No, red states are not becoming 'laboratories of autocracy'

Since about 2016, a sort of cottage industry has emerged to soothe the nerves of respectable white people, telling them that they’re sooooo right. Democracy may be backsliding into a pit of autocratic despair, but that’s not because America is bad. America is a beacon of hope around the world!

Springing from this tenor of thought, as I see it, are missives of the kind I read recently in The Atlantic, in which the writer, who should know better, pretends that he does not know better before claiming that “red states” controlled by the Republican Party have become “laboratories of autocracy.”

This is how Brian Klaas, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, began his latest: “In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis applauded the role of experimentation within the states, calling them ‘laboratories of democracy’ that could inspire reforms at the national level.”

“Today,” wrote the author of The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy, “that dynamic is inverted, as some red states have become laboratories of autocracy, experimenting with the autocratic playbook in ways that could filter up to the federal government. American states are now splintering, not just on partisan lines, but on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy.”

It’s not that he’s wrong. Red states are experimenting with authoritarianism. Klaas demonstrates this fact by citing numerous examples – from the policing of “abortion traffickers” in Montana to extreme gerrymandering in North Carolina, from voter suppression tactics in Georgia to expelling Democratic reformers, who’d raised hell, from Tennessee state House.

No one should deny these things are happening, but neither should anyone see them as a result of “red states” becoming laboratories of autocracy. As for their “splintering … on their commitment to the principles of liberal democracy”? This America is an America that has never existed. The view here is from 30,000 feet in the air. It’s better to be closer to the ground.

The ex-slaver states of the former Confederate States of America, and the regions of the country that have aligned with them, have always been autocratic. They will almost certainly always be autocratic. The question isn’t whether they are. The question is how they express themselves. The key, for the real “laboratories of democracy” and hence for America’s global image as a beacon of hope, is whether such expressions can be contained.

It was largely contained by the last quarter of the last century, but not before then. This may come as a shock, because we tend to take the Bill of Rights for granted, but there was a time in our history when the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. It did not apply to the states.

Under ideal conditions, and there were and are ways of manufacturing ideal conditions, a state could and did crush civil rights and individual liberties. If a state wanted to outlaw sodomy, it did. If it wanted to regulate forms of worship, it did. If it wanted to prevent undesirables from voting, it did.

There were ways of pushing back, of complicating those “ideal conditions,” but they did not include torts against state governments for violating constitutional rights, because such appeals had not yet been recognized.

The federal government accelerated its containment (my word) of these autocratic laboratories only after the US Supreme Court, in the late 1930s, accelerated a process known to legal scholars as “selective incorporation.”

In plain English, that’s the process of reading the Bill of Rights through the lens of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause, in effect nationalizing them, so they applied to the states as well as the federal government.

Some rights were never incorporated and probably never will be on account of the current Supreme Court, and its rightwing supermajority, reversing this long orientation toward nationalizing the the Bill of Rights.

I’m no legal scholar, but that reversal seems to have become transparent with the overturning of Roe, thus triggering the invalidation of not only the national right to abortion but the national right against the infringement of privacy by state governments. With those rights now gone at the national level, states are free to return to their natural states of authoritarianism.

Republican legislators are now passing laws providing government agents the potential for accessing virtually anything, privacy be damned. Kansas recently enacted a statute paving the way for grotesque intrusions. It requires the inspection of genitals to block “men” (trans women) from competing in the “wrong” sport (and from using the “wrong” bathroom).

These experiments are being projected beyond their borders. “Many red states have already considered bills to restrict travel for abortion care,” wrote Lindsay Beyerstein. “Last year, an antiabortion legislator in Missouri tried to criminalize aiding and abetting an abortion outside the state.”

This is why “contained” is the right word. Just as the US government tried to “contain” the spread of Soviet Communism around the world, during the post-World War II era, so too must real “laboratories of democracy” try to contain the spread of native autocracy. (Let’s hope for better success.)

Again, Klaas isn’t wrong. It’s obvious. Some state governments dominated by the Republicans are experimenting with authoritarianism. But what they are experimenting with is not a matter of kind. They were always already authoritarian. What they are experimenting with is a matter of degree.

How much autocracy are they willing to express? In the last quarter of the last century, when the Supreme Court’s rulings effectively contained authoritarianism, the ex-slaver states of the former Confederate States of America, and the regions that aligned with them, expressed less of it.

But now that a rightwing supermajority has begun reversing a century of “selective incorporation,” we are seeing these states and allies expressing violent spasms of autocracy, as if supported by the court, which they are.

I don’t have a problem with respectable white people clinging to the idea of America being a beacon of hope around the world. But let’s concede to the hard reality of that belief. We are not a united country. Parts of us don’t believe in liberty. Parts of us are compelled to make some of us suffer.

To the extent that we are a beacon, and I think we are, it’s because the real “laboratories of democracy” – the ex-free labor states, say – believe that governments ought to maximize opportunity and minimize suffering.