Will the Democrats become a states’ rights party?
Spring break ups with the feds
I don’t usually make forays into political writing, but I have, for as long as I remember, been interested in the often invisible divisions in America. Usually, fantasies about some post-national USA take an apocalyptic tone, like a stunning vision of a North America split into hundreds of polities in a fictional universe by aspiring author (and dentist) Wolliver. The author’s Fallen Continent map and stories depict a nation in 2059, thirty years after a Great War, and features small polities such as the Kingdom of God in America and the Heartland Social Republic. It’s an entertaining fever dream projecting into fiction current divisions and past geographically determined ethnic and religious clusters (see Colin Woodard’s great 2011 book American Nations that traces contemporary ideology of regions back to colonization patterns.)
But the times do seem apocalyptic. At the very least, we are moving backwards, towards unchecked power and oligarchy. Some embrace this, but most Democrats don’t. Trump’s approval ratings are very low. In the past, this would have just prompted a swing back to the election of more Democrats, but not now; a recent Newsweek poll has the Democrats in Congress hardly more trusted than Trump, if at all.
The Democrats, as they stand now, are not in a good place, even though they recently released millions of dollars to support the party in red states. It looks like they still haven’t gotten the message, as a terrified new DNC chairman, Ken Martin, stands in front of various posters displaying the phrase: Yes We Ken interspersed with other posters saying ORGANIZE featuring a large school of fish, in the shape of a bigger fish and in the colour of the flag, Pac Man chasing a Trump fish.
The coalition of even the Democrats, an extremely diverse group, into a big-fish moving in unison seems incredibly unlikely given the approval ratings and the general disidentification with national Democrats.
The other day, I heard a story about the Michigan attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel, conducting raids on supposed pro-Palestinian protesters associated with the University of Michigan with FBI involvement. Apparently, in statements to the press, Nessel did not mention any FBI involvement, because anything with federal in it would seem like a betrayal, given that it is Trump’s FBI. Her hesitancy to mention the FBI could come from the fact that the trumped-up charges (multi-jurisdictional vandalism) don’t, to the sane person, necessitate the involvement of the feds at all.
On the other hand, it may signal a growing unwillingness for Democratic politicians to be seen as associated with federal forces at all. We’ve already seen “resistance” to Trump’s agencies in local politicians, such as Colorado’s laws limiting data sharing with ICE. As Democrats become more and more unpopular, these moves may become not just positive but absolutely necessary.
People always mention Lincoln's status as a Republican when defending the Republicans against contemporary charges of racism. The parties change all the time, shifting in response to power. Right now, we are seeing both the heavy association of federal forces with Trump himself and, outside of that, a general waning of the federal government. The military, a usually universally popular element, has been declining in popularity.
Many blue states have already been emphasizing sanctuary cities, which Trump recently cracked down on, calling their refusal to cooperate with immigration authorities a “lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law”.
While states’ rights were a mostly conservative issue for the 20th century, sanctuary city policies, abortion laws, and drug policies have been eroding this. How many people have said recently they’re glad to live in New York City, where they feel more insulated from national politics? How long will that last? Already, some of the more prominent succession movements are left-coded, such as Cascadia. As conservatism becomes the status quo again, and there is no truly unifying issue, like 9/11, we will see more and more of this: Democrat states shunning the federal institutions and parties in an attempt to maintain power and to move with the will of the constituents.
The extreme mobility of the 20th century, people moving between states, allowed for the strong nationalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But people aren’t moving around as much. Local identities hover below the surface and are often expressed in sports fandoms or joking cross-state stereotypes.
This won’t happen right away. Most of the strongest state identities are linked to very distinct cultural pockets like Texas or Louisiana. A strong cosmopolitanism still exists among liberals. People won’t stop identifying as “bi-coastal” any time soon. However, on a messaging level, I expect that we will see more and more national Democrats embracing, ironically, a states’ rights platform as a tool of resistance against Trump. Will this lead to even further fracturing? It’s hard to say. But I will say that when going over the idea of secession in the past, the ubiquity and power of the federal government was always the one piece of evidence that swung the debate against it. I’m not sure if that’s such a strong argument anymore.