The Nation is a biweekly ‘progressive’ political journal, whose positions have usually been on the far left end of the American political spectrum. The magazine used a fairly simple drawing to illustrate an article this morning, but I thought a drawing of Pickett’s Charge, from the Battle of Gettyburg, would be more appropriate, because they’re worrying that The South Shall Rise Again!

In the Attacks on Trans Rights, We’re Seeing the Rise of a New Confederacy

These legislative assaults constitute the spear tip of a nation within a nation, threatening the foundations of democracy.

by Nan D Hunter | Monday, June 26, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

A right-wing inquisition is singling out young transgender Americans, their parents, their teachers, and their doctors as targets in the battle over what kind of nation we are and want to be. Since 2021, roughly half the states have passed at least one law designed to eliminate medical or educational policies that recognize trans youth and protect them from abuse. According to the ACLU, 20 states enacted 72 new anti-trans laws in the first six months of 2023; more than 200 are in the pipeline.

Anti-trans campaigners seek to create a blanket of repression. Because the recent wave of anti-trans laws was not triggered by a landmark event like the rush of anti-abortion laws enacted in the wake of the Dobbs decision, this new reality has crept up on the country. Major media outlets have struggled to keep up with which laws have been passed in which states. With the exception, perhaps, of the trans people who find themselves in the cross hairs of these new laws, almost no one saw it coming.

The Nation allows non-subscribers three free articles, but you can read it here without going to the magazine’s website. As this article is approaching 2,900 words, you can read the rest below the fold.

That their political slant is abortion forever, abortion at any time, abortion without restrictions can be seen from the screen capture at the right, showing their related articles. Nan D Hunter, the article author, who “teaches courses on law and social change at Georgetown University Law Center, where she is Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law emerita,” doesn’t have a lot of articles in that magazine, but they are all on a similar topic: homosexuality and transgenderism, with a touch of abortion thrown into the mix.

In her nearly 3,000 word article — which I cannot simply reproduce in toto — Dr Hunter continues to tell us that, Heaven forfend! the “right wing” has a stranglehold on large parts of the United States, and, shockingly enough, conservatives in conservative states have managed to enact pro-life and anti-‘transgender’ laws in those areas, along with laws against teaching ‘critical race theory,’ a subject which blames all white people for the plight of blacks.

Given the avalanche of anti-trans legislation, it might be surprising to learn that the bulk of Americans are turned off by the extremism and cruelty of these laws. According to Roll Call, recent polling found that 64 percent of Americans believe that the sudden onset of anti-trans bills this year amounts to “too much legislation,” with politicians “playing political theater and using these bills as a wedge issue.” On youth access to gender-affirming medical care, an NPR/Ipsos poll found that 47 percent of Americans oppose restrictions while 31 percent support them, with 21 percent declining to answer. On allowing trans girls to compete in girls’ sports, however, the same survey found that 63 percent oppose. A Pew survey from June 2022 found that the number of people who think American society has gone too far in accepting trans people (38 percent) is roughly equal to the number who think it hasn’t gone far enough (36 percent).

Here’s what Dr Hunter, and the rest of the #woke^[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left just don’t get: ‘transgender’ girls and women and not real girls or women, and even many of the moderate to liberal Americans realize that. It has been argued that the numbers are actually quite small, but men males who have decided that they really are women, and have edged their way into athletic competition with real women and girls have for the most part simply trounced their actual female opponents. If Will Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania men’s middle-of-the-pack swimmer had decided that yes, he really was a woman named “Lia,” yet not forced his way onto the women’s swim team, but simply gone on with his life without competing athletically against real women, few would have noticed, and none would have cared. But since he did compete, completely trouncing the real women in the pool in the Zippy Invitational. Mr Thomas time would have finished 15th in the men’s final, ahead of ten other male swimmers. The last place male swimmer in the 500 yard freestyle, Luke Scoboria of Bloomsburg University, finished at 4:42.78, 7.21 seconds ahead of Anna Sofia Kalandaze’s second-place time.

In the NCAA championships, Mr Thomas easily secured his first championship, and though I cannot prove it, then deliberately bagged the rest of his races to try to minimize the political fallout.

Had it just been Mr Thomas, as a single aberration, things might still have blown over, but it wasn’t. More men males decided that they were women, and took championships in things like weightlifting and cycling.

