From civil rights foe to progressive hope: How states’ rights flipped from a conservative weapon to a liberal shield to protect democracy.
When presidential hopeful John Edwards spoke of “two Americas” in 2004, he described a nation divided between Black and white, rich and poor. Today, that divide has transformed into a widening schism between red and blue America, with Texas and California as the dueling capitals of these parallel nations.
In this WhoWhatWhy podcast, veteran journalist Sasha Abramsky reveals a striking paradox: Progressives, long suspicious of states’ rights — once a reactionary battle cry against civil rights and federal reforms — are now embracing state power as their best defense against growing authoritarianism.
As the federal government tilts rightward, blue states are forming unprecedented coalitions to preserve democratic values and progressive policies. But could these defensive measures actually accelerate America’s political fracturing?
Drawing from his new book, Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Takeover of Small Town America, Abramsky explains how our nation faces stresses not seen since the Civil War — while coalitions of progressive states emerge as crucial bulwarks against federal overreach.
In these examples of local grassroots resistance and cross-ideological alliances, he finds glimmers of hope for mending our deepening political fault lines.
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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. My guest today, Sasha Abramsky, is no stranger to the volatile intersection of politics and American life. With a keen eye for the deeper currents shaping our society, Abramsky has spent decades dissecting the impacts of poverty, justice, and radical political movements in our country. His latest work, Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America, digs into one of the most troubling trends in our time—the encroachment of national polarization in the heart of local governance.
As we reflect on the recent election results, we’ll talk to Abramsky to consider what it means for democracy when the guardrails of civil discourse begin to crumble, even in places once immune from such fierce divides. What happens when national politics permeates every layer of local life? And as we look to the future, can small-town resilience and resistance hold back the tide of polarization?
Sasha Abramsky is a veteran political journalist, with work spanning some of the most pressing issues of America. Today he joins us to share his perspective on the growing fault lines in American democracy. It is my pleasure to welcome Sasha Abramsky here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Sasha, thanks so much for joining us.
Sasha Abramsky: Good to be on. How are you?
Jeff: Good. Well, thanks so much for doing this today. We appreciate it. In your latest book, Chaos Comes Calling, you write a lot about how political polarization, and particularly efforts by the right, take over small towns and what the consequences are. Are we looking at a situation now in the current environment where we may need to look at the reverse of that? For so long, federalism and states’ rights has been something looked upon with some askance by Democrats and by the left. Are we looking at a situation now where federalism and states’ rights may be the only way to survive the next four years?
Sasha: Yes, I think you’re right. Historically, generally, [the] federal government has pushed more progressive policies and has been stymied by very reactionary state politics. You saw that certainly [with] slavery in the pre-Civil War period, you saw it around Jim Crow in the post-Civil War period. And then, most recently in the civil rights era, where states like Alabama and Mississippi basically tried to walk away from federal mandates on voting rights and housing rights, and so on and so forth.
But there’s nothing inherent in our system that says the federal government has to be more progressive and state governments have to be more reactionary. And I think what we’re seeing in the Trump era, Trump eras, I guess, because it’s obviously now spanning two different periods, but what we’re seeing in this sort of current moment is that there are forces afoot in the country that are pushing the federal system rightward and sort of ducks into this deeply irrational moment with Trump 2.0 and these calamitously poorly qualified and far-right appointees that he’s nominating.
As the federal government swings into this irrationalist, right-wing moment, it is going to fall to states. It’s going to fall to state coalitions to try to preserve something of what we understand America to be: an open, pluralist, tolerant society, a society that has space for political pluralism and a society that doesn’t sic the military on its own citizens or on immigrants, both of which are real possibilities under the incoming Trump administration.
So I do think the calculus changes a bit, and this sort of assumption that when states go it alone, it’s inherently a bad thing. I think progressives are going to have to reexamine that. And there are going to be times over the coming years where it’s absolutely vital that progressive, decent politics and political rhetoric emanate from blue states because it’s not going to come from the federal government.
