How the states went nuts: Democratic backsliding in state capitals -- and how to defeat it
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.
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.
State politics is not so much the culprit as the conduit, as Grumbach's subtitle indicates. As the two national parties became more homogeneous with the breakdown of the New Deal coalition, the nature of state-level politics changed significantly. In the period Grumbach's data covers, from 2000 to 2018, there was significant change in public opinion regarding marijuana legalization and LGBTQ rights that was reflected in state legislation. But these two high-salience issues were the exception, not the rule. "For the rest of the issue areas, state policies have changed profoundly, but state opinion has been mostly static," he writes. "And you can't explain change with a constant."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/how-the-states-went-nuts-democratic-backsliding-in-state-capitals-and-how-to-defeat-it/ar-AAZTREj
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