The New Yorker Radio Hour - Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? And Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Just a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity— instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands.  Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy,” talks about how state politics  has become nationalized. “If you’re a politician, and you’re trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of constituents’ real concerns. Plus, the contributing writer Joshua Yaffa talks with David Remnick about Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage since the nineteen-eighties. “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working,” Yaffa notes, but he returned to Russia again and again to tell the story of that country’s descent into autocracy. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Just a month ago, we were riveted by a story about two lawmakers expelled from the state legislature in Tennessee. Their offense wasn't corruption or criminal activity. They had dared to join a protest at the State House in favor of gun control just after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. And for that, the men who just began their terms in the legislature this year were thrown out. I don't personally want attention.

What I want is attention on the issue of gun violence. But instead, we're here with a resolution you put up talking about expelling me for advocating for ending gun violence in the state of Tennessee. But those young men are not the only Democrats being targeted by the Republican colleagues. Just weeks later, Representative Zoe Zephyr of Montana was barred from the House chamber for the remainder of the session after making a speech against a trans-health care ban. In Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, state legislatures have tried to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands. Now, debates can get ugly in state legislatures for sure, but these are not exactly debates. steps to prevent debate, and they're deeply anti-democratic. So how is this happening and why?

I talked last week with the political scientist, Jacob Grumbach, who's the author of a book called Laboratories Against Democracy. Jake, in Tennessee last month, we saw two lawmakers thrown out of their seats for joining a protest which became a big national story. And in Montana this week, a state representative named Zoe Zephyr is suing, in an attempt to regain access to the House floor after she gave a speech against restrictions on gender-affirming care. Why are Republicans escalating these seemingly minor confrontations

in state legislatures to be national news stories? How does that possibly benefit them? Right. And one interesting puzzle is these happened in states that have supermajorities of Republicans in the legislature. So it's not like eliminating one seat here or the legislature. there is going to shift a vote on state legislation in these cases. So that's extra interesting. But really what we're seeing is the long culmination of the increasing nationalization of American politics where state legislatures are at the front line of battling over the national tug of war

over issues in the culture war especially, like transgender rights and issues of racial conflict. Well, how did this happen and why? It must be a deliberate choice on somebody's behalf? Right. Well, it took sort of major investments by both political parties nationally, campaign donors nationally, and organized interest groups and activist groups over the long term with respect to issues like abortion and reproductive rights or issues of gun rights and gun control. Now we really have two national teams, the Republicans and the Democrats, battling over this tug of war nationally through the institutions of state government. Is there anybody that's responsible for this strategy? How would you personalize this in Washington on behalf of either the Republican National Committee or the greater Republican Party?

So we can point to, you know, the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers have funded groups like Americans for prosperity, as well as been, you know, had an arm's length distance, but been sort of involved in the American Legislative Exchange Council. and Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is an incredibly important organization that really organized three constituencies. That's major business and extractive industry, gun rights, libertarians, and the religious right. And what they did is they really provided what we, social scientists, call, legislative subsidies for state legislatures. Okay, what does that mean? Exactly. So state legislatures, I don't mean this as an insult, are less professionalized. and more amateurish than Congress.

They don't have big staff to write bills. They don't have staff lawyers all the time. In some state legislatures, you know, people go into the legislature for maybe a couple months a year, and the rest of the time they're on their corporate board and the American Plastics Council and doing their, you know, earning money. They earn low salaries in the legislature.

So what that means is they need help from groups and experts and activists on what to bring on to the political agenda in their states and what bills to write and pass, because that takes serious professional work. And groups like Alec provided model bills around issues like stand-your-ground laws that then spread across states, especially Republican-controlled states. But it's not just on the right. You know, you think about climate activist groups and things have really helped the coastal states like California pass fuel efficiency standards and other climate regulations and integrate democratic state governments into the national sort of Democratic Party position on climate and the environment.

Now, Jake, I spoke recently with a lawmaker in Nebraska who's been fighting a ban, fighting a ban on transgender care in that state. She told me that our constituents don't really care that much about trans issues, and the culture war is kind of out of step with what they do care about, agriculture, property taxes, and so on. That really surprised me. Does it surprise you? It doesn't surprise me. This is part of a larger pattern. And really, a couple generations ago, for better or worse, you know, it's not always great. But states were much more focused on state-based issues and their regional issues. So this could be a bad thing, like in the era of Jim Crow, where this was really about southern segregationist states protecting the right at the state level to segregate. This was about local public goods and segregated institutions. Whereas, now we have what is a national conflict between the parties. So an issue like, you know, policies to go after transgender health care or rights or things like that, they're not responding to a local influx of transgender rights and trans people, right? This is not responding to a local

concern. They're responding to a hot button culture war thing that's going to help them possibly in a national election. Exactly. So if you are a politician and you're trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party, you have to think about where the donors are, where the organizations in your party network are, and where the national party is. So your best bet is to join the national culture war. So Ron DeSantis is a great example of this in Florida, of really being entrepreneurial, saying, I want to rise in the ranks in the National Republican Party, tap national Republican donors who care about these national issues. And same thing with, you know, Gavin Newsom or, you know, other Democratic governors have responded in kind to tap the Democratic donor base and rise in the ranks and potentially run for president.

