all the attacks on voting rights at the state level again," that would again be a perfect example where the other side is protecting their long game, but we fall for the thing that deals with what we've always cared about, almost blindly and solely, which is the presidency. Not seeing the long game gives them another massive victory.
You conclude with a chapter on what individuals can do. As you describe it, there's quite a lot.
Each person and organization, I believe, needs to figure out how they can add to their own personal mission statement or their organizational mission statement how, in everything they do every day, they try to lift democracy. Add that to your New Year's resolution. If there are companies that are helping democracy, not hurting it, spend your resources there. Don't go around the paywall if there's a state paper that's covering the statehouse well. Thank God! You're lucky they're there. Subscribe! Keep them going! Reward those who are lifting democracy!
If you're in Georgia or Ohio, get involved in registering voters. If you run a homeless shelter, are you registering everybody who comes to your shelter every time they come through there? If you're the mayor of the city and you run rec centers and health clinics, are you registering people? They're attacking your voters through purging. You have an obligation to lift those voters up. Everyone can play a role. We know that there are people attacking democracy every single day. We love that we have people like Stacey Abrams out there protecting it. But we can't we can't leave it all to her.
It also means figuring out who your state representative is and never letting a state rep going unchallenged, especially if they're attacking democracy. There's a whole array of things everyone can do to push back for democracy. They may just think it's bigger than them, but there's steps that everyone can do, and if we all did them together it would make a massive difference.
I like to end by asking, what's the most important question I didn't ask? But in this case I'm aware of so many. I'd rather ask if there's one more thing you'd like to emphasize.
Well, the other thing we all can do is wake other people up to it. I've gotten so many responses to my book like, "Oh my God, it's a lot worse than I realized!" The more you can educate everyone you know — in your family, on your bandwidth — please do it. Because I'm worried sick that people just aren't seeing this for what it is. If you think it's bad, the truth is, it's worse than you can actually see.
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How the states went nuts: Democratic backsliding in state capitals — and how to defeat it
People take part in a protest for "Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine" at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan on April 15, 2020. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty
Every week seems to bring a new stress fracture in American democracy to light. While the drama of the Jan. 6 hearings focuses attention on former Donald Trump's top-down predation, the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has unleashed a torrent of state and local conflicts that only grow more intense. This is happening even as many states now enforcing or enacting abortion bans laws actually have pro-choice majorities, as noted in this Monkey Cage analysis by political scientists Jacob Grumbach and Christopher Warshaw.
What comes next is very much up for grabs, but Grumbach's new book "Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics," casts a dramatically different light on how we got here, which in turn says a lot about the task of setting things right.
This antidemocratic lawmaking was just one example of a nationally-driven agenda that voters weren't asking for, either on the state or national level. That's the good news, as well as the bad. To make sense of this contradictory state of affairs, I recently spoke with Grumbach about his new book. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
In your preface you use the metaphor that the states served as a "wrecking ball clearing a path for Trumpism." What are some salient developments you'd cite as examples of this?
There's many angles to take on this. One is that since the 2010s there is a huge shift in state-level democratic institutions and some serious democratic backsliding in a handful of states, including key Midwestern and Atlantic seaboard swing states. States like Wisconsin and North Carolina, which Barack Obama won in 2008, proved hugely consequential, as an example, in the 2016 election.
In the 2010 redistricting cycle, you saw states like Wisconsin set records for partisan bias in legislative gerrymandering for both their U.S. House seats as well as their state legislative seats. This allowed a minority of voters to set state legislative majorities, and also to affect who controls the U.S. House. So, that's one thing. Later, after the Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, those state legislative majorities were able to restrict voting rights and make it more costly and burdensome to vote.
By contrast, other states, like where I am in Washington state or Colorado, were expanding access to the ballot over that same time through things like automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration and expansive mail balloting with drop-off locations. That divergence in democratic performance proved really consequential, and that's happening at the state level. And if the Supreme Court rules on the "independent state legislature" doctrine, which may be incoming, it will be even more so.
