CounterPunch+/originally published for subscribers on 10/10/2021

Nationally focused progressive intellectuals and activists might be more willing to confront the fact the United States is being overtaken by a creeping, homegrown Amerikaner fascism if they paid more attention to state-level politics, the soft underbelly of what’s left of bourgeois democracy in the not-so United States.

The left tendency to neglect and avoid what’s happening in the states is foolish. For one thing, state-level policy has significant direct impacts on a vast swath of the nation’s population. From highly populated jurisdictions like Texas (home to 30 million) and Florida (22 million) to smaller ones like Iowa (just over 3 million), North Dakota (762,000) and Wyoming (less than 600,000), at least 150 million Americans live in fully or mainly “red states,” where state politics and policy are completely or largely in the hands of the neofascist Republican party. I write from 91% white Iowa, where the Republikaner governor and state legislature power have passed laws suppressing minority voting rights, forbidding honest discussion of white systemic racism in public education (K-Ph.D.), banning local governments and school districts from enforcing minimum wage ordinances, and banning local vaccine and mask mandates. Iowa’s Nazi Lite chief executive “Covid Kim” Reynolds has cut pandemic-related unemployment benefits, rejected federal Medicaid dollars to help the poor receive health care, and made her state’s taxpayers fund the sending of Iowa state troopers to patrol the southern US border in its neo-Confederate partner state of Texas.

Thanks to the noxious right-wing political culture in “#KillerKim’s” “flyover” state (home of Steve “Somebody Else’s Babies” King), the University of Iowa is the only Big Ten school without a mask mandate. Under rules imposed by the state’s right wing university Board of Regents, professors and teaching assistants at the University of Iowa in bright blue, super-liberal Iowa City are not permitted to discuss students’ vaccination status, to arrange seating in accord with mask usage, or to offer any “tangible incentives” for wearing masks. They can’t even ask students to wear masks during office hours. As a geography and sustainability professor at the university recent told The New Yorker: “I am being forced to behave in ways that are contrary to the best science and the best public-health advice. And I cannot even discuss this with my students. My students and I talk about power and power structures and how progress is impeded by powerful interests who prefer to have things the way they are, when we talk about climate change. And I feel the same thing is happening to us now with classrooms, but I am being gagged and I cannot discuss this with my students.”

(The professoriates of the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa are reluctant to protest this epidemiological terrorism because they know that the Republifascist state government in Des Moines is ready, willing, and able to strip them of the right to tenure if they resist. That is public health terrorism enforced by economic terrorism, like when Reynolds strips pandemic unemployment benefits to force low-wage workers back into unsafe factory and slaughterhouse jobs.)

Similar and other vicious policies are ongoing and underway in numerous other red states, directly menacing millions. A coronavirus incident map of the US reveals a de facto Covid Confederacy reflecting the obvious cause-and-effect relationship between low vaccination rates and the absence of common sense public health measures like mask mandates on one hand and high covid infection and hospitalization numbers on the other. The Delta Variant is lighting up southern states under the control of the pandemo-fascistic Amerikaner Party of Trump (APoT). Perhaps the former slave states should have adopted Tanya Tucker’s hit country tune “Delta Dawn” as their new proto-national anthem this summer.

An especially horrific jurisdiction is the Covid Sanctuary State of Texas, which has recently enacted a major racist voter suppression measure and a mercenary, Christian Fascist anti-abortion bill. The second measure has chilling1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It deputizes anyone on the planet to get $10,000 by suing anyone who carries out or assists in any way an abortion on a Texas woman after six weeks of pregnancy. The civil liability extends even to an Uber driver who delivers a woman scheduled for an abortion to a clinic and even to an out- of-state resident who helps a Texas woman leave her state to get an abortion in another jurisdiction. This wicked act of forced motherhood and female slavery makes no exceptions for rape and incest.

While Texas has moved to the front of the New Gilead line, abortion rights have been under right-wing legislative attack in numerous red states in recent years, directly menacing millions of women. The southern Bible Belt is at one and the same time the onetime national lynching belt, the racist voter suppression belt, and the anti-abortion belt. The red states of the South and their neo-Confederate allies in other regions – in states like Iowa and Dakotas – are also in the related vanguards of the state legislative and gubernatorial campaigns against accurate and honest teaching about racism, the rights of social justice protesters, expanded health care, and pandemic unemployment benefits.

At the same time, what happens in the red states doesn’t just stay in the red states. Red state politics and policy filter out and up to pollute and menace the entire United States in various ways.

Covid infections transmitted in pandemicist red states easily and regularly cross into blue states that take public health and science more seriously. (Iowa City’s student parking lots are loaded with Illinois license plates, meaning that thousands of the local university’s students return from their wild west Covid Confederacy [upper Midwestern offshoot] school to the Chicago area, where more responsible rules are set by the smart corporate-Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker.)

