Regardless of who sits in the White House, extremist MAGA politicians will continue to hold power in almost half the states in America. The movement that embraces both white Christian nationalist theology and libertarian hatred of government has fueled the Republican party culture war that’s campaigned to outlaw abortion, invoked statewide book bans, censored the teaching of America’s slave era history, criminalized teachers who discuss LGBTQ rights in the classroom and erased references to climate change from state law.
Through voter suppression, gerrymandered state and federal legislative districts, and the incitement of political violence, right-wing activists elected to government office have imposed their extremist agenda that has marginalized and disenfranchised a majority of their state’s multi-racial population.
While Donald Trump’s incitement of the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has come to symbolize the threat his movement poses to democracy, Republican governments elected in many southern and midwestern states have already implemented a long list of anti-democratic policies that are proposed in Project 2025’s authoritarian blueprint. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and David Noll, professor of law at Rutgers University, who discuss the threat posed to democracy by extremist MAGA state governments.
We first hear from professor Noll, who is co-author with Jon Michaels of “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy,” and responds to a question on how defenders of democracy can effectively respond to a Trump presidency.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Noll, if Donald Trump wins the election, what is the best defense? What’s the most effective approach defenders of democracy can take to push back, to resist the kind of imposition of Christian nationalist or fascist laws that will dictate what they do in their lives and erode freedom on a scale that we probably haven’t seen in the history of our country?
DAVID NOLL: Jon and I consider ourselves nationalist. We were raised thinking about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And so we looked to Congress and we looked to the federal government as a protector of civil rights. But sort of one thing that folks who are opposed to this movement can take from states like Texas and Tennessee is that the states are a real source of power, right?
This all happened with Joe Biden in the White House. Right? And there wasn’t unified Republican control of Congress and the states that are pushing these policies did so because they controlled state legislatures and they control the executive branch in states. And the response from other states — we go through this in detail on the book — has been pretty muted.
There has not been a vigorous movement to counter these state policies from what we might think of as blue states. And so there’s a double lesson there, right? You know, if Vice President Harris wins the election, then blue states are going to have a role to play in countering what red states are doing because it takes a long time to enact federal policy.
And then legislation, you know, doesn’t emerge fully formed from Congress. So blue states need to do the work of prototyping policies that, you know, counter the spread of legalized vigilantism and what everyone is terming fascism these days. But that’s going to be especially important if Trump wins again. And the broad lesson here is that when you have control of a site of institutional power, you have to use it.
Blue state policy is a tool that has gone dramatically under used. So, you know, it can’t just be attorneys general filing lawsuits, trying to stop the most radical Trump policies when they come into effect. We have to be thinking systematically about how to push back against these anti-democratic moves that are coming out of red states. And, if people get to the end of the book, we have a long list of 19 model laws that people can consider and blue state legislatures might consider taking up.
SCOTT HARRIS: We hear next from professor Stanley, whose latest book is titled Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, who answers my question on defending democracy under an authoritarian Trump regime.
If Trump is elected, what are the most effective ways to combat fascist repression?
JASON STANLEY: Donald Trump is a method to enable what’s half the Christian nationalist agenda that we’re seeing in states like Tennessee and in states in the South, states like Texas. He’s a method to move that to the federal level. So, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to have state-level resistance. In a sense, it’s a kind of progressive federalism we’ve got to do.
We’ve got to look at what southern states did to essentially, continue the kind of racial oppression and one-party states that have long held sway there in those states. We’ve got to look at what they’ve done to sort of keep injustice going. And we’ve got to probably adopt those strategies on the state level with probably California, which is the closest thing to a multi-racial democracy we have leading the way on that.
So the states are going to be much more important. And ironically, we’re going to have to look at the strategies employed by places like Texas and South Carolina and Louisiana to stop the federal government from imposing civil rights law. We’ll have to look at that and take lessons from it.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with David Noll (26:41) and Jason Stanley (23:18) see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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