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MAGA's Way or the Highway

How the cold civil war shares characteristics with the hot one

A lot of people read these columns who might not know about, or fully appreciate, the organization publishing them. Since its founding in 1990,

**The American Prospect**magazine has been in the front line of the forces battling both the increasing authoritarianism of the Republican Party, and those Democrats desperate to turn the party into Republican Lite [link removed]. For its recent special issue, the

**Prospect** produced something extraordinary: a suite of articles [link removed] on America's ongoing "cold civil war."

States run by Republicans have become more and more right-wing, creatively inventing new ways to destroy the conditions for equality, liberty, dignity, and human flourishing at every turn. If the United States were not, in fact, a

**nation**, it might be enough for those who want to protect themselves and their families from this to hunker down inside a state where sane Democrats are in charge-and one of the things these articles document is how blue states have been hardening themselves against the damage. But that's not an option for those in red states who can't or don't want to move. So one of the things these pieces provide is information required to devise strategies for those who intend to stay and fight.

But really, no one anywhere will remain safe from the MAGA onslaught. Not only because state borders cannot possibly protect anyone from policies that will be dragging all of us down-and these authors provide plenty of examples of these. But also because a lot of the ideas legislators, attorneys general, and governors in red states have enacted already, and what they have in mind for the future, are bluntly

**imperialist**: bold attempts to crush any other jurisdiction that dares govern differently than they do. Make no mistake: With MAGA, it is their way or the highway.

Indeed, many of these states have provided us a preview, in what they've done to counties and cities that make laws to which the right-wingers and plutocrats running their capitols take offense. This is known as "preemption [link removed]." The North Carolina legislature nullified a gay rights ordinance in Charlotte in 2016; Democratic cities have been stripped of the right to try criminal cases in their own courts; agricultural barons with friends in the state capitol threatened the board of supervisors in rural Polk County, Wisconsin [link removed], with criminal felony charges if they passed a law

**in their own county** regulating concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)-massive industrial-scale pork-processing operations that turn vast swaths of land into water table-poisoning pig latrines.

Really, you should devour the whole issue [link removed]. Here, I just want to summarize some of the most important points-and flesh out some particularly dire scenarios about what might happen next, with examples from history. Not for panic, but to be prepared.

[link removed]

WHAT ALL THE BEST BOOKS MAKE PLAIN about the slow-burning sectional crisis that preceded America's actual hot Civil War is that the thing was driven by an attempt by the slave states to basically try to colonize the rest of the country. The third book of All the Powers of the Earth [link removed], Sidney Blumenthal's multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, covers the 1856-1860 period and explains this well. Before it was a battle of guns, it was a battle of laws.

Leaving states alone that didn't allow humans to own humans was simply unacceptable, not least because slaveholders' "property" could escape to them to live in freedom. Southerners in Congress preempted that by passing the Fugitive Slave Act, upheld by the Supreme Court in its infamous decision in

**Dred Scott v. Sandford**, basically making it illegal for a Black person to not be a slave anywhere in the U.S. That's a lot like what Hassan Ali Kanu writes in a TAP article [link removed] illustrated by a cartoon of the states of Texas and Louisiana styled as angry fists waving judicial gavels. As Kanu relates, the anti-abortion movement is attempting a modern-day Fugitive Slave Act with their efforts to ban "abortion trafficking."

Amarillo, Texas's proposed ban on abortion travel, Kanu writes, portends "interstate legal battles over whether people can be extradited and prosecuted in one state for 'aiding and abetting' an abortion" in another. The language of an anti-abortion leader he interviews sounds for all the world like the kind of people who overturned the overwhelmingly popular will of people in free states to keep slavery out of their jurisdictions when he responded, with "steely and unshaken resolve," to a question about why it did not matter to him that even majorities of Republican women disagree with him: "We can't have anti-abortion states

**and**abortion access states."

One battleground here, hopefully only metaphorically, will be courtrooms. Red states "rely on courts more and more to constrain or coerce citizens of other states," Kanu writes-effectively, a way to "make policy nationally." And if one state cannot achieve some reactionary goal on its own, it can always-to take a word much in the air in 1860-

**confederate**, like the confederation of state attorneys general who successfully sued to limit the right to sue for discrimination under the Voting Rights Act.

But another way the people who later started that big old 19th-century Confederacy tried to get their way was with vigilantism. That was what made "Bloody Kansas" bloody in the 1850s. Not a huge step to that, perhaps, from the sorts of armed irregulars whom Jon D. Michaels and David Noll, co-authors of

**Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy**, write about in their TAP contribution [link removed]. They describe the "interstate pipeline" of social media-driven "Trump trains," like the ones that showed up outside the home of Rusty Bowers, the Arizona legislator who testified about Donald Trump's attempt to deploy him to steal the state's electoral votes. "An armed gunman confronted one of Bowers's neighbors. A video billboard baselessly and scurrilously accusing him of being a pedophile was parked outside his home."