How is it possible that a country with so little demand for anti-trans policies produced such an onslaught of anti-trans laws? The most important characteristic that these states share with states that have passed new anti-abortion and anti-CRT laws is a legal structure that reinforces minority control of governance—in effect, a democracy deficit. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach calls such states “laboratories against democracy.” Eight of the 24 states that have passed the worst anti-trans laws rank among the worst states for legislative gerrymandering, according to ratings issued by either the University of Southern California’s Schwarzenegger Institute or the World Population Review.

In 2010, Republicans got a head start redrawing district lines for state legislatures as well as for Congress. Although both parties can play the gerrymandering game, Republicans have been far more successful and systematic at it. Since 2010, of the country’s 20 most populous states, there is only one in which Democrats have controlled the governorship and both chambers of the legislature for 10 years or more—California. Republicans have achieved that feat in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. In the 30 least populous states, Republicans have sustained at least a decade-long trifecta in nine (Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming), while Democrats have done so in five (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Oregon, and Rhode Island).

Dr Hunter raises the typical leftist meme that they’ve been unfairly gerrymandered, but it’s pretty much bovine feces. Those states in which Republicans have “sustained at least a decade-long trifecta” have all elected Republican governors . . . and governors are elected statewide; statewide races are not subject to any redistricting shenanigans. Those same states have mostly Republican senators, and senators are also elected statewide.

More, virtually all of those states had Republicans first gaining control under district boundaries drawn by previous Democrat-controlled legislatures. Here in the Bluegrass State, the left constantly whine about being gerrymandered out of power, but the General Assembly, now with Republican ‘super-majorities,’ seized control in the 2016 elections in districts drawn by Democrats following the 2010 Census. In the last election under the Democrat-drawn House districts, Republicans won a 75-to-25 advantage in the state House of Representatives. The GOP came close to maxing out their advantage, at 80-20, in the 2022 elections, with the districts drawn by Republicans, but the Democrats did not even contest 44 out of 100 races, and in one district, the one in which I live, which they did technically contest, the nominee was a perennial kook candidate, because only kook candidates ran in the primary. The state Democratic Party disavowed him.

The attack on trans kids is backed by issue-specific groups like Moms for Liberty, who instigate local eruptions, but the overall campaign is part of a larger national advocacy network and supported by the legal organizations Alliance Defending Freedom and America First Legal, the latter led by Trump administration alumnus Stephen Miller. Together, these groups are out to torpedo the institutions, practices, and norms of democratic governance.

All of these developments are occurring within a networked system of right-wing policymaking at the state level that can and does function across the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In today’s digitized world, the lack of geographic contiguity between, say, Mississippi and Montana no longer matters. And while the anti-trans and anti-abortion laws generate the most immediate attention, solely focusing on them obscures an even more consequential development: a model of political economy in which so-called social issues constitute the keystone of regressive and authoritarian governance.

So, what laws, exactly, are the Moms for Liberty pushing? They are trying to protect minors, by removing sexually-oriented material from public school libraries, but the question has to be asked: what are sexually-oriented materials doing in public school libraries in the first place? The Moms aren’t trying to ban such in other places, such as bookstores, private book exchanges, or amazon.com from having and selling those materials, and anyone can borrow or buy them, but a public school has, due to the compulsory education laws in every state, what is, in effect, a captive audience, a captive audience of minors.

Almost no one would support a public school having materials instructing girls how to fellate boys, but somehow, some way, the progressives are appalled that the Moms would try to remove a book instructing boys how to fellate other boys. Those books are easily available on Amazon, though I refuse to link them.

“Attack on trans kids”? Perhaps when stories about a boy who frequently wore a skirt and used the girls restroom raped two girls, in two different schools, at least one anally, one would think that Dr Hunter would have been more circumspect in her writing. Liberal columnist Michelle Goldberg tried to minimize the story in The New York Times, but it was still a rape by a boy wearing a skirt, in the girls’ bathroom.

In effect, a new Confederacy is emerging, not in the literal form of 160 years ago, but as a viable structure for subnational governance. Its constitutional foundation is secured by the increasingly right-wing Supreme Court’s reconfiguration of powers between national and state levels of government. The court has systematically withdrawn federal protections with the goal of enhancing state power using a variety of methods. One has been to eliminate a constitutionally protected right, as it did with abortion in the Dobbs decision. Another has been to eviscerate a national standard established in a statute, as when it removed federal oversight of discriminatory voting access schemes in the Shelby County ruling. Yet a third has been to increase the power of state governments in areas of the law that historically have been regulated primarily at that level, including education and public health.

