Toscano is a former minority leader in the Virginia House of Delegates. He is the author of “ Fighting Political Gridlock: How States Shape Our Nation and Our Lives.”
The 2020 election again showed that we are in the fight of our lives. Donald Trump was dispatched, but not without efforts to overturn a democratic result while undermining the legitimacy of elections themselves. Democrats won the presidency, but actually lost seats in state legislatures. Some new officeholders openly embraced the “stop the steal” narrative. A recent NPR/Ipsos poll reports that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is "in crisis and at risk of failing."And the public remains focused on a federal system that appears dysfunctional and mired in partisan gridlock.
But as the public’s gaze remains fixed on Washington, major decisions affecting control of the nation and the quality of our lives are being made in each of the 50 states. Democracy is up for grabs. Voting rights are under attack in many states, and hyperpartisan redistricting continues to manufacture majorities by shaping state legislatures and congressional delegations. But state policies influence us in so many other ways.
Here are five:
Education as contested terrain
A democratic society cannot survive without an informed and educated citizenry. Wonder why some topics are taught in schools and others are not? Why some schools are modern, and others are physically deteriorating? Why some children score better on tests than others? The answers are found in state policy.
Exploring the history of racial discrimination, paying teachers more than the national average, and reinvesting in the buildings within which learning occurs are uniquely state functions. Less than 8 percent of K-12 school funding comes from the federal government; most is provided by the states. The choices of state lawmakers affect our children’s performance much more than decisions made by policymakers in D.C.
Lately, disputes over the teaching of slavery and discrimination have reemerged as statehouse flashpoints. Five state legislatures recently considered denying education funding to school divisions that included materials from The New York Times’ “1619 Project” about the role of slavery in their curricula. Nine state legislatures and state school boards in four others have banned critical race theory from schools altogether. The first official act of Virginia’s new governor was to sign an executive order to prevent CRT from being taught in schools, even as there is no evidence of it.
In addition, state legislatures are now considering laws to compel the removal of controversial books from schools and libraries. To complicate matters, some states are considering making school board elections partisan contests, a change that will further polarize our schools.
While we should be mindful about exposing our youngsters to inappropriate materials, access to information and critical inquiry are essential to democracy. And efforts to rewrite American history, whether it involves eliminating examples of our idealism and compassion or whitewashing the darker sides of our ignorance and heartlessness, only undermines the public’s ability to understand our past and build a better future. Strong democracies embrace the truth. Enhancing democracy begins in our schools, and the states will be key in supporting curricula that protect democratic values.
The pandemic and our health
The pandemic created huge challenges for democracy, most of which were affected by state policy. When Trump was asked about federal responses to the virus early in the crisis, he said, “I would leave it to the governors.” State executives responded by using legal authority not available to the president to impose a wide array of mandates and policies designed to combat the virus.
For almost a year, these executive orders went generally unchallenged. But as the pandemic continued and became politicized, many legislatures became uneasy with this exercise of power and moved to end it, even in places where the virus surged. Legislatures began to push back, arguing that emergencies are, by definition, temporary, and one person should not be permitted to control too much of our daily lives.
The spread of the delta and omicron variants further intensified debates over mask and vaccination mandates. Despite low vaccination rates and soaring infections, many states, mostly in the South and under the control of Republican legislatures or governors, fought mask and inoculation requirements. Many of these states initially reported the highest Covid infection rates.
This continued into 2022.
In early March, data showed that of the 10 states with the highest Covid deaths per 100,000 population, only two had a Democratic governor and all of them were controlled by Republican legislatures. Couple this with generally underfunded state public infrastructure, and you have a recipe for different health outcomes depending on the state in which you live.
Criminal justice
Public legitimacy is a key underpinning of a democracy. And if people do not believe the system is just, its legitimacy is undermined. The murder of George Floyd sent shock waves through our nation and compelled the U.S. to reexamine the relationship between criminal justice and democracy.
Our nation’s high incarceration rates are largely due to state policies. Most offenders are incarcerated in state facilities becauscre they broke state laws and were sentenced in state courts; the numbers of state criminal cases far exceed those in federal courts. State pardon and parole policies dictate when the incarcerated can be released, even if they are model prisoners.
These policies are traceable to the “law and order” attitude of the late 2000s, and a reexamination is now underway, led by a coalition of liberals and conservatives concerned both about monetary costs of the system and the social impacts of housing so many prisoners, especially those from minority communities. Some states are reforming their criminal justice system, especially in the treatment of juveniles. Finding the proper balance between punishment for wrongdoing, the costs of incarceration, fairness in sentencing, and the effectiveness of rehabilitation is always a challenge. The major decisions on these issues will be made not in Congress, but in statehouses.
State preemption of local control
Wonder why your city council cannot require the payment of a living wage or impose a mask mandate? The answer is found in state policy doctrines called the Dillon Rule and “preemption.”
The Dillon Rule is a concept applied in more than one-half of our states and prohibits localities from acting unless the state has provided the authority to do so. Hence, many localities are forced to request legislation that will provide them explicit approval to make change; legislators call this “enabling legislation.” Requiring localities to seek state permission often limits their ability to innovate and respond to uniquely local challenges. Even in states where constitutions grant localities more flexibility to act (called “home rule” jurisdictions), legislatures can still “preempt” changes from occurring.
In other words, states rule.
Conservative lawmakers have historically used these tools to prevent liberal localities from enacting policies with which they disagree, thereby exerting control over populations that they may not directly represent.
The pandemic only exacerbated the conflicts between state and local governments. As school began in fall 2021, 12 states and the District of Columbia required everyone to wear masks, eight states prohibited any such requirement, and another 29 states left the decision with local school districts. But governors and legislatures then began to intervene.
By early 2021, 17 states had enacted legislation to bar localities from imposing mask mandates in schools. In Texas, Gov. Gregg Abbott sued to prevent the state’s four most populous counties and various school divisions from imposing mask requirements, and issued executive orders to bar private businesses from compelling employees or customers to be vaccinated.
As Florida became the state with the highest number of new Covid-19 cases, Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order that required schools to allow parents to determine whether their children wear masks in school, and the state then imposed a $3.57 million fine on Leon County because it required its employees to be vaccinated. Even as Covid abates, the conflicts between state and local control will continue, and many issues of life and liberty will be determined based on their resolution.
States as laboratories of democracy
Increasingly, states are willing to tackle issues that the federal government either will not or cannot address. And these policies often become models for other states or federal approaches.
Almost two decades ago, Massachusetts embarked on an experiment to provide health insurance for all its citizens. In 2006, it embraced the concept called the “individual mandate.” Everyone in the state was required to have health insurance, with subsidies provided to those who could not afford to pay. Four years later, this served as the model for the Affordable Care Act.
Today, states are innovating in other areas. Eleven states have now joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a state consortium seeking to reduce emissions through market-based practices. And the burgeoning movement to legalize marijuana has been led by the states through the use of a specific tool permitted in some state constitutions called “initiative petition.” Twenty-four states have some variation of this direct democracy, where citizens collect enough signatures to place a policy or constitutional change directly before the voters or the legislature. Initially, cannabis legalization was not the result of legislative action, but instead through citizen ballot initiatives. Today, eighteen states have legalized recreational use of the drug.
Policies to protect democracy and enhance economic opportunity don’t just happen. They are created by elected officials who understand the issues and by an engaged citizenry who participate, prod and push for change, not just in national elections but in statewide contests as well. Decisions being made right now in statehouses across the nation will influence not only electoral results in 2022 but, more importantly, the direction of the nation, the strength of our democracy and the quality of our lives in the years ahead.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.