The Red States Experimenting with Authoritarianism
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, that dynamic is inverted, as some red states have become laboratories of authoritarianism, 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.
Democracy requires more than just holding elections. But at a bare minimum, two qualities are nonnegotiable. True democracies must allow voters to determine who governs through elections, and must respect the outcome of those elections. Many Republicans at the state level are undercutting those principles.
Democratic deterioration is not a new problem in red states. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor at the University of Washington and the author of Laboratories Against Democracy, measured the democratic quality of American states from 2000 to 2018. He used 51 indicators, including gerrymandering, whether politicians were responsive to public opinion, long wait times to vote, and the availability of postelection audits to verify that the count was accurate. States that had been dominated by Republicans over the previous two decades, Grumbach found, became substantially less democratic. States dominated by Democrats and those with a divided government saw no such drop-off.Since Grumbach published his findings, Republican attacks on the mechanisms of democracy have accelerated. When Democrats win at the ballot box, Republicans may attempt to neutralize their power. In Arizona, an elected Republican proposed allowing the state legislature the power to overturn the results of presidential elections. In Mississippi, white Republicans in the state House of Representatives established a parallel court system to cater to white neighborhoods in Jackson, usurping the elected judges put in office by the broader population, which is 80 percent Black.
Recently, the Tennessee House expelled two Black Democratic representatives who led anti-gun protests in the statehouse. The protests they led were disruptive, but the expulsions were wildly disproportionate and likely motivated by race: Republicans voted to expel the two young Black men, but not the older white woman who’d also participated. The attempt backfired, as both were swiftly reinstated, but that doesn’t change the fact that Republicans tried to undo the will of the voters over a minor transgression.
The botched effort in Tennessee is just one example of Republicans trying to invalidate elections by getting rid of Democrats who end up in power. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers recently passed a bill that would give them the power to remove elected prosecutors. And in Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis boasted about firing a Democratic prosecutor using a flimsy pretext. A judge who reviewed the firing concluded that DeSantis’s goal had been “to amass information that could help bring down [the prosecutor], not to find out how [he] actually runs the office…”
