While We Concentrate on Biden-Trump, the States Are Eating Our Lunch

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has a most excellent column in a recent issue on what he calls “sharp new limits on the rights and privileges of Americans.” And he’s not talking about what’s going on in a disfunctional Congress or Supreme Court, but quite accurately names that the actual threat to American freedom as coming from the states.

“It is states that have stripped tens of millions of American women of their right to bodily autonomy, with disastrous consequences for their lives and health. It is states that have limited the right to travel freely if it means trying to obtain an abortion. It is states that have begun a crusade against the right to express one’s gender and sexuality, under the pretext of “protecting children.” It is states that are threatening to seize the children of parents who believe their kids need gender-affirming care. And it is states that have begun to renege on the promise of free and fair elections.”

That’s no great surprise to me, although I admit I could and should have paid closer attention

I’ve written about Sinclair Broadcasting sucking up the second-largest number of television stations in America, owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets, covering 40% of American households. It’s the largest owner of right-wing stations affiliated with Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, MyNetworkTV, and The CW.

These dudes also own four digital multicast networks (Comet, Charge!, Stadium, and TBD), sports-oriented cable networks (Tennis Channel and Bally Sports Regional Networks), and a streaming service (Stirr). They put out a single message on a daily basis without any staff other than a local presenter. In most small town venues they are the only news source. How’s that for capturing the right-wing hearts and minds of Americans?

We have very strong States’ Rights in America

States' rights is a political philosophy that emphasizes the rights of individual states to fight what proponents believe to be the encroaching power of the United States government. The conservative right wing contingent in America believes nearly all federal moves work against their interests and state governments are not their only target. They work against liberal values in the cities, small towns and even (perhaps primarily) school boards. Having captured 40% of America’s attention with single-issue politics and backing that with enormous funding by individuals such as the Koch brothers, America’s states have been sliding into the red without much notice.

Bouie goes on to write “that it is states, and specifically state legislatures, that are the vanguard of a repressive turn in American life shouldn’t be a surprise. Americans have a long history with various forms of subnational authoritarianism: state and local tyrannies that sustained themselves through exclusion, violence and the political security provided by the federal structure of the American political system. In many respects, the history of American political life is the story of the struggle to unravel those subnational units of oppression and establish a universal and inviolable grant of political and civil rights, backed by the force of the national government.”

Yes indeedy, that’s what it means to be a republic.

Good enough, so far as it goes, but it currently provides less  and less protection

The Supreme Court recently gutted the Civil Rights Act and school boards across red states are banning books and dictating what schools may or may not teach and what students may or may not read. A record 2,571 different titles were banned or censored by school districts in states and other government entities in 2022, according to the American Library Association — a 38% increase from the previous year. Nearly 60% of those bans were aimed at classrooms and school libraries, and most of the targeted books were by or about racial minorities or LGBTQ people. Broad, vaguely defined prohibitions on teaching "critical race theory" and other allegedly divisive topics in classrooms have required 24% of U.S. teachers to alter their curricula. Omygod, teach American history as it actually was, warts and all? That might make some white kid uncomfortable and we can’t have that. Teachers and librarians are resigning in droves rather than comply, but the beat goes on.

Viewed in this light, our current times are those in which we face an organized political movement to undermine this grant of universal rights and elevate the rights of states over those of people, in order to protect and secure traditional patterns of white domination and status. The only rights left in this world for minorities are those most at risk.

(The WEEK) In Florida, a textbook publisher even had to completely remove a purely factual passage on George Floyd's murder and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. In at least a half-dozen states, teachers and school librarians now face potential prison time for violating the bans. It isn't just individual books being "removed, restricted, suppressed in public schools" anymore, said Kasey Meehan of the PEN America foundation. "It's a set of ideas, it's themes, it's identities, it's knowledge on the history of our country."

America has an uncomfortable past of genocide, slavery and racism that the right wing hopes to sweep under the rug to make their children comfortable. Comfortable is the mantra and ignorant is okay so long as white children lose no sleep.