You also write that "the three monumental crises in 2020 [meaning the pandemic, policing and democracy] revealed an American political system that lacked the capacity to solve fundamental challenges." Keeping in mind that you don't blame federalism alone, what would you highlight to make your point?
Those three crises are different, but they all strongly point us to the role of decentralization and state governments in not solving these problems and allowing them to worsen over time. First would be COVID-19. Early on state governments had trouble coordinating on getting PPE equipment to essential workers, and lack of coordination during the economic crisis precipitated by COVID-19 was hugely important. Also, states don't have a unified unemployment insurance system. They have various underfunded and decentralized forms of welfare state provision, like unemployment insurance or Medicaid. The fact that states were allowed to reject Medicaid expansion, even though the federal government is paying for it through the Affordable Care Act, means that people who are working poor, but may not have children do not have access to Medicaid in these states, which worsens COVID relief, and COVID-based health care.
With Trump in the White House and governors of different parties, decentralized authority meant that no one was really responsible for the outcomes of the COVID pandemic.
Finally, with Trump in the White House and governors of different parties in the states, decentralized authority means decentralized accountability. So that means that no one political office or legislature was really responsible for the outcomes of COVID-19. Decentralized authority means that politicians at different levels of government — mayors, governors, presidents — can reasonably point to the other and say, "That crisis going on in your area, it's this other level of government's fault!" This makes it extremely difficult for voters — especially in the context of sensationalist national media and the decline of state and local journalism — to hold their politicians accountable. If you're a Republican, you can say, "It was my dumb Democratic governor's fault." If you're a Democrat, you can say, "It's Donald Trump's fault." It's really hard to draw lines of accountability there.
What about the second crisis: policing?
Policing is constitutionally a state level authority, and states then delegate authority to local governments. So mayors are the commanders in chief of their police departments and states then have ultimate authority over them. Yet what we see pretty consistently is that police departments tend to be the de facto government and they're extremely insulated from democratic inputs. Police departments are essentially impervious to reform, so when reform-minded mayors and district attorneys come in at the local level what you see is not much change.
One finding I have in the book is that criminal justice policy, unlike other policy areas like abortion rights, the minimum wage, labor relations, health insurance or climate change — all of those areas are really polarized by party. But in terms of policing and incarceration, there's not much difference between red and blue areas, they all tend to take the "tough on crime" approach, even when reform-minded state and local politicians take office. Unlike in other democracies that tend to have centralized authority over policing, in the U.S. this decentralized form of policing allows police department cartels to really run their towns and cities.
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And what about the last crisis: democratic backsliding?
We see throughout American history that state-level authority — state legislatures, especially — have been the main forces of democratic backsliding. They're often aided by a permissive Supreme Court that says, "States, you can do what you wish" with respect to elections or gerrymandering or, in the past, Jim Crow laws and before that slavery, giving states free rein to do that. Democratic backsliding right now is not as extreme as under Jim Crow or slavery, but it is meaningful. What we see is that Congress then decides to get its act together and stop the state-based backsliding, or not. And Congress has not organized to pass laws to ban gerrymandering or certain forms of voter suppression, which it certainly could.
You argue that today's Democratic and Republican parties have nationalized in a way that has fundamentally changed how American federalism operates. So, two questions. First, how have they nationalized in a new way?
Throughout American history, state legislatures have been the main force of democratic backsliding. But what's new in this era is that the political parties are nationalized, and highly polarized.
Throughout American history, the constitutional system has been really decentralized. But what's new and recent is that the political parties are no longer decentralized. They're very nationalized through a series of processes since the 1970s. One is the breakdown of the New Deal coalition, which meant the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century was extremely decentralized. Southern Dixiecrats were pro-Jim Crow, while Northern labor and civil rights Democrats were in favor of egalitarian racial democracy and economic justice. So the Democratic Party was very decentralized through racial politics and then, more recently, you see the Republican Party take on a "Southern strategy" since Nixon which made the party much more Southern.
