Abstract

Devolve This!

The author discusses an idea for progressives to take over state electoral politics and government to counter the advances made by the political right. In American politics, who controls the states controls the nation. The right understands this, and for a generation has waged an unrelenting war to take over state government in America. It's also true that state politics is less compelling than other politics, if not downright boring. Along with the redistricting scams already mentioned, they are constitutionalizing restrictions on state spending, cutting social services of all kinds, acting hostile to labor, privatizing an ever wider range of state functions, pushing punitive criminal justice, rolling back privacy rights to the benefit of banks and insurance companies, avoiding the health insurance crisis, limiting medical and product liability, freezing state minimum wages, limiting consumer protections, cutting funding to public schools, dolloping out ever more expansive tax breaks to business and playing the red meat game (gay marriage, concealed weapons, etc.). We know this not only because it is in the interests of a vast majority of voters--labor, most people of color, most women, high-roading business and the many residents of inner-ring suburbs, depressed rural communities and central cities who are getting killed by present low-roading policy--but because our own organizing experience over the past decade has shown repeatedly that, given a choice, this is the one the majority makes.