Sam talked to Aaron Kleinman of The States Project about the battle to defend American democracy at the state level. Subscribe on patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.
Duration
2m
Broadcast on
31 Oct 2022
Audio Format
other
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
With the midterms a week away, Sam talked to Aaron Kleinman of The States Project (aka @BobbyBigWheel) about the battle to defend American democracy at the state level — where Trumpist state legislators continue to deny the 2020 election and lay the groundwork for ignoring the will of the majority in the future. How did the conservative movement manage to to take over so many statehouses? Can Democrats still turn back the tide? What is the "independent state legislature" theory?
Aaron helps answers these questions and more — and gives us a useful rundown of the states to watch closely in the midterms next Tuesday.
The conservative movement, they got Nixon in the White House in 1968, but they were really kind of frustrated with his real inability to reverse how politics had been going and reverse the post World War II liberal consensus, especially around domestic policy. So the Chamber of Commerce asked future Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, to basically analyze the situation for them and how they could ultimately become the dominant political movement in the country. And Powell came back to them with three main recommendations. One was taking over the judiciary, and that's why you have the Federalist Society. The second is building alternate institutions, both media and academics. So that's why you have Fox News. That's why you have the Heritage Foundation. And the third thing that Powell really focused on was taking over state government, specifically state legislatures. And that's why you had Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and other groups are founded by people like Paul Wierick and Grover Norquist that really popped up in the '70s and the '80s to really drive state legislatures rightward and make them basically safe for corporate special interests and do the bidding of those. What was the left doing? Were they watching this happen? And we're like, we don't need the states, or is it just kind of Dems or the left asleep at the wheel? I think it was a misallocation of priorities. We just talked a lot about kind of strategies of the new right. Well, there also was a new left. That new left, it was very kind of litigation focused and very DC focused. And there is this theory of change that you could build and during political power by basically turning everyone into a litigant. They wanted to change the country through litigation. The right wanted to change the judges who were deciding that litigation. Guess which worked out better. [Music]
Sam talked to Aaron Kleinman of The States Project about the battle to defend American democracy at the state level. Subscribe on patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.
