Red Menace

Midterm predictions of a Red Wave turned out to be two years premature. Donald Trump will take office in January with the support of a Republican House and a Republican Senate. The margins are thin, but one can accomplish a lot with thin margins.

And thin margins can be a blessing, as Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak found when he tried to unravel the “baffling mysteries” of state politics: “The more ‘red’ a red state is, the more moderate its Republican lawmakers tend to behave.” There are many reasons for the gap between voters and legislatures. Few pay attention to state politics, including the media, so no one holds state legislators accountable. In deep red states, liberal candidates know they can’t win with that “D” by their name, so they run as Republicans. State legislators often work part-time, so they aren’t up to speed on the issues and defer to the nearest “experts,” often lobbyists or entrenched bureaucrats. Ten GOP-dominated states have open primaries, where Democrats, knowing they can’t win a general election, vote for the least unpalatable or the most vulnerable Republicans. There’s a problem of strategy and stewardship: Conservatives and their PACs pour millions into congressional races that win them a single vote that won’t affect any outcomes, but give little to state races where the winners might actually direct policy. Hobnobbing with state legislators just isn’t as sexy as having a senator on speed dial.

My home state of Alabama, packed with conservatives, is a case in point. Republican presidential candidates have won Alabama every four years since 1980, often by 20 or more percentage points. Only one Democrat, Sen. Doug Jones, has won a statewide election in this century, and that was something of a fluke. There have been notable social-issue victories—a 2018 Sanctity of Life Amendment, a “porn ID law” that requires porn sites to verify a user’s age, restrictions on DEI, election integrity legislation, a parents’ right-to-know bill that requires teachers to make their curricula public.

But the social legislation masks the failures of the state’s GOP supermajority. Two years ago, the Alabama Policy Institute reported that between 2018 and 2022, state spending rose 36 percent, faster than California or New York. Alabama has the fifth highest sales tax in the country. In Jefferson County, which includes Birmingham, the combined state, county, and municipal sales tax can be as high as 10 percent. In 2021, Alabama took in $1.5 billion more than it spent, but only 5 percent of that money went back into the hands of Alabamans. Even when my wife and I had enough little deductions around the house to elude federal income tax, we still got hit every year with a sizable state tax bill. After the legendary football coach Nick Saban retired, he moved to Florida, where he could escape Alabama’s 5 percent income tax. Saban can afford it, but any Alabaman who makes more than $4500 has to pay income tax. And what do we get for our money? Not much. Alabama consistently ranks near the bottom in education, health, and, despite a powerful medical establishment, health care. Policy innovations that run afoul of entrenched interests—especially in health care—are harassed or crushed.

Deep red states display the pathologies of what Matthew B. Crawford, in a 2023 American Affairs article, calls a “party-state.” Progressive states like California, Crawford argues, have replaced constitutional order with rule by a “Humanitarian Party” whose legitimacy comes from “an anthropology that posits a particular kind of self—a vulnerable one.” The humanitarians adopt vulnerables as clients and “mascots,” in whose name they enact “programs of social control” led by “a class of social managers and political rent-seekers.” Government colludes with corporations in a form of “state capitalism” that isn’t too different from China’s party-controlled economy, with one big difference: Western party-states are “consistently anti-productive,” preferring to create layer after layer of DEI oversight that exist only “to divert time and energy to struggle sessions that serve nobody but the cadres themselves. . . . The result has been a massive transfer of wealth from consumers to party-aligned actors.”

The Democratic party-state in California has become hair-tearingly incompetent. Many Californians, Crawford reports for UnHerd, bypass the DMV in their efforts to get an emissions certificate and instead work through “fixers,” people who have connections with bureaucrats, “often by virtue of kinship.” In California, bribery “isn’t a problem, it is the solution.” Crawford sees the incompetence as a function of dominance: Without any serious challenge from the GOP, California Democrats have little incentive to help people. State services no longer exist to serve citizens, who are regarded as a nuisance. Instead, the bureaucracy exists to keep the uniparty plump and happy. The DMV is again an egregious example: It essentially stopped administering written exams and driving tests, but stayed open so the state could collect union dues from DMV employees, dues that, it was later revealed, were siphoned off to the Democrats’ war chest. California may be the future, but if so, the future looks a lot like Africa. 

Red states like Alabama are refreshingly free from the particular dynamics Crawford describes, but many have become conservative party-states. They miss their opportunity to enact experiments in conservative governance because they can’t resist the perils of victory. Turns out that, once granted unchallenged supremacy, a GOP establishment is every bit as entrenched, every bit as self-protective, as every other establishment.

Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute. 

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Image by Exothermic, from Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.