America’s federal system of government is, in theory, key to the strength of its democracy. As opposed to citizens in the more centralized states of Europe, Americans get to vote for a huge array of local offices, policies and ballot initiatives that can influence their lives for the better. Innovation in the states can be healthy for the whole country, such as when healthcare reform in Massachusetts provided inspiration for the Affordable Care Act. The supreme court justice Louis Brandeis famously praised US states as laboratories which could “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country”.

But what happens when the keys to the laboratory end up in the wrong hands? Throughout history, the power invested in the states has allowed all sorts of anti-democratic abuses to flourish. The most famous example is the Jim Crow system, which denied African Americans their rights and stained the ideals of American democracy for decades. In extreme cases, such as Governor Huey Long’s Louisiana in the 1930s, near-dictatorships have been established by ambitious local politicians.

Over the past few years, the Republican party has begun some experiments of its own. After losing governor’s races in North Carolina in 2016, and now in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2018, Republicans have looked to use lame-duck sessions of the state legislature to strip power away from the next governor and make it impossible for them to deliver the policies that the people of the state just voted for. And they’ve been remarkably brazen about doing it.

Wisconsin and North Carolina are the canaries in the coalmine

In Wisconsin, where Scott Walker’s loss to the Democrat Tony Evers was a national embarrassment for Republicans, the legislature has moved to seize control of welfare policy from the incoming governor. Evers will no longer be able to overturn policies that require food stamp recipients to take drug tests, or that require Medicaid recipients to meet a work requirement. Nor will the state’s new attorney general, also a Democrat, be able to withdraw Wisconsin from a lawsuit which seeks to have the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional.

Given that these are all policies that the incoming Democrats fought and won their elections on, we might expect Wisconsin Republicans to show some humility. But we would expect wrong. Wisconsin speaker of the House, Robin Vos, instead warned his fellow Republicans that the power grab was necessary to stop a “very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in”. Just not quite enough, that is, to actually win the election.

Not that winning an election in Wisconsin is any longer so easy as just winning the most votes. Republican gerrymandering has created a built-in advantage for the party’s own candidates. As a result, despite the Democrats scoring over 8% higher in the popular vote than Republicans, the Republican party will enjoy a nearly 2-1 advantage in state assembly seats. This locks in Republican control of the state legislature and gives the party a secure base from which to torment the popularly elected governor. Such an effort has been successful in North Carolina, where the governor, Roy Cooper, has seen his administration consumed by legal battles since a similar Republican coup in 2016.

The Jim Crow signs of racial segregation in, Durham, North Carolina, May 1940. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Wisconsin and North Carolina are the canaries in the coalmine of American democracy. As changing demographics make it harder for Republicans to win elections, the party is showing a disturbing tendency to rewrite the rules in its own favour or outright nullify the results of the popular vote. Faced with the choice of attempting to broaden its appeal beyond its shrinking base or rigging the game so that its base stays in power regardless, the party has chosen the latter. And the gerrymandering and voting restrictions they pursue mean that their efforts will be hard to undo.

While so much outrage is rightly directed at Donald Trump’s daily attacks on democratic norms, the growing detachment of establishment Republicans from them is arguably an even greater concern in the long run. Trump’s general incompetence and lack of focus have so far prevented him from doing serious damage to voting rights, but his administration has provoked a backlash and energized the left. This swinging of the pendulum is how democratic politics should work. But events in Wisconsin show the limits to what can be accomplished by even an energized left in the face of disciplined Republican attempts to rob them of the power that is rightfully theirs.

To see the complicity of establishment Republicans in these attempts to turn the states into laboratories of anti-democracy, look no further than Paul Ryan. Even as he leaves politics this year, the Wisconsin congressman and poster boy for a supposedly “respectable” conservatism has been silent on events in his home state and their broader implications. There is little indication that the next generation of Republican leaders will have any more scruples, and plenty of reasons to fear they will have fewer. As the incentives increase for Republicans to ignore the will of the voters, the threat to American democracy today goes much deeper than Donald Trump – and consequently will be all the harder to tackle.