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For the first time in decades, the Left is on the rise in the United States. This resurgence has primarily been driven forward by local and national struggles. In towns across the country, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters have helped win important victories, such as achieving paid sick days in Austin, Texas and electing six socialists to city council in Chicago. And on a national level, the efforts of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have captured the imagination of millions. These types of advances in our cities and in the national political arena are essential, but they’re not enough. Our strategy has a crucial missing link: we’re not yet consistently building power on a statewide level. State governments in our country are far too influential to be ignored. Decisions made in the fifty capitols determine which residents get to vote; who bears the obligation of financing public services; the strength of union rights and labor protections; access to comprehensive health care for women and trans people; the criminalization of black and brown residents; and the funding allocation for everything from schools to prisons to nursing homes. In the war over the future of the multiracial working class, state governments today compose a decisive front. Until we can build an effective challenge to the corporate dominance over our statehouses, we’ll continue to be fighting the bosses with one hand tied behind our backs.

Why States Are So Important States have always had an outsized political weight in our country, a product of our anti-democratic Constitution and a long history of slavery and Jim Crow. And for more than a century, states have been a vital terrain of class struggle animating the construction and evisceration of the American welfare state. Reforms pioneered at the state level in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for the New Deal. Though popular uprisings compelled the federal government to expand its reach over labor relations and social welfare, state governments remained significant by implementing many of the programs newly created to shore up the economic security of workers and the unemployed. By administering national programs including unemployment insurance, food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Medicaid, the states came to shape the strength (or weakness) of the social safety net. Yet this role proved double-edged, as some also instituted right-to-work laws, racially-driven exclusions, and corporate tax breaks that contributed to the uneven geography of capitalist development. The balance between federal and state governments has shifted dramatically during the neoliberal attack on the welfare state. Nixon sparked a sea change with his call to transfer federal responsibilities to the states under the aegis of the New Federalism. The “Reagan Revolution” turned this objective into an article of faith, assigning greater discretion to the states while slashing federal aid and taxes on the rich. Support for expanding the autonomy of the states wasn’t limited to the ascendant conservative movement; Third Way ideologues joined in too. The Clinton administration as well as half of congressional Democrats joined Republicans to “end welfare as we know it” by abandoning the federal guarantee of cash public assistance, enforcing draconian rules and restrictions on benefit recipients, and authorizing states to design their own programs. This reconfiguration intertwined with the march toward privatization. As Michael Katz argued in The Price of Citizenship , the devolution of public authority from the federal government to the states and the application of market models to social policy advanced in tandem. Caught in a vise between federal retrenchment and municipal crisis, state governments increasingly contracted out public services of all kinds. What is the reason for such seismic change? Devolution and privatization result from capitalists’ decades-long project to enhance their power. Recognizing that their unsurpassable money power is best deployed at the state level, corporate and wealthy donors have organized accordingly. Through trial and error since the 1970s, they have developed an elaborate infrastructure to promote their interests in every state across the country. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN) spearhead this apparatus. ALEC brings together thousands of state legislators and corporate representatives who produce and disseminate model laws; SPN comprises an array of state-level think tanks which lobby to enact them. Fueled by dark money, these are the motors of a coordinated strategy to eliminate any promise of a more equal America. “We need to wage more than a battle of ideas — we need to wage war for the control of government,” proclaimed the founder of Pennsylvania’s SPN affiliate in 1989. “Ideas are ammunition, the bullets of a political movement, but let us not forget that to fire those bullets effectively we need a full arsenal at the state level.” The systematic offensive against workers peaked after the Great Recession. Authors such as Gordon Lafer and Nancy MacLean describe how the top one percent have used state budget crises as a historic opportunity to bust unions, dismantle democracy, and impose permanent austerity. Severe cuts to public employment and services have diminished working-class living standards and disproportionately harmed communities of color. Corporate lobbies have achieved the most success wherever Republicans capture trifecta control, but they exert the same pressure to race to the bottom in blue states. The scale of devastation is staggering. To name but a few developments in the last decade: five states, including union strongholds such as Wisconsin and Michigan, passed right-to-work laws (more than the number to do so in the previous half-century). Twenty-five restricted voting rights. And at least twenty enacted preemption measures that prohibit localities from raising labor standards like the minimum wage. Unless we can build an effective statewide response, working people won’t be able to confront and eventually defeat the billionaires and their political proxies.