Every week seems to bring a new stress fracture in American democracy to light. While the drama of the Jan. 6 hearings focuses attention on former Donald Trump's top-down predation, the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has unleashed a torrent of state and local conflicts that only grow more intense. This is happening even as many states now enforcing or enacting abortion bans laws actually have pro-choice majorities, as noted in this Monkey Cage analysis by political scientists Jacob Grumbach and Christopher Warshaw.
What comes next is very much up for grabs, but Grumbach's new book "Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics," casts a dramatically different light on how we got here, which in turn says a lot about the task of setting things right.
