Of Republican States and United States

The movement now is to restrict rights such as abortion and marriage equality and to limit sex education.

A century and a half after the Civil War, fought to determine the right of states to set their own policies, including whether to approve slavery, several former Confederate states are taking up the “lost cause” of deciding on issues, including the treatment of immigrants, that have been subject to federal authority.

According to veteran analyst Ron Brownstein, the current situation “marks a new escalation of the red state drive to seize control of national policy from below, not only on immigration but on a broad array of domestic policies.”

And at the center of this new “civil war” is the issue of immigration, used notably by former president and presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump during his election campaign in 2016, and now, especially, but not exclusively, by Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida. Both are spearheading a movement that transfers migrants to Democratic enclaves in the North by means that include deceptive “recruitment” campaigns.

But these gestures, which are quite cynical but appear to be symbolic given the size of the problem, are only one aspect of a larger trend. They are only a facet of a renewed onslaught by the American right, which has been developing for years.

Since the 1940s, and very notably since the 1960s, there was a tendency in the United States to give more power to the federal government and grant it jurisdiction over a number of issues, from the economy to law enforcement and citizen rights, which translated into greater power over legal and social matters, even racial integration.

But now the pendulum seems to be swinging in the opposite direction based on the influence that conservatives and flat-out far-right groups have gained with the appointment of right-leaning judges around the country and given Republican-led administrations in half or more of the states.

The movement now is to restrict rights such as abortion and marriage equality and to limit sex education. And indeed, after the Trump regime, Republican-led state governments seem more determined to enforce what they see as their rights and jurisdiction.

Republican federal legislators are evidently on their side, and a plethora of judges appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush (1988-1992), George W. Bush (2000-2008) and Trump (2016-2020), are, at the very least, facilitating these administrations’ objectives to thwart Democratic efforts to expand voter rights.

The debate is so heated that there is talk about the possibility of violence and the willingness of armed groups, especially from the right, to impose their agenda amid growing political polarization.