So that's part of it: racial realignment. But the other processes are things like the nationalization of fundraising since the '70s, where activist organizations, new technology, changes in campaign finance, economic inequality which gave donors much more money to spend, all those things contribute to nationalizing how politicians can be successful. No longer do you tap into local elites to get elected, you can tap into national fundraising and also nationalized media. Since the 1990s, the advent of the internet and Craigslist really destroyed newspaper revenue, so we saw the decline of state and local political journalism, the rise of the internet and especially cable news.
It seems cliché at this point to say that Fox News had a big effect, but it really had an overwhelming effect on nationalizing politics and making the Republican Party much more competitive. That started in the 1990s, which coincided with the Gingrich revolution that made the Republican Party much more extreme and aggressive and nationalized in orientation. Great research by Greg Martin, for example, shows causally that Fox News has improved the electoral fortunes of Republicans over this time period. On the Democratic side, you've got groups like MoveOn, environmental groups and various other activist groups that have nationalized the Democratic Party. There are huge differences between the parties on all sorts of dimensions, but it is true that both became nationalized.
So how did this connect with the main consequences that you cite? First, the resurgence of state-level policymaking?
As the parties nationalized you see that Democrats across the country become more similar to each other. There are no longer Southern conservative Democrats and northern liberal Democrats. There's one Democratic Party and one Republican Party. States like Mississippi and Arkansas had Democratic state legislatures up to the 2000s. It's really remarkable how long it took for them to go Republican. They had a lot of Joe Manchins and even more conservative Democratic state legislators in the South.
Those states become Republican and start passing things for the national Republican agenda. That also happened in the Midwest after 2010. On the Democratic side you see states start to have similar agendas on things like climate and LGBTQ rights and so forth.
Talk about Louis Brandeis' phrase "laboratories of democracy," and why it didn't work out that way.
The idea was that states would serve as national laboratories making policy experiments and would learn best practices from each other. So we have a financial crisis, let's see which states do best in tweaking economic policy, and we'll copy them. In the modern period you don't really see any evidence of that. Policies that do well are no more likely to be emulated by other states, unless that state is controlled by the same party. It's much more about two national communities of state governments, when it was not all about party in the previous period.
What about democratic backsliding in states controlled by the Republicans?
States have done really bad things for democracy in the past — slavery, Jim Crow and so forth. But the politics of those moments of backsliding were much more regional. They were barbaric, but they were really not about national goals. Whereas now you see through Jan. 6, for example, as well as issues around trans rights or critical race theory, that these are really national in orientation. If you listen to the Republican voting base, they say, "Our country is slipping away," and their opposition to the direction of the country is in terms of multiracial democracy rather than highly localized and regional conflicts like Jim Crow legislation.
You're seeing a national orientation, where if the Supreme Court rules on this independent state legislature doctrine, state governments and state legislatures are really battling over who is going to control the country. So when they decide to gerrymandering House districts or suppress the vote, or shut down ballot drop-boxes or whatever — all these voter suppression policies are done with national ambitions to affect national elections, not just control of your state. And that is fundamentally different than before. So the collision of these national parties with these decentralized institutions is creating this explosive moment for American democracy that we may see in the 2024 presidential election.
Talk about the arguments in favor of federalism. We've already discussed the Brandeis tradition, but what about the "decentralist" argument?
Going back to the Federalist Papers and James Madison, the "decentralists" argue that in a large, diverse country like the U.S., it will be more harmonious if we can customize our local areas to the policies we like and not have to battle this out at the national level. So places that are very religious can have a more socially conservative life, while places can be more permissive and libertarian in spirit, they can be customized to local culture and conditions.
The collision of national parties and decentralized institutions is creating an explosive moment for American democracy that we may see play out in the 2024 presidential election.
Another argument Madison made is this idea of "double security": Federalism, by decentralizing authority, meant that one autocrat or dictator couldn't capture the whole system easily. I think there's something to both of those arguments, in the best of times. If you have a would-be dictator with national power, certainly that's not the time to centralize all sorts of institutions. At the same time, state-based authority and decentralization helped propel Trump to office in the first place, right? So there's a flipside to the trade-off.
What about the "new federalist" argument?
So the new federalist arguments are a set of more political economy-based theoretical arguments in the latter half of the 20th century as the social sciences were getting more sophisticated. They believe a lot of the arguments of the decentralists, but use more sophisticated tools. One of their big arguments is that governments will be more efficient and effective because individuals in a decentralized system can move to the place that they'd like to live under.