Jeff: And even beyond the states, we’re hearing this talk about some kind of informal, loose affiliation, loose compact between the states. We’ve heard it in talk about things with California, Washington, and Oregon. And then we start seeing it in the Midwest with conversations that have been taking place between Pritzker and Polis in Illinois and Colorado and other Midwestern blue states getting into this.
Sasha: That’s right. I mean, the Pritzker and Polis’s organization that they set up last week is basically a loose coalition of governors designed to try and sort of protect the mantle of what we understand American democracy to be. Their working assumption is that a lot of the guardrails that held Trump vaguely in check from 2016 or ’17 to 2020 have been corroded, that the Republican Party has been so co-opted by the MAGA movement and by Trump, and the courts have been so co-opted and the intimidatory processes unleashed by Trumpism on the ground have become so powerful that there’s no guarantee the guardrails will hold.
And so Pritzker and Polis’s idea is that if you can pull resources, you can pull legal resources, you can pull intellectual resources, you can pull grassroots organizing efforts, that in some ways you can recreate some of those guardrails at the local level. Now, last week when that announcement was made, California wasn’t a part of that founding group, neither was New York. My working assumption is that over the months and years ahead, California and New York will be intimately involved in these coordinated strategies to try and rein Trump in a little bit.
Now again, it’s an open question as to whether or not these efforts will succeed. It’s also an open question as to how far Trump’s willing to go outside of the legal processes to enforce his will. This is something we’ve rarely if ever seen in the American political experiment before, the idea that you have a deeply autocratic president backed up by deeply autocratic henchmen trying to take control of the sort of most important apparatus of power, the military, the intelligence, the Department of Justice.
If Trump’s nominations go through, if people like Matt Gaetz and Peter Hegseth get approved, we’re in a whole new world because these are people who won’t in the slightest push back against Trump’s most extreme impulses. They’ll facilitate them. And at that point, it really does become an open question what the states can do and how far they can go to try to preserve the remnants of [a] democratic pluralist system.
Jeff: If in fact these states and these coalition of states try and do this, whether they’re moderately or even a little bit successful in this, does it further exacerbate the red and blue divide in the country? And could the long-term consequences of that be even worse in terms of tearing the country apart?
Sasha: Yes, there’ve been a lot of people who’ve been writing and thinking and talking about this in the last few months, and maybe beyond the last few months, that there are sort of stresses in play now in the American project that haven’t been in play since the Civil War. That there are these fissuring impulses where the states are going further and further apart, and the state’s understanding of political realities of truth and falsehood of, in science, of a whole bunch of things. There are just two totally different countries now.
So to simplify it, you have a Californian country and you have a Texan country. These are sort of two enormous economic and political powerhouses that have their alliances and have their coalitions that are forming. And it’s unclear whether those two powerhouses in the long run coexist in a meaningful way, or whether they’re going to increasingly go their own way with their own set of rules and regulations around really important parts of civil society, with minimum of cooperation between the states, with antagonistic relationships to the federal government, depending who’s in charge of the federal government at any moment.
It’s very dangerous. America is a project that works through individuals and through states being able to engage with each other. And it starts to break down very profoundly when that process of engagement corrodes. I think we’re seeing that at the moment.
Jeff: And one of the places that it potentially breaks down is with respect to economics, the states being able to afford to do the things they might want to do, the blue states in this kind of a situation.
Sasha: That’s right. If you look at the minimum wage, for example, we’re one country with several different minimum wages. So if you live in California, you’re going to pay a lot more for housing and a lot more for a bunch of other things. But the flip side of that is you live in a state where the minimum wage is north of $15 an hour, and in the not too distant future will be somewhere in the $20 an hour region.
If you live in Texas or you live in Montana or you live in Alabama or many other Republican states, you live in a state with the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour. So if you live in California, you’re going to have a whole different set of economic priorities than if you live in Texas. Similarly, the tax structures of the state. If you live in California, there are resources the state has because it has a fairly progressive tax structure that allows for big ambitions around health care access or around mental health services or around funding higher education or whatever it might be.
