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MAY 23, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Battlefield Reports From Our New Civil War

Two Prospect pieces on red and blue trifecta states make clear we really
are two separate nations.

If there's anyone who's still mystified about why congressional
Democrats and Republicans can't come to an agreement on anything so
basic as honoring the debts they've incurred, may I gently suggest
they take a look at what Democrats and Republicans are doing in the
particular states they each completely control.

Yesterday, we posted a piece
<[link removed]> by my
colleague Ryan Cooper on how Minnesota, where Democrats now control both
houses of the legislature and the governor's office, has just enacted
its own (to be sure, scaled-back) version of Scandinavian social
democracy-including paid sick leave for all, paid family leave, a
minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers, sector-wide collective
bargaining in key industries, and the outlawing of "captive audience"
meetings, in which management compels employees to attend anti-union
rants. A new law also strengthens women's right to an abortion.
Similar laws have been enacted or are under consideration in other
Democratic "trifecta" states, though none quite so pro-worker as some of
Minnesota's.

Also yesterday, we posted one of my pieces
<[link removed]>,
this one on everything that Texas's Republican legislature and
governor are enacting to strip power from their large cities, almost all
of which are solidly Democratic. One new bill says the state can declare
elections to be invalid and compel new ones to be held under state
supervision in the state's largest county, Harris County, which is
home to reliably Democratic Houston. And the state Senate has also
passed a bill that would strip from cities the ability to pass any
regulations on wages, workplace safety, business and financial
practices, the environment, and the extent of property rights that
exceed the standards set by the state. Which leaves cities with the
power to do essentially nothing. No other Republican trifecta states
have gone quite as far as Texas, but Tennessee's legislature did
effectively abolish Nashville's congressional district and expel its
assemblymember; Alabama's legislature revoked Birmingham's
minimum-wage law; and Florida's governor suspended Tampa's elected
DA because he wouldn't prosecute women and doctors for violating the
state's new anti-abortion statutes. Beyond their war on cities,
Republican trifecta states have long refused to expand Medicaid
coverage, have recently also begun to re-legalize child labor and
legislate prison terms for librarians whose shelves hold banned books,
and in the wake of the

**Dobbs** decision, criminalized abortions.

Just as cosmic inflation propels the stars away from each other with
ever-expanding speed, so Democratic and Republican states are also
moving away from each other at an accelerating pace-the Democrats
toward a more humane future; the Republicans borne back ceaselessly into
a nightmare version of the past. Any dispassionate view of America today
has to conclude that the differences between these two Americas are
almost as large and intractable as those that split the nation in 1860
and '61. (The South's opposition to fairly paid and
nondiscriminatory labor was the central issue then and remains a central
issue now.)

That said, when confronted with the choice between those two Americas,
voters in those red states have frequently backed the blue-state
versions of economic rights and personal freedoms, as is clear from
their many initiative and referendum votes to raise the minimum wage,
expand Medicaid, and preserve the right to an abortion. Likewise, the
polling on unions shows their national favorability rating now exceeds
70 percent of the public, including roughly half of self-declared
Republicans. Only by their relentless demagoguery on culture-war issues
and immigration, their adept gerrymandering, and the disproportionate
power that the composition of the Senate vests in barely inhabited
states can the Republicans enforce their biases against a rising public
tide-but enforce them they do wherever they have the power.

All right, as John Dos Passos wrote in his USA Trilogy, we are two
nations-and becoming more so with each passing day.

______________________________________________________________________

Postscript: In his Washington Post column
<[link removed]>
this morning, Perry Bacon noted that while a number of news publications
have gone under recently, a few, in his words, "are reimagining
political journalism in smart ways." He cited seven such publications,
and his list was headed by-ahem-

**The American Prospect**.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>

[link removed]

Quackonomics
<[link removed]>

Medical Properties Trust spent billions buying community hospitals in
bewildering deals that made private equity rich and working-class towns
reel. BY MAUREEN TKACIK

Industrial Policy Works
<[link removed]>
Exhibit A is long-depressed upstate New York. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Republican Debt Ceiling Lies
<[link removed]>
Today's X-Date: GOP members insist they're worried about the
national debt. It ain't true. BY RYAN COOPER

Podcast: The Debt Ceiling Approaches
<[link removed]>

Ryan Cooper joins to talk about how Biden has boxed himself in. BY
PROSPECT STAFF

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