There's not much evidence that's working very well. First, it's hugely costly to move, even across states, and the people that are able to threaten to move and can influence governments by saying. "I don't like the taxes in this state, I'm going to move," tend to be much wealthier people. So this gives wealthy individuals and big business an advantage over ordinary workers and voters. You hear this all the time, whereas ordinary people don't have that same ability to threaten to leave.
One key observation you build on is that while policy has shifted dramatically at the state level, public opinion in the states has been mostly static over the past generation.
A key example is abortion policy. I wish I had written this knowing all of this would happen now, but I think I called it pretty accurately. Legal abortion has like 61% support in the U.S. and has been at about that level for a generation or more. But right now we're seeing some states banning abortion despite no real change in public opinion or, if anything, an increase in support for legal abortion over time.
Note that the issues where you do see a lot of responsiveness are those that have seen big changes in public opinion, like on marijuana. States that saw huge support for legal marijuana legalized it. The same with LGBTQ rights. Before the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in all states, more progressive states started implementing marriage equality.
But on other issues where you see states take hugely important policy changes over the past generation — on taxes, or on labor relations, where in the Midwest they totally dismantled labor unions, for example — you actually don't see people suddenly saying, "Oh, I really hate unions." That's just not happening. It's happening because of these group coalitions when a party takes power in a state and has an ambitious policy agenda based on its coalition. Now the party that controls your state really, really matters for policy outcomes. Again in most areas, you don't see much change in public opinion despite these huge policy changes.
The "laboratories of democracy" idea wasn't about isolated state-level experimentation, but the collective learning process that's typical of science. So how did that model break down?
One trend I do find is that policy emulation or copying between states is much more within one party — parties only share policies within themselves now — than it was in the 1970s. Policies that political economists used to think were objective standards of quality — things like whether the economy grows or whether unemployment gets reduced by state economic policies — are not likely to be emulated by other states if they're controlled by the other party. So it doesn't matter how well the state next to you is doing: If it's controlled by the other party, you will not copy their policies.
Your most crucial finding has to do with the undermining of democracy itself. How do you go about measuring the state of democracy and democratic erosion?
Democracy is a really tough, big concept. One thing that democratic theorists and philosophers do is to break it down into different components. So I mostly talk about electoral democracy. That's things like: Are elections free and fair? Do people have a reasonably easy time getting to the polling place and casting a ballot, or are there really tough burdens to doing that? How fairly are districts drawn in legislative maps? How secure are elections and how much integrity do they have? Do states follow public opinion when passing policy?
I take a bunch of indicators or variables of measures of how fair districts are, or whether a state has certain policies around allowing people to register to vote on Election Day. Or, you know, whether they allow absentee voters, or do they have to prove an onerous health burden, things like that. I put them into a statistical model which then tells me how to weigh those different indicators in measuring democracy. So it's not me imposing my philosophy of things on it. It generates a state democracy score over the past couple of decades, and the big finding there is that some states have done some really serious democratic backsliding, and that has pretty major consequences for democratic performance in the U.S. as a whole, and for the stability of the American political system.
What were the competing causal theories that you tested to explain this democratic backsliding?
This has been a big question for a long time. What causes a society to be a democracy or an autocracy or an oligarchy or whatnot? There's been hundreds of years of theorizing about this. With the focus on the U.S. and recent democracies, there's been some focus on the idea that democracy is really about political competition between the parties, or that it's about polarization between the parties: How distant are the two parties? If they're very polarized, democracies may not work very well.
Another argument is about immigration and racial threat. This is true around the world: As societies change through immigration or there's increased economic or political power of a minority group within society, the majority group gets threatened and will reduce democracy. You see in European far-right parties that are anti-democracy that they are really mobilized against new immigration.
Finally there's one line of theory that's more focused on parties of the wealthy and parties of racial hierarchy, Those tend to be anti-democratic parties and the Republican Party, kind of uniquely around the world, is a party whose elite constituency wants high-end tax cuts and things that help the very wealthy, and also wants to restrict multiracial democracy and maintain racial hierarchy at the electoral base level.
