The Coming Democratic Revolution
7 min read
Resistance is not futile, although it might seem that way at the moment. No major protests are set to descend on the National Mall. Legal challenges to Donald Trump’s policies are likely doomed, given how far rightward the judiciary shifted during his previous administration. With Trump’s unified control of the Republican Party, which now has unified control of Washington, congressional oversight is defunct.
That leaves a lone bastion of countervailing power, one force capable of meaningfully slowing the maximalist ambitions of the incoming administration: blue states, especially the 15 state governments where Democrats control the executive and legislative branches and, therefore, have more latitude to launch aggressive countermeasures.
Over the past few months, a small coterie of wonks and lawyers—and a few farsighted Democratic governors—have been working in anticipation of this moment. They have prepared measures to insulate states from the Trump administration’s most aggressive impositions. They have constructed plans to preserve abortion protections within blue-state borders and to protect environmental regulations enshrined in their books; they have formulated legal strategies for at least slowing Trump’s intended mass deportations.
But as Democrats developed these tactics, something unexpected occurred. Some of these wonks began to extoll a vision that promised more than merely preventing the worst. As they pondered the latent power of state government, the outlines of a new progressive vision of federalism—pugilistic and creative, audacious and idealistic—began to emerge.
In another era, this vision might have felt paltry, especially to liberals, many of whom tend to dream of centralization and train their intellectual capital on Washington. Given the dire circumstances in which Democrats now find themselves, however, there’s no true alternative. And liberals might soon discover that federalism, once the hobbyhorse of conservatives, contains not only the hope of stubborn resistance but the possibility of regeneration.
Within progressive think tanks and the foundations that fund them, the most influential manifesto for this fledgling movement is a 170-page unpublished memo by Sarah Knight, a veteran of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, and Arkadi Gerney, who ran Michael Bloomberg’s national gun-control organization. What makes their memo, which they began researching more than a year ago, so intriguing is that they want Democrats to filch tactics from a political foe, Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
From the governor’s mansion in Austin, Abbott has exerted outsized influence on the climate of American politics. He’s notched victories in the culture war that have resonated beyond his borders. The most notorious, and most noxious, of his gambits entailed transporting more than 100,000 recently arrived migrants to New York, Chicago, and other big cities, at a cost of more than $148 million. The new arrivals—particularly the stress that they placed on state and city services—sowed discord within blue states, as officials argued with one another about how to deal with the mess. Just as devastating, Abbott’s stunt helped cement the impression that Democratic rule culminates in chaos, narrowing Vice President Kamala Harris’s victory in her party’s most loyal states and thereby paving the way for Trump’s triumph in the popular vote.
Federalism is a theory of self-government, the underpinning of a system that allows states to express distinct political preferences. But Abbott has practiced a form of hegemonic federalism, which attempts to bend the will of the rest of the nation to his own vision for it. His state subpoenaed medical records from Seattle Children’s Hospital, to determine whether its staff provided gender-affirming procedures to kids from Texas. Ultimately, Texas withdrew its subpoena, but the process gave doctors and hospitals outside the state reason to worry about the legal costs they might incur for performing such procedures. And as banks began to adapt to the standards of environment, social, and governance investing, Texas banned Barclays from participating as an underwriter of the state’s municipal bonds because of its commitment to carbon neutrality. Abbott’s goal was to send a message to institutions: There are meaningful costs to joining the wrong side of the culture war.
I have heard a few hastily sketched ideas for how Democrats could mimic Abbott’s coercive ploys. Blue states might aggressively recruit ob-gyns from states with severe restrictions on abortion, leaving behind a red-state shortage of medical care. Women in those states, even ones who aren’t especially passionate about abortion, might begin clamoring to ease abortion bans—or punishing the Republican politicians who installed them in the first place. The goal is to apply pressure on Republican governors by provoking a political backlash from within.
Another set of proposals involves deploying massive public-employee pension funds that Democratic states control to make strategic investments in red states. By sinking money into Texas’s wind industry, for instance, blue states would do more than just expand alternative-energy options in the state. They would unleash a powerful interest group, which might help reshape the political dynamic in the state.
None of these ideas is well developed, and none is quite as clever as Abbott’s. (And the plan to recruit ob-gyns strikes me as immoral, given that it will inevitably siphon health care away from women who desperately need it.) Then again, on the first day of the Biden presidency, Abbott probably didn’t have any inkling that he’d spend millions transporting migrants to major cities. What Abbott represents is a potentially powerful template to be opportunistically exploited, a tactic for engineering public opinion.
That’s the aggressive, impish side of the new federalism, which requires governors to think sensationalistically in order to call attention to the failures of Republican policies. But there’s a more idealistic piece of the vision, too.
The common conception of states’ rights is the image of Alabama Governor George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door against integration. Or it’s John C. Calhoun’s theory of nullification. Historically, a quiet strain of liberal federalism also runs in parallel. During the Progressive era, Robert La Follette, then the governor of Wisconsin, turned his state into a geyser of reform, passing laws combatting corruption and conserving the environment. His agenda, reverentially referred to as the “Wisconsin Idea,” inspired a raft of imitators in other states—and helped set the course for the New Deal. With the Badger State in mind, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis coined his aphorism about states being “laboratories of democracy.”
What the heirs to this tradition now propose is far more ambitious than experimentation. That ambition begins with a fact: States where Democrats have unified control of government contribute 43 percent of the national GDP. (Red states fully under Republican rule account for 37 percent.) Economic power is the basis for political power, which is what the example of California suggests: The state’s strict emissions standards for cars eventually became the national benchmark, a phenomenon political scientists have branded “the California effect.”
The innovation that the new federalists propose is that the blue states begin to leverage their big budgets—and their outsize influence—by acting in concert. Banding together into a cartel, they can wield their scale to bargain to buy goods at discount. There are drafts of plans to form a collective of states that would purchase insulin and other prescription drugs, which might help mitigate the higher costs of living in their states. (After the Dobbs decision, California Governor Gavin Newsom spearheaded an alliance that began to stockpile the abortion pill misoprostol.) Or they could cooperate to buy solar panels en masse, with the hopes of transforming clean-energy markets.
It’s not just about teaming up for the sake of bulk purchases. They can collaborate on creating a joint set of standards, which becomes the basis for legislating and regulating. By creating uniform rules for, say, corporate governance or animal welfare or the disclosure of dark-money contributions to nonprofits, they stand a chance of shaping the standard for the entirety of the country, because it’s cumbersome for a national corporation to adhere to two sets of guidelines for raising chickens.
Some of these arrangements would be challenged in court, because the Constitution imposes limits on the cooperation of states. And it’s not hard to imagine certain audacious Democratic governors inching closer to nullification of federal laws as they seek to protect their states from Trump’s impositions. But there are also ample precedents that allow states to adventurously engage in liberal federalism.
The greatest barrier to this strategy might be the party implementing it. Pouring new thinking into state government requires Democrats to break from character. Their states and cities are, in far too many screaming examples, shoddily managed, a fact reflected in the party’s diminishing margin of victory in most metropolises. Creative, competent governance of states is a political necessity for the party, an escape route from the lingering sense that Democratic rule devolves into dysfunction; it’s also an opportunity to hash out a fresh agenda of reform, to erect a series of attractive demonstration projects on behalf of a robust liberalism that tangibly delivers for its citizenry. The most effective form of resistance, in the end, is actually proving that Democrats govern better.
