North Carolina’s state legislature has been one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy” since REDMAP helped Republicans take the majority after the 2010 elections. The next decade, regular readers know, was a string of lawsuits challenging gerrymandered districts again and again. Plus, a voter ID bill a federal court ruled targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” From the state house to the U.S. Supreme Court and back, from superior court to the N.C. Supreme Court, the Republicans’ plan faced setbacks. Yet, with every defeat, Republican legislators went back to their laboratories, retooled their schemes, and tried, tried again to secure permanent control. Democracy be damned.
A former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, Pepper believes Republican-controlled state legislatures are “the most corrosive danger America faces.” What the right did while the left focused more on federal races was target easy pickups in state legislatures. As Democrats and progressives pour themselves into marquee federal races, Republicans are eating their lunch in the states.
“Republicans figured out that it would be relatively easy to take over at the state level,” David Waldman wrote in a column referencing Pepper’s work. They could then “use that power to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win, locking in their control and creating a playground for special interests.” (I have not yet read Pepper’s book.)
Truman Show legislatures
Mickael Tomasky explains at The New Republic:
But Pepper makes a broader argument: that since the GOP started spending big money to flip and control statehouses, the state governments themselves have become undemocratic. Gerrymandering is the big culprit here. Republican legislators, he argues, “are sitting in power mostly having never won a real election.” They cut themselves districts that are wildly skewed in their direction. They never have to think about swing voters. They worry only about primaries from their right. So they’ve created these Truman Show legislatures that have no serious civic interaction with the public at large.
Dave Neiwert’s Daily Kos interview with Pepper last month blended his studied observations on violent, right-wing extremism with Pepper’s reflections on the increasing autocratic lean of Republican state legislatures. Pepper’s story begins with his experience in Ohio.
“Our statehouse has been named, or our state politics have been named the most corrupt in the country,” Pepper said, “which back in a few years ago I would never have thought we would be named that, and they’re legislating, again, like we’re Alabama or Mississippi, and it’s never changing. It’s this downward spiral of poor outcomes, corruption—lack of democracy in the end, and those go together.”
For every Madison Cawthorn or Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress, there are hundreds more in state houses, Pepper tells Neiwert. And while Republicans stymie legislation in Congress, in state capitols they are passing anti-abortion laws, anti-voting laws, even making it legal for drivers to run over protesters, Neiwert adds.
David Pepper: Yeah. Yeah. I keep thinking about that last one in particular. If we saw another country do all these, but particularly that one, my guess is we’d almost issue sanctions that this country has fallen away from democracy so badly that we would treat them differently, and what’s frustrating for me is we have a blind spot when it comes to our own country. We just assume that everyone buys into the democratic project, small D, and so when these series of things, attacks on courts and elections offices and independent offices, and trying to crack down on protests of those we don’t agree with, to vigilanteism being encouraged, everything else we’ve talked about, rigging of districts, in our own country … If that was another country, as I said, we would raise the alarm: “My gosh. They’re moving away from democracy.”
In our own country, I worry as I watch … We compartmentalize each one. “Oh, my gosh. There’s that bad law, and there’s this bad law,” and most people are not saying together, these are collectively just an attack on the fundamental pillars of democracy, as you said, and as you said when we started, the lesson of our history here and elsewhere is when all those things happen, you do get autocracy. You see, once you rip all those pillars away and you normalize it, it doesn’t take very long for the place to flip, and that’s what we’ve seen in Hungary and other places. Yeah, it’s a pretty disturbing scene…
And because Republicans have made their elected sinecures unassailable, save by further-right primary challengers, they never face an accounting from voters. Democracy fails. Democrats are not reacting with the urgency circumstances require, Pepper finds. It prompted him to write “Laboratories of Autocracy.“
They think their freedom and democracy are inconsistent, and essentially, mutually exclusive.
Pepper tells Neiwert what I’ve told readers about our approach to elections:
David Pepper: I mean, they’re literally using these states to undermine national rights, federal rights, and federal law, and then again, in the national sense—and in my book I go through a lot of steps that I hope are very practical for everyday people to act upon, but before we get to those, and those are necessary, but federal action is essential. Without it, the history’s pretty clear. If there’s no federal pushback on this, at least our history tells us the attacks on democracy succeed. That’s what happened that led to Jim Crow. But I also think we need to rethink our politics, because one side—the Koch brothers and ALEC and their allies—this is a war on democracy. They think their freedom and democracy are inconsistent, and essentially, mutually exclusive. So, they’re warring against democracy every year, everywhere.
Our politics is still based on the presidential calendar and the Senate calendar, and the swing states that are in play in those races, or some of the swing congressional districts, which means they’re on offense every year, everywhere. We contest in some states every two, and essentially, every four years. Well, if that’s the terms, they’re going to win. My older kid plays soccer. If one team’s on offense the entire time, and you’re on offense every once in a while, you’re going to lose. So, we have to rethink this all as a long game for democracy that we have to fight everywhere, and we need to schedule our action accordingly. We need to use our resources accordingly. We need to think about running for office accordingly, and we’re catching up in that mindset, but we’re years behind. This sounds a little bit like, “Whoa, you really want to move some money away from the presidential year spending and put it into statehouse races?” The Koch brothers did. Look what happened. It worked.
“If you don’t fight to protect your democracy, you can lose it almost overnight,” Pepper warned in a tweet last month.
What can Democrats do? What Howard Dean tried and Barack Obama abandoned:
If you took some percentage, 5% or 10% of your presidential year multibillion-dollar spending, and you spread it out among 50 states for four years, you not only would protect democracy better, you’d actually do better in the presidential year because you’d be building something. So, we have to really rethink, I think the way we frame politics, and the other advantage to think about it this way, Stacey Abrams is the best example. Once you define it in this way, you realize it’s a long game. It’s like a John Lewis long game for voting rights, or the suffragists’ long game for women’s suffrage, and then you start to see that the result is not determined by every result of every cycle.
We often have one bad cycle, we quit, we fire everybody, we start over. Stacey Abrams told us, even when she lost her governor’s race for a lot of reasons that she explained were really illegitimate, she gained progress in that loss. She registered people. She fired up people, and that progress carried over to ’20 in a way that we turned Georgia blue, just like running in every single statehouse district in every state. You’re going to lose most of those races. We know that, but we should celebrate the fact that we’re running in every district because every one of those candidates will register voters. They’ll change minds at every door. They will have higher turnout, and maybe in two or four years, if they do it again, and we’ve seen this in states like Virginia, they win the next race.
Listen, losing by less out in rural counties where Democrats struggle is the key to winning back state legislatures and beating back autocracy, if not fascism. There is no Hogwarts-style shortcut. What is required is for Democrats to get their heads out of their asses and fight the fight where it really is. D.C. is not the main event, just the most high-publicized.
As I wrote in 2019:
Many progressives would rather elect presidents before they can elect Democrats to city council or the state legislature. Those un-sexy races develop candidates who might eventually undo state gerrymandering, or become U.S. senators who vote to approve the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court or stop the next Brett Kavanaugh. I said often during the 2016 election, President Bernie can’t help me with that. Neither can President Hillary.
Want to fix that? Look in the mirror. Look at counties across southern Georgia, at Louisiana, at Alabama and Arkansas and Oklahoma. Get engaged in rural counties where Democrats are organized. There is a good chance it is barely.
(Watch this space for For The Win, 4th Ed. next month. Join the fight now.)
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