As Jamelle Bouie wrote in The New York Times, the right hopes to eliminate a national “baseline for political and civic equality,” a goal that racists have been pursuing since Reconstruction. But the political ramifications of today’s overlapping anti-trans, anti-abortion, and anti-CRT regions go beyond history repeating itself. Although there is a distinctive Southern etiology to cries for states’ rights, it is dangerous to assume that white supremacy is limited to any particular region. Nor is it smart to ignore other regional conservative tropes, such as the tradition of land rights in Western states. Those who focus solely on the South as the predictable villain are still fighting the Civil War.

The real Confederate States were created because the federal government was trying to exercise greater power over some states, to that state’s detriment. No one will ever argue successfully that it wasn’t about slavery, after abolitionist Abraham Lincoln won the Presidency, but South Carolina had threatened to secede as early as 1833 over the protective tariffs of 1828, 1832, and 1833, which helped the northern states but hurt the south. It is a simple fact that different states have different interests, and a federal government which has metastasized out of any conception by the Framers of our Constitution has led to a lot of resentment by conservatives.

That is not to say that the left have not had their own resentments, and attempted to nullify federal immigration laws by refusing to in any way enforce them, creating the so-called ‘sanctuary cities,’ which, amusingly enough, haven’t been happy in the least when Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida went ahead and shipped those northern sanctuary cities busloads of illegal immigrants that the Biden Administration allowed in.

The subnational governance structure is a decentralized network of power centers rather than a single regime, but reliable one-party control enhances its strength. Two institutions beyond the governorship and the state legislature are critical. One is the state’s judiciary. Judges on the highest courts of most states have a clear partisan identification—either because they were appointed by a governor or because they won a partisan election. Additionally, state attorney general offices are increasingly involved in joint, multistate litigation projects such as the challenge to the availability of mifespristone. Attorneys general of both parties participate in such alliances, but those from states that conservatives fully control have the advantage of not needing to worry that they will be restrained by their legislatures or courts.

She means, not restrained by the duly elected members of their legislatures! But, naturally, she believes that conservative, Republican-majority legislatures must have been elected only due to gerrymandering.

As a pure example of the paranoid style in American politics, this scare campaign against trans people is bad enough. It is a manufactured panic of political opportunism and religious fundamentalism, fed by an unconstrained media environment that hungers for news of whatever can be depicted as abnormal, ascendant, and invasive. The imagined horde of moody, discontented teens riding a supposed trend of gender experimentation provides an easy target for those who are still smarting from the legalization of same-sex marriage. Even if it becomes obvious at some point in the future that this frenzy was an episode of regrettable excess, real people — many of them highly vulnerable — are being harmed in the meantime.

Heaven forfend! An “unconstrained media environment”? Does Dr Hunter want a constrained media environment, something in which Congress does make laws “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”? What else are we to assume that her complaint about “an unrestrained media environment” means? “(N)ews of whatever can be depicted as abnormal, ascendant, and invasive”? Given that non-closeted homosexuality has really only existed for a generation, and ‘transgenderism’ for a decade, those things would be, by definition, “abnormal, ascendant, and invasive.” It could be argued that the huge public displays of a ‘homosexual lifestyle’ for ‘Pride Month’, the public performances that would get the participants locked up under public indecency laws a generation ago, would not have happened had normal people been more accepting of the homosexual/transgender political movement, but there’s no way to prove that.

“The imagined horde of moody, discontented teens riding a supposed trend of gender experimentation provides an easy target for those who are still smarting from the legalization of same-sex marriage”? Perhaps if we didn’t have cases of people being sued over their refusal to participate in same-sex ‘weddings,’ there’d be very little ‘smarting’ over them. Perhaps if we didn’t see a still small but nevertheless real trend of “gender experimentation” among minors, there wouldn’t be quite as much call to ban hormone and surgical mutilation of supposedly ‘transgendered’ minors.

The subtitle of Dr Hunter’s article is, “These legislative assaults constitute the spear tip of a nation within a nation, threatening the foundations of democracy.” But what she is complaining about is exactly democracy, a democracy in which the public have freely elected conservative officeholders in many states, and she just doesn’t approve of people voting for conservatives. She likes the idea of a liberal federal government imposing ‘progressive’ values on conservative states, not conservative states legislating conservative values over themselves individually, but unable to impose conservative values on other states.

Dr Hunter isn’t actually predicting a new Confederate States of America, and neither am I; that’s just her scare-tactic way of drawing eyeballs onto her article. But what she wants is a new post-war South, and Midwest, defeated and tamed and subject to the rule of a liberal federal government, a new Reconstruction if you will, to impose the laws and values she has on the people who do not share them. The democratic choices of the people she despises? Nope, she most certainly doesn’t want those!