If you live in Texas, well, again, the tax base is far, far lower, because whether it’s property taxes or whether it’s state taxes or whether it’s cap, all the other taxes that states bring in, there’s a lower tax base in most GOP states. They have fewer resources to create these ambitious social programs. So that’s always been the case. There’s always been some states that invest more and other states that invest less, some states that tax more and other states that tax less, but it’s becoming ever more pronounced.
And in some ways, when you look at America, you’re looking now at two countries. You’re looking at a blue country with its own set of economic and political rules. You’re looking at a red country with its own set of political regulations and rules, and growing animosity between those two camps. And again, we like to think of ourselves as sort of eternal and exceptional. Well, in some ways, we’re not exceptional. We’re just another country struggling to get by and doing something’s right and something’s wrong. And we’re certainly not eternal. There’s nothing in the sort of God-given rules of the universe that says that this political project works forever. We seem to be doing an awfully good job at the moment of making it ever more likely it doesn’t work. I think that’s very sad because I think it’s an important political project.
Jeff: It even goes beyond the state level to some of the fundamentals of local governance and local politics in that we certainly have a lot of blue bubbles that exist within very red states. Even as you wrote about in Chaos Comes Calling, red bubbles that exist in blue states like California.
Sasha: Yes, that’s absolutely true. I’ve done a lot of reporting. Half of my book is set in Shasta County, which is one of these very, very red islands in a blue state. But there are plenty of blue islands in red states. If you go to Austin, Texas, very liberal city, very progressive values. Even Houston, which not too many years ago, was quite conservative. Houston’s now governed by very progressive Democratic political leadership.
I was recently up reporting in Montana and Wyoming. It’s the same thing. Both of those states are dyed in the wool, make America great again, red states. And yet their cities, whether it’s Bozeman in Montana or Jackson in Wyoming, the cities have these very sort of liberal political hues to them. Then you have this conflict. Does the state allow the cities to preempt state laws by creating higher local minimum wages or local rent control ordinances? And the red states are showing remarkable reluctance to let the cities do that. You’re having these battles at a state versus local level as to who controls those levers of power.
At the moment, the state’s winning those battles, whether it’s in Montana or whether it’s in Ohio or many other states. The state is pushing back against blue cities’ efforts to go their own way. And so I think, again, you’re talking about sort of these fissures that have emerged. You’re right, we’re seeing them between blue and red states, [but] we’re also seeing them within states themselves and the different regions within those states.
Jeff: To a certain extent, it raises the question which you touched on earlier, how much stress can the system take? All these fissures, all these fault lines that we’re talking about, at a certain point, something has to break.
Sasha: Yes, I think that’s true. Again, from the inside, when we look at a system from the inside, it’s very hard to sort of look at it and say, well, this thing’s breaking apart. When you look at it from the outside, people have other views. I read a very interesting guest essay in The New York Times, I think it was two days ago, by a Russian intellectual who had lived through the breakup of the Soviet Union. He wrote about how unimaginable that breakup was from within the Soviet borders. If you were inside looking out, the Soviet system seemed eternal. It turned out to be extraordinarily fragile.
This writer was making an analogy with the current crises in American politics and American culture. And he said, well, look, there are these forces tearing America apart, and there are political figures in Russia now, and he sort of specifically identified Vladimir Putin and some of his entourage, who are essentially betting on the fact that America has become ungovernable.
Well, that’s a terrible thing. If an authoritarian dictatorial regime like Putin’s is looking west at America and thinking, you know what, this system is breaking up on its own. It just needs a little bit more fuel thrown onto the fire. It needs more chatbots, causing chaos online. It needs more cultural wars and things being stirred up. And then the system breaks. If you have authoritarians looking to America and thinking the system is that fragile, again, it’s a terrible thing because if America does become ungovernable, that’s going to have global consequences. That’s going to ricochet all around the world in ways we can’t even begin to imagine at the moment.
Jeff: The other thing that’s hard to imagine is what are the forces that are working to prevent this? And when you look out there now it’s hard to find many forces that are really working to pull these things together to prevent these fault lines from cracking.