The wealthy constituency of the Republican Party doesn't want a robust democracy of working people, and the electoral base doesn't want a party that shares political power with Black people and more recent immigrants.
Both of those things point towards not wanting to expand democracy and potentially wanting to backslide democracy. What I find is none of those other potential causes are really driving democratic changes in the states. It's really the national Republican Party. When it controls a state it backslides democracy and I think this can be explained by the fact that the wealthy constituency of the Republican Party doesn't want a robust democracy of working people redistributing their wealth, and the electoral base doesn't want a party that has important political influence and political power for Black Americans especially, as well as recent immigrant groups.
You use the term "plutocratic populist partnership" in talking about the GOP. In contrast, you note that civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin, as well as labor leaders such as Philip Randolph and Walter Reuther, emphasized linkages between race, class and democracy, arguing that powerful interests exploit racial division for political gain. This is precisely the argument that Ian Haney López and Anat Shenker-Osorio make, and I read this passage as a de facto endorsement of their approach.
Yeah, I really like those two. I would say they're focused on the behavioral aspect of it and whether messaging in the race-class narrative, as they put it, is most effective. I don't do that. I do the political economy and policy side rather than the psychological and behavioral side, so I can't comment on whether that's the most effective messaging. It seems pretty effective to me, but that's not my area of expertise. But it's clear that one thing that's driving changes in democratic institutions — and we see this in terms of political coalitions throughout American history — is this tragedy of the white working class rejecting coalitions with Americans of color that are also working class. They've rejected class-based multiracial coalitions, and as W.E.B. Du Bois has written, have been willing to accept a lower status that at least is not the lowest rung.
The Republican Party at the elite level, which I study much more, is clearly about maintaining this coalition. You see wealthy individuals and big business titans, they realize they're not going to be popular for their economic platforms. It's really hard to win elections saying, "Let's cut taxes for billionaires." So you have to build a coalition with more popular items and somehow get members of the white working class to support the big-business party that supports tax cuts and anti-labor policy. One way to do that is to really focus on anti-immigration politics or social conservatism around gender and sexuality, to avoid elections being about your economic platform. Because it's clear that the Democratic economic platform of more labor rights and health care spending tends to be more popular, but Republicans are very electorally competitive and it's not for their economic platform. It's for these other cultural areas of politics.
So what do you suggest should be done to protect American democracy, in terms of the problems you identify?
A basic pointer for politicians at the national level is this: If you have the opportunity, it's really important to pass national policy that prevents states from doing this type of democratic backsliding. I know that seems ridiculous to say, with getting things through the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court the way it is. But it's clear there have been missed opportunities to pass national policy that would prevent democratic backsliding. You could pass a gerrymander ban. You can reform the Electoral Count Act to prevent a stolen presidential election by state legislatures. There's a lot of things like that.
There's also things that are just as important for protecting democracy, through national policy supporting the labor movement and labor unions. My research with Paul Framer shows that the decline or destruction of labor unions has really increased the power of resentment-based politics, and has helped the Republican Party in this era of the culture war. The decline of labor is not just a problem for wages and health benefits and working situations, it's also a big deal for democracy.
For ordinary activist types reading this book, I would say that state-level politics is highly important and hard to monitor, and that organizations really matter and it takes a long time to produce electoral gains. So long-term organizing, especially through the labor movement, is important. The labor movement is well situated for this, because locals within the unions are federated but have a national coordinating mechanism. It's important to get involved with long-term robust organizations, not just sending a check to a national group in D.C., but getting involved in your community in an organizational capacity. Even though it's extremely boring and thankless, it's more effective over the long term than all the phone-banking and text-banking every presidential election.
One reason labor unions are really important is that we go to work all day. That's like our main task in life. That's one reason why the gun-rights community on the right has been very successful, and the religious right. Having something that brings you together through a social aspect makes you a really powerful force in politics. Groups on the left should think about that. The resurgence of young people organizing union campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks is, I think, one of the bright spots in American politics.
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