The Texas abortion bill just passed extends civil liability to people in other states and countries, meaning that a New Yorker can be sued for giving money to a group that helped ferry a poor Texas woman to an abortion clinic in Nevada. Its insidious mercenary impact is explicitly nationwide.

Right-wing Christian fascist advocates of forced motherhood and de facto female slavery have for years been pushing through red state anti-abortion laws with the explicit purpose of forcing a federal high court decision making abortion illegal again on a national level. Mississippi’s horrific 15-week abortion bill is slated to be heard by the right-wing US Supreme Court later this year or early next year. Texas may be the nation-leading “New Gilead” at present, but make no mistake: the plan is to make the whole country a New Gilead and the nation’s absurdly powerful high court is likely on board. As National “Public” Radio explained last spring:

‘In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a six-week ban in North Dakota and a 12-week ban in Arkansas. That same year, the court struck down a Texas law that made it difficult and expensive for clinics that perform abortions to function. But since then, the composition of the court has changed dramatically, with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a major advocate of reproductive rights; the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, a centrist conservative who supported abortion rights; and the addition of three Trump appointees to the court. Bottom line: The court now has a 6-3 conservative super majority, with all six having taken positions hostile to abortion rights at one time or another, and the newest justice, Barrett, the most outspoken critic of abortion before joining the high court. The 6-3 majority means that conservatives can lose one of their own on this issue and still prevail. That wasn’t the case as long as Chief Justice John Roberts held the deciding vote. Though he has never been a supporter of abortion rights, his approach has always been to whittle away at Roe, slowly eroding the rights tiny piece by tiny piece. But with Monday’s decision to take on the whole question of pre-viability abortion bans, that approach may now be on the way out, and a more direct approach on the way in — namely overturning Roe.’

With the southern Bible Belt as their American Taliban sanctuary, the patriarchal Christian Right has a chance of reddening the whole nation with the blood of botched, back-alley abortions.

To make matter worse, the nation’s disproportionately white, rural, and reactionary red states are absurdly overrepresented in the nation’s government and politics. The United States’ 18th Century aristo-republican slaveowners’ Constitution grants every US state two representatives in the nation’s extremely powerful upper body of the US Congress regardless of the 50 states’ widely divergent population sizes. This brutally violates the core democratic principle of one person, one vote. The vast “rotten borough”-like benefit granted to Red State America in the national governance order is unmistakable. If bright blue liberal and diverse, highly metropolitan California (home to nearly 40 million) had the same population-to-Senator ratio as white and rural Wyoming (home to less than 600,000), it would have 134 representatives in the US Senate. This extreme rightward rigging of the national political game dates to the 1780s and reflects the fears and demands of 18th Century southern slave-masters, who worried that their largely slave-based laboring population would lead to under-representation in Congress.

Reflecting historically recent population shifts from the nation’s rural regions to the more metropolitan and racially diverse coasts, it is now at least mathematically possible for the APoT to control the Senate by representing states with less than a fifth of the nation’s total population.

Besides skewing the Senate towards the nation’s rightmost territories, the US Senate apportionment formula pollutes the nation’s bizarre and openly undemocratic system of electing its very powerful chief executive – the US president. The nation’s Monty Python-esque winner-take-all Electoral College system (great fun to try to explain to people from other nations) so badly overrepresents the nation’s red states that the Democratic presidential candidate must win many millions more votes than his Republican opponent in the national tally to secure victory in the decisive, democracy flunking Electoral College count. (A noxious Republican maniac has been installed in the White House after losing the national popular vote twice in the current century: 2000-01 and 2016-17). To make matters worse, Republicans are overrepresented in the US House of Representatives thanks in part to their success in gerrymandering House districts, whose lines are drawn at the state level, by state legislatures and governors.

In the rare event of state-level Electoral College slates being contested at the state level (as in 1876) – an eventuality for which the Republicans are certainly preparing in case Joe Biden or his Democratic successor nominee (the already “sleepy” Biden will be 83 in 2024) seem at first to win the 2024 Electoral College – the Constitution’s 12th Amendment sends the contest to the House of Representatives. That might at first seem to favor the Democrats, who currently possess an 8-vote margin (220 to 212) in the lower body of Congress. But it doesn’t. For one thing, the Republicans can expect (with no small help from state-level gerrymandering) to have taken back the House majority and speakership by 2023. The party out of the White House almost always gains a considerable number of House seats. But even if the Dems maintain their slim House majority, the 12th Amendment mandates that the decision will be based on a “vote…taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote.” That would favor the Republican candidate since there are more red states than blue states even if more Americans live in blue states than in red states – a subtle form of gerrymandering on the national scale.