Sasha: Yes, there are many people of good faith, not just Democrats, not just progressives, but many people across the political spectrum who are looking at this and thinking, look, this is a train wreck, we’ve got to find some ways around this. In my book, I focused on a place called Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, which veered into this sort of very dysfunctional far right, but more than far right, this sort of irrationalist local government in 2019, 2020, 2021.
Then a lot of locals looked at this and thought, this is crazy. There’s nothing getting done. The roads aren’t being fixed. The houses aren’t getting built. Nothing that needs to be done is getting done. And they formed a cross ideological Good Governance League. And they very consciously weren’t just looking for people on one side of the aisle. They also looked for moderate Republicans who weren’t seeking to burn the house down, and they brought them into the coalition.
That Good Governance League was very effective electorally. It did a lot of on the ground voter education efforts. And it won in 2022, and again, in 2024, in a series of very important local elections. And I think that story and the people I met when I was reporting the book gave me some insight into a sort of way out here, that there are ways to put the brakes on this slide to irrationalism. But it involves a lot of education work on the ground. It involves a lot of sort of old-fashioned political engagements in a way that it’s become somewhat unfashionable.
It’s much easier these days to go online and be performative. So you sort of click on an emoji saying “like” or “dislike” or “sad” or whatever the emoji might be. That qualifies for our political engagement for the moment. But actually the hard work of doing something on the ground, talking to people, shifting understandings, it takes a lot more time and effort. But I think, seeing a group like the Sequim Good Governance League as it coalesced and as it succeeded, that to me was at least one roadmap for a way out of this mess.
There have to be roadmaps. If you just look at what’s happened, you say, oh, well, the election in 2024 turned out to be a calamity. The cabinet appointments are shaping up to be a calamity. The presidential administration is clearly going to be a calamity. I’m going to put my head in the sand. I’m going to wake up in four years. If that’s your approach, well, things are going to get very, very bad. If you instead turn around and say, we know there’s room here for a reimagining, but it’s got to occur from the ground up. Well, then you work from the ground up and you look for that reimagining.
Jeff: Does it also need some kind of leadership, some kind of charismatic leadership on that side?
Sasha: Yes, it needs people who have the ability to engage with their neighbors and their colleagues and their fellow community members. It doesn’t necessarily need celebrities. It doesn’t necessarily need high-profile people. Look, one of the most effective movements I’ve ever encountered was in North Carolina a few years back. I was doing a story on grassroots activism in very conservative parts of rural North Carolina. I encountered this group called Down Home North Carolina, which basically was doing door-to-door engagement in very hardscrabble communities. It was building a movement. It was talking about healthcare access. It was talking about jobs and wage security. It was talking about access to nutritional food, just really important things for families that were really struggling to get by.
In doing so, it was building up local credibility. It was going from one house to the next to the next. It wasn’t just talking to people, but it was getting them engaged. It was getting them signed up to join that organization and to in turn go and knock on their neighbor’s doors. It was a chain reaction of movement building. And you see that all over the country. The Down Home North Carolina is particularly effective, but there are these organizing efforts – I’ve certainly encountered them in Arizona, or in Nevada, or in California, in many different states across the country – where people are doing the hard work of political education.
I don’t think you need high-profile people. I don’t think you necessarily need charismatic leaders, but I do think you need people who have both the time, the energy, and the understanding to really engage in their own communities. And it’s a long-term process. This isn’t something that’s going to suddenly get better overnight or tomorrow or next week. We got into this hole over many, many years. My guess is it’s going to take many, many years to get out of this hole.
Jeff: It is worrisome that so much of the analysis and talk coming out of this election is that a lot of the grassroots effort, the ground game operations that the Democrats and the Harris campaign engaged in, were not as successful as they have been in the past, that it’s just something that doesn’t seem to work as well anymore. And on the Trump side, they didn’t engage in much of it and were successful anyway. It really put a damper on this whole idea of the value of this grassroots effort.
Sasha: I think there were a lot of problems that the Democratic campaign ultimately faced. One of them was that no matter how Kamala Harris tried to reset, she was seen by a lot of people as a continuation of Biden. And rightly or wrongly, Biden’s presidency was not viewed by the majority as a success. Now, I personally think a lot of really interesting things happened under Biden. A lot of really important legislation was passed by Congress.
