Want to Understand National Politics? Look to the States: Subnational Influence on Democratic Backsliding
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that the states were a kind of “laboratory of democracy” asserting that statescan “try novel and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the county.” Brandeis’s view endured as the standard used to characterize the benefits of our federal framework. This view assumed that while state and local governments could create and test policy within the democratic system, the national government would be insulated from the negative effects of failed state experimentation. This view of federalism assumes a top-down structure resting too comfortably in the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. When, in fact, the U.S. has the most decentralized form of federalism, which renders Brandeis’s view slightly inert.
In the present context, it is evident that democratic backsliding is occurring on a state level. As former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, was credited with saying “all politics is local,” with an additional understanding that all local politics eventually bubbled up to the federal government. So, what if the states experiment with anti-democratic principles? Will the central government assert its authority to counteract them? Will it have the will to do so, will it have the ability to? There are books by David Pepper and Jake Grumbach already in circulation exploring this very premise.
Here, I endeavor to affirm the conclusion that if one wishes to understand national politics, look no further than the states.
In a federal system where there exists a power sharing structure between a system of autonomous states and the central national government, national politics inevitably get influenced by what happens on a subnational level.
It's worth remembering that in a nation like the United States, social and political processes do not develop evenly, meaning, they tend to happen in geographically uneven patterns. This has made the power-sharing arrangement between the national government and the states and arduous, strained balance of power. It’s through this arrangement of decentralized power sharing those illiberal tendencies and anti-democratic policiesget boosted to national prominence.
A compelling argument can be made for this nation’s enduring legacy of anti-democratic tendencies at the subnational level. For example, look at the politics of the 1787 Constitutional Convention where 17 Southern delegates threatened to abandon the convention if their proposal of counting the slave populationtoward their share of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives was not adopted. In a high-stakes political showdown, the majority (55 delegates) acquiesced to keep the Southerndelegation at the negotiating table resulting in the three-fifths “compromise.”
Another compelling example is during the American reconstruction. After the American Civil War, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. In response, several states made aggressive efforts to legislateforms of the antebellum social, political, and racial hierarchyand the courts asserted states’ rights to resist top-down, federal intervention. As a result, white supremacy was long enforced at the state level (and effectively nationalized) before the federal government intervened with the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
For better or for worse, America’s national politics has alwaysbeen influenced by the subnational context. Other important, and notorious, political developments in American history were firstmobilized at the state level. For example, voting rights for women were simply nationalized with the 19th amendment, but the states had started enfranchising women long before. In 1869, the Wyoming territory was the first to grant women full voting rights--51 years before the ratification of 19th amendment. Other states followed suit, and by the time the 19th amendment went to the states for ratification, women were voting in 22 states.
Similarly, the states were responsible for nationalizing prohibition. The subnational Temperance Movement helped prohibition gain national traction long before the ratification of the 18th amendment. Banning the production and sale of alcohol was a state-initiated policy as early as the 1830s with Massachusetts being the first to pass temperance laws and Maine being the first to enforce outright prohibition in 1846. These examples are here just to illustrate how the states really function as a taproot that mobilizes social and political agendas in the central government.
These examples demonstrate how our subnational politics eventually bubble up to the federal institutions effectively nationalizing local policy and political trends.
Turning attention to the present juncture, global reports on democracy listed the United States as a declining democracy, for the first time, ever. How did this happen?
Over the last decade or so, several key state legislatures were working to resuscitate illiberal policies and implement anti-democratic measures. Under the guise of morality statements, state legislatures passed laws to restrict the rights of trans people, women, BIPOC, and immigrants. Additionally, states are restricting voting rights and ballot access in response to the 2020 presidential election. Wisconsin and North Carolina have been diligently working, quietly, since 2014 to craft and mobilize efforts to consolidate power into either the governor’sor the state legislature while also stripping constitutional offices of authority. After the 2020 presidential election, in the wake of ‘The Big Lie’, several more state legislatures have taken up the charge to recalibrate election laws, restrict voting rights, and strip election officers of their constitutional powers to manage and certify votes in their respective states.
One reason these anti-democratic measures are getting nationalized is because federalism helps facilitate lop-sided politics at the local level. Several states enjoy single-party dominance and super majority legislative status because of the concentrated interests that get to mobilize political resources asymmetrically. It is most easily observed in the long subnational strategy of heavily gerrymandered districts that have expedited this era of Republican dominance.
The Republican Party presently enjoys political dominance viapartisan trifecta in 24 states, whereas, the Democrats hold complete control in only 14 states. This leaves fewer than 10 percent competitive U.S. House seats and over half of the U.S. Senate seats are locked in as safe havens for their incumbents.
In 2018 and 2020, the heavy Republican tide of electoral victories in state legislative and congressional races propelled the GOP to supermajority status at the subnational level. This dynamic has inevitable consequences for Congress and the federal government. Only now, there doesn’t seem to be substantive attempts, or even the political will, to implement anycounterweight measures to temper the anti-democratic subnational context.
Additionally, it could be because federal decentralization tends to propel autocratic elements to national prominence, and that is exactly what this nation is presently experiencing. Those sameanti-democratic elements have infiltrated our federal institutionsand are mobilizing a concerted effort to constrain any kind of national response to temper the subnational democratic backsliding.
