Ht tip to Tim Russ for tweeting about this CNN story:
Think of it as a determined effort to roll back the power of the Federal Government and Balkanize the country into red and blue enclaves along state lines.
(CNN) It was a revealing sign of the times when the Supreme Court last week, in response to a lawsuit from the Republican state attorneys general in Texas and Louisiana, blocked President Joe Biden's administration from changing a key element of federal immigration policy.
The case was just the latest example of how red states, supported by Republican-appointed judges, are engaging in a multi-front offensive to seize control of national policy even while Democrats hold the White House and nominally control both the House and Senate. The red states are moving social policy sharply to the right within their borders on issues from abortion to LGBTQ rights and classroom censorship, while simultaneously working to hobble the ability of either the federal government or their own largest metro areas to set a different course.
To a degree unimaginable even a decade ago, this broad offensive increasingly looks like an effort to define a nation within a nation -- one operating with a set of rules and policies that diverge from the rest of America more than in almost any previous era.
emphasis added
Update 7-27-2022: The CNN article by Ron Brownstein appears to be a followup to an article by Brownstein at The Atlantic, which is -alas — behind a paywall:
America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good
The great “convergence” of the mid-20th century may have been an anomaly.
Here’s an excerpt quoting Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections.
To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”
Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”
The situation Brownstein describes at CNN shows how Republicans are exerting their control at state level to impose their vision. This is only because we are in a situation where Republicans do not totally control the Federal government.
...For now, Kettl sees the initial red state Republican goal primarily as consolidating these new rules and blocking any interference -- what he calls "an effort to build very high castle walls with a very deep moat." But like Grumbach and other experts on state policy, Kettl is dubious that Republicans will settle for imposing their values solely on the states now under their control. As the red states pursue a more consistent and coordinated course, Kettl predicts that Republicans will "try to impose [this] policy on the nation as a whole" if they achieve the federal power to do so.
emphasis added
If and when they regain control of Congress and the White House (they have a lock on the Supreme Court that will last decades), expect them to impose an agenda that will only be limited by their own incompetence and unknown limits on how much force they will be able and willing to use to impose it.
What does Red America look like?
...One way to define the red states is to examine the 25 that voted for Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. At a time when the foreign-born share of the total US population is nearing its all-time high, 19 of the Trump states rank among the bottom 25 states in the share of their population composed of immigrants. While the overall share of college graduates is also rising, 20 of these states also rank in the bottom 25 for the share of their population that holds at least a four-year college degree, the Census Bureau found. The vast majority of Trump states, by contrast, fall into the top half when states are ranked by the share of their population that are White Christians or who own guns.
emphasis added
The draconian anti-abortion measures being put into place in the red states are the most obvious difference, but as the article points out, an entire range of actions are being taken that widen the divide.
...The elements of the red state offensive include a flurry of lawsuits seeking to block actions from Biden's administration on issues from the environment to civil rights to immigration; other lawsuits, such as the case around a Mississippi law that prompted the Supreme Court to overturn the right to abortion, aimed at providing states more leeway to deviate from previously nationally guaranteed rights; a flurry of red state laws that advance the cultural priorities of the GOP's predominantly White Christian electoral base; and a steady flow of red state statutes blocking Democratic-leaning large cities and counties from setting their own policies on everything from police budgets to recycling.
...On everything from gun ownership and religious affiliation to reliance on fossil fuels and participation (or not) in the 21st century information economy, most red states are following similar tracks, while diverging more sharply from the experience in blue states. Broadly speaking, blue states are more heavily exposed to the big demographic, cultural and economic forces reshaping American life, while red states are less exposed, and to the extent they are, those changes are centered overwhelmingly on their large metropolitan areas, which are trending Democratic and often -- like in Austin or Atlanta -- are a target for the Republicans controlling state government.
"It's not at the level of Jim Crow, or certainly the difference between slave states and free states, but the differences are major," says Jake Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist who studies divergence among the states. And like Kettl, Grumbach believes the economic and political differences between the red and blue states are on track to only widen.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing. We would be living in a very different country if the 50 State Strategy was still in effect and Democrats still had a political presence in these regions.
...Howard Dean pursued an explicit "fifty-state strategy" as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, putting resources into building a Democratic Party presence even where Democrats had been thought unlikely to win federal positions, in hopes that getting Democrats elected to local and state positions, and increasing awareness of Democrats in previously conceded areas, would result in growing successes in future elections. Democrats who supported the strategy have said that abandoning "red states" as lost causes only allowed the Republican Party to grow even stronger in areas where it was unchallenged, resulting in lopsided losses for Democrats in even more races.[2]
emphasis added
Every election cycle seems to turn on Democrats going for the short term win; why spend resources in places where there will be no immediate payoff? Well, the world is made by the people who show up for the job. When Democrats stop showing up, should they be surprised at how the world gets remade? Republicans have been playing the long game — and this is where it has gotten them.
Paul Krugman documents The Dystopian Myths of Red America which explains why the people living in these states are so determined to go their own way. (The link should penetrate the Times paywall.)
Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.
What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.
What he fails to note is the big factor in this: the right wing media that promotes and reinforces these myths every day and how the Republican Party runs with them. It’s no longer possible to tell which is the tail, which is the dog, and who is wagging whom. It’s also worth noting that this none of this is something that can be blamed just on Trump or that will go away with Trump — although there seems to be quite a few who believe that’s the case.
Republicans have been working on this for decades, with things like the Powell Memo, the Long Con, Language a key mechanism of control. Look at the efforts of the Federalist Society and ALEC to put the courts and the legislatures on a partisan war footing. Look at the money the Koch family and other super wealthy individuals have spent — chump change out of their vast fortunes — to buy an America that works for them and no one else. Look at the media machine they have built to catapult the propaganda 24/7.
If there is any comparable theoretical, ideological, and practical infrastructure on the left to support Democrats, it’s not obvious to me. While Democrats have been focusing on individual battles, Republicans have been fighting a war — and they’ve not been shy about saying so.
We should believe them — and respond accordingly. Democrats need to stop pretending ‘normal’ can be restored. Normal is over.