I think if you look at the raw metrics, by the sort of abstract metrics, in many ways, he’s a very successful president. He navigated the pandemic and its aftermath. The economy had a period of inflation, then the inflation was tamed and unemployment stayed relatively low. But the public perception was that it was a calamitous failure, and Harris was saddled with that perception. So I think that was one big problem.
Another big problem is the Democrats, for various reasons, were reliant too much on spin doctors and political consultants who were trying to craft a message that would take no risks. And one of the problems with that is at this moment in time, there are a lot of Americans for various reasons who want to shake things up, and they want risk in their politics. So if you’re going to craft a campaign that is sort of risk averse, you’re not going to come up with particularly radical economic proposals.
Bernie Sanders was talking about putting a lot more attention on the minimum wage or the living wage. Well, that didn’t happen, and it probably should’ve. I think to blame the grassroots for this is probably missing the point a bit. I think that there was a sort of grassroots momentum, but a lot of it was to do with writing $50 checks or whatever it was. In terms of a sort of grassroots army of community organizers, I don’t know if that was there. It probably was in some parts of the country, but I think taken as a whole, this was not a sort of insurgent grassroots campaign and maybe it needed to be somehow.
Jeff: And coming back to your point before, in terms of what this looks like from the outside, how important do you think the global situation is to this? The degree to which the rest of the world can either help or hurt, what comes next here?
Sasha: The world’s in chaos at the moment. If you look at the instability in the Middle East, you look at the instability in Ukraine, you look at the potential for instability in Taiwan or on the Korean Peninsula, and in many other locations, there has been a huge upsurge in global violence and war in the last few years. Now, that chaos is, I can’t imagine it getting less severe under Donald Trump. I think that chaos is here for the foreseeable future. But I do think that there are other things that could get far worse. The idea of sort of ricocheting trade wars, which is the consequence of the kind of tariff program that Trump’s talking about.
Once you get economic warfare between major powers, things get really ugly really quickly. And there’s lots of historical precedent for that. The idea that the world is just going to sit by and passively take punitive tariffs from Trump or passively take demands from Trump to remilitarize, which is what he did in 2016 to 2020, or demands from Trump to abandon climate change policies and revert to a sort of “drill, baby, drill!” policy.
The idea that we can dictate those changes to the world and not get some pushback, I think is unrealistic. So I think it’s very likely that Trump’s presidency will presage even more chaos, even more dislocation. But you asked what the world can do to help America in this moment. Look, we routinely send election observers to other countries. We routinely monitor whether or not there’s political violence in other countries. We routinely monitor whether or not there’s media freedom in other countries.
Well, if we have an authoritarian government that starts clamping down on the media, and I don’t know if they will or not, but the signs aren’t so good. If we have an authoritarian government that starts doing political persecution of its enemies, and again, don’t know if they will, but there’s a lot of indication that they’d like to go down that road. Well, at that point, the rest of the world will have something of an obligation to monitor the state of our civil society in the way that we monitor other civil societies. So I think that that’s a possibility that we may end up with, however unthinkable it is now, we may end up with other democracies writing reports on the shambolic state of our human rights, and so on and so forth.
Jeff: I think it was Eisenhower that said first that sometimes the solution to an absolutely intractable problem was to create a bigger problem. Maybe it is only on a global stage that we’ll begin to see how bad our problems are here.
Sasha: Yes, that’s entirely possible. I have journalism students, and I always say to them, don’t just read American newspapers or look at American online journals. Look at how the rest of the world sees us. Read reports from news organizations from other countries, because I think it opens eyes. I think when you don’t just look at yourself from within your own borders, but you step outside and see how other people look at you, it’s something of an eye opener and helps you understand the world in a more complicated, more nuanced way.
Jeff: Sasha Abramsky, his latest book is Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Sasha, I thank you so much for spending time with us.
Sasha: Hey, it was a pleasure. I look forward to doing it again.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman.
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