In perhaps the richest contribution to the TAP special issue, Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight provide a brilliant set of strategies [link removed] for how blue states can "play hardball" to deter the kind of damage I've been describing. Liberal states might, for example, aggressively court brain drain from neighboring conservative states, like Minnesota does, offering "free college tuition for some low- and moderate-income students" to compete with North Dakota for top students, who might also be incentivized by pro-choice policies. States could offer "free or low-cost training to medical and nursing school students whose red-state schools no longer offer training in the full array of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion care, with the expectation that some would stay and lend their talents." Or they might advertise their multicultural bona fides to attract the sort of migrants who boosted the economy of Springfield, Ohio-until they became the focus of Trump's "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats" blood libel.

And they should. But don't assume that will bring peace in the cold civil war. That's not how this game works. Another driver of the cold civil war is economic. In 2015, TAP's Harold Meyerson wrote [link removed] of how the antebellum South "was the low-wage-actually, the no-wage-anchor of the first global production chain," comparing that to the importance Southern states still attach to their ability to pressure Northern ones not to interfere with their race-to-the-bottom labor and social policies. And that's where the true danger might happen next.

[link removed]

STATES CAN BE LIKE OKLAHOMA, Kalena Thomhave writes in the TAP issue [link removed], or they can be like Connecticut. In 1959, in that misty past before states increasingly competed with each other with frenzied rounds of tax cuts and reductions in state services to "attract business," Oklahoma and Connecticut's social outcomes, at least measured by conveniently available longitudinal data on life expectancy, were quite similar. Connecticut, between 1970 and 2014, passed some of the most progressive social policies in the nation. Oklahoma chose a strategy of racing to the bottom.

The result: Communities in Oklahoma are 46th in the nation for food insecurity, 49th in education, and 45th in health; Connecticut is 8th, 3rd, and 11th, respectively. Life expectancy is 80.8 years in Connecticut and 76.1 in Oklahoma. And its residents, like those in red states everywhere, "are beholden to the policy whims of corporations, interest groups, and wealthy donors ... who have a vested interest in low taxes and limited social spending."

Indeed they do. And their populations

**do**provide targets of opportunity for states that wish to attract residents in search of a better deal-and the opportunity to have an abortion, and not get shot by a crazy person who nonetheless suffers no legal impediment to carrying a gun.

Just don't expect red states to let them go without a fight.

The fact is that the low-wage, low-service model is not some theory about how to deliver a better life for its citizens than the way liberal jurisdictions try to do it. Sure, its propagandists will

**claim**that their way is the better way for everyone: "Oklahomans," as a state spokesman explains, "don't look to the government for answers, we look to our communities"; and that this makes everyone

**happier**. It's actually a way to ensure weaker, more compliant populations-which is what makes them attractive to a certain kind of business.

For elites in places like these, the ability to maintain that fiction, and get their impoverished populations to believe it, is a very high-stakes enterprise. One of the great things about Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

**Demon Copperhead**(2022) is that it places this logic at the center of the plot, explaining it with the punch that only great storytelling can provide.

The book takes place in Lee County, Virginia, white and impoverished. A Black, liberal teacher from Chicago shocks his students by explaining to them something of the way of the world [link removed]: "Didn't we wonder why there's nothing else doing around here, in the way of paying work? Our general thinking was that God had made Lee County the butthole of the job universe. 'It wasn't God,' he said. Just ticked off enough for his accent to give him away. I remember that day like a picture ... 'Wouldn't you think,' he asked us, 'the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you've heard? Don't you think the mine companies knew that?' What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines ... Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot."

It's one of the most predictable stories in the modern world, in places where the money comes from resource extraction, like Texas, or Oklahoma-or Nigeria [link removed]; it's called the resource curse. Or simply cheap, pliant labor as is available in the South, just like Harold Meyerson explained in 2015.

In one of

**Demon Copperhead**'s subplots, a bright young high schooler wants to start a team to participate in statewide academic competitions. But that takes money, which the school board refuses to provide-reserving funding for the football team instead. The school board members come from the families that owned the mines; and even now that the mines don't need the workers, their old habits die hard: "They came up in another era when mining labor was the end game, and college was not on anybody's radar."

As for the kids themselves, they are resigned to their one psychic compensation: their proximity to the greatest high school football team in the state. "An academic team ... We'd get creamed because the kids in ... those place just have more brains. But outside of a schoolroom, we could whip their asses."

Kingsolver's political-economic wisdom makes for quite the contrast to her main literary competition for explaining this world to the rest of us: the guy who happens to be the vice president-elect of the United States. JD Vance's explanation in

**Hillbilly Elegy**for his people's destitution is their own moral failings; he made it, so why can't they? And though there was plenty of head-scratching over a guy who seemed to so many liberals to be a reasonable moderate-he went to Yale!-really, it's all there. As always among reactionaries, the story reifies the classification of human beings into two broad categories: the worthy and the unworthy, according to their just deserts.

Disturb a setup like that, and you might even end up with a cold war. And given that nowhere in Vance's book is any particular judgment ever offered about whipping someone's ass as the way to solve a problem-except, if anything, as a lesson in building character-it's not hard to anticipate that someday they might figure out a way to turn it into a hot one.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

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