The democratically absurd exaggeration of red state political power filters up to the ridiculously powerful US Supreme Court and the rest of the federal bench. The federal judiciary is appointed by the winner of the right-/red state-tilted Electoral College and subject to confirmation or rejection by the even more right- and red-state tilted US Senate. The fruits of that constitutional atrocity currently include a high court with a 6-3 right-wing supermajority that strands, far to the starboard side of the US populace. The nation’s red state Supreme Court signed off on unlimited corporate campaign funding in 2010 (Citizens United). It gutted anti-racist Voting Rights Act protections in 2013 (Shelby v. Holder). And the high court (which hosts at least one right-wing rapist and a full-on Handmaid’s Tale jurist appointed by the Christian Right’s “Cyrus” Donald Trump) can soon be expected (as noted above) to abolish US women’s right to control their own reproductive lives by repealing Rose v. Wade in response to a case brought to it by the bright red state of Mississippi two months ago.

Through its increasingly common use of the “shadow docket,” whereby quick decisions are rendered without serious legal argument, the Red State Roberts Supreme Court has vetoed Joe Biden’s effort to extend the former federal Covid-19 eviction moratorium, ordered Biden to continue Trump’s vicious policy of bottling asylum seekers up in Mexico, and refused to intervene against the clearly unconstitutional Texas abortion law.

In another key example of how what happens in the red states at the state level doesn’t stay there, red state legislatures and governors are pushing national politics and policy ever more dangerously rightward by passing state laws and enacting policies that suppress and even nullify Democratic votes and by gerrymandering (geopolitically manipulating) US House districts in ways that inflate Republikaner power (over-concentrating minority and Democratic votes in a small number of districts is a leading method). Add in Biden’s declining popularity (a recent Emerson College poll has Trump beating Biden 47 to 46%) – itself partly a reflection of limits on covid protection (and thus on job creation) imposed by Republicans at the state level – and it’s easy to see why the orange-tinted white power Nazi Trump is licking his chops for another run in 2024. A right-gerrymandered US House and a right-wing US Senate could well prove a critical APoT asset in a contested 2024 election, as could the absurdly right-wing Red Amerikaner composition of the Supreme Court, itself a reflection of the absurdly right-wing Red Amerikaner composition of the US Senate and the absurdly right-/red-leaning starboard tilt of the Electoral College.

The corporate and imperialist Democratic Party would be better positioned for 2022 and 2024 if it wasn’t a pathetic party of neoliberal “inauthentic opposition” and was instead something remotely like the fighting “party of the people” it claims to be[1]. But it is what it is – a Weimar-like junior partner in the ongoing fascitization of the United States – at least partly because of Supreme Court rulings (Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United) and a broader reactionary governance structure that reflect and embody the outsized power of the nation’s most reactionary, right-wing, and, well, “red” (racially white) states.

It’s not for nothing that the nation’s rightmost corporate political funders and operatives – the Koch-backed “fifth column” culprits in historian Nancy MacLean’s haunting study Democracy in Chains – have long focused heavily and smartly on politics and policy at the state level. The states are the soft underbelly of what’s left of American bourgeois democracy and the giant petri dish for the creeping virus of Amerikaner fascism. State-level politics are both relevant to business and the right in and of themselves and to the broader national political and policy agenda of right-wing corporate and political actors. As MacLean notes, “corporate and conservative interests can make their will felt most easily in state governments – and are more likely to be challenged successfully by the citizenry at the federal and local levels – partly because state affairs are less well monitored by the people and the press.” Having used the big fascist lie that Obama stole the 2008 election to advance dozens of red state voter suppression laws in the 2010s, the right knows very well that what happens in the red states doesn’t just stay in the red states. While many blue zone Trumpenlefty fascism-deniers and bootlickers live in blissful ignorance and dismissal – and sometimes in faux-left/-populist approval – of what’s happening in the white nationalist “flyover” states, the hard right is hard-wiring these jurisdictions to be instruments of a national fascist ascendancy with enviable Leninist discipline.

Endnote

+1. Sleepy neoliberal Joe, a doddering ruling class plaything placed on the center stage of history by the “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” Barack “Wall Street” Obama (who told Americans to rally behind a 45th president he privately knew to be “a fascist”), can’t muster the cojones even to do basic things permitted under the Constitution like raising the federal minimum wage to a paltry $15 an hour, fighting to end the racist Senate filibuster (to thereby force the passage of elementary voting rights and union organizing legislation already passed by the US House), advancing the admission of disenfranchised Washington DC (which has a larger population than Vermont and Wyoming) as a state, and diluting the power of the right wing on the nation’s all-powerful high court by expanding the size of that body.