And this is a massive change from a couple of generations ago. And we also have to really emphasize that, unfortunately, voters are really responding to the national tug of war. And we've seen statistically in political science the diminishment and decline of economic voting and voting. on the basis of how your area is doing economically or socially and much more about your sort of national partisanship. There was a time not so long ago when state level politics would have been thought of, certainly to reporters who are aching to go to Washington, it's kind of boring. They're concerned with budgets and roads and that seems to have changed. What's been the effect on the actual day-to-day life of the states is if you're spending all your time,

screaming and yelling at each other about issues that, you know, bear on very few people and are there to impress Fox News or whomever it's there to impress. What's getting lost? So there's a sort of feedback cycle in the nationalization of political media here where the Internet and the rise of Craigslist really destroyed classified revenue, classified ad revenue for local newspapers that were on the state legislative beat. So there's been a huge decline in state politics journalism. So that makes it harder for voters to hold state-level politicians accountable. And what that means is now voting is really detached from the performance of state legislators and governors on issues like expanding the economy and jobs and, you know, how COVID is doing in an area. And this makes it really hard to do, have a healthy political system where you bargain over policy when it's

sort of national tug of war on these culture war issues where there's really no room to negotiate. Jake, another tactic we've seen lately is Republican legislatures passing laws to strip power from Democratic officials. In Arizona, a couple of years ago, lawmakers stripped Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs' legal authority in election-related lawsuits. And that gave that power to a Republican Attorney General. There have been moves quite similar to it in other states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, I think. Is this business as usual, or should we be very alarmed? That's the key question, David.

So I would say the most serious consequence of this nationalization of state politics has been threats to American democracy. The U.S. Constitution puts a massive amount of authority over democracy, over issues like voting rights, legislative districting, and these sort of legislative powers that you mentioned in the hands of states, not the national government. And that's pretty unique, the U.S. putting all this authority over democratic institutions like election certification at the state level and then to some extent counties. And then the emerging threat of electoral subversion in presidential elections that we almost saw in 2020 and we could see in 2024. And those have been pretty asymmetric. So it is true that Republican-controlled states have,

pass much more extreme gerrymanders and restrictions on voting. Then there's this additional dimension of it, which is illiberal moves and norm erosion in politics. And that's where you see stripping out partisan governors in Wisconsin and Michigan of power of transferring power over election administration and expelling legislators for, for example, speaking out of turn and things that historically have not generated expulsions. Jake, you mentioned earlier the Koch brothers, but, you know, this is not the first moment in history when money has played a great role in American politics, either on the state level or the national level. This is not the first time in American history when the politics of the country are deeply fractured and inflamed. So what's new?

What about the demographic trends of the country or the rural urban divide of the country have also helped lead us to this place? So it is true that in the past threats to democracy and the weakening of democracy in the states was much more extreme. Like we just have to be clear about that. The difference between a Jim Crow and a non-Jim Crow state is so much more vast than the difference between Wisconsin and, you know, Connecticut or something like that. But I think one big difference now is that politics is so nationalized and the Republican Party has kind of uniquely created a coalition of a very elite. economic base that prefers high-end tax cuts and deregulation. And then you have the electoral base that's really motivated by

anti-immigration politics and other elements of the culture war. That's pretty unique around the world. Now, I can almost hear a Republican voice somewhere saying, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Look at

politics on the national level. Nancy Pelosi didn't let the Republican Party have its own chosen members of the January 6th committee. In the U.S. Congress, when the House was controlled by the Democrats, Marjorie Taylor Green, was stripped of her committee assignments for views that her opponents found offensive. So what's the difference? Do you think that was a mistake on the Democrats' part in Congress, or is this an equal battle? How do you assess the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans here?

It's true that the Democratic Party has, for example, used the filibund. against George W. Bush and the Republican Congress. And then again, under Trump, it's true that at the state level, there's been issues with democracy and democratic states of having elections at the state level be an off cycle, off years in order to keep turnout low. There's all sorts of issues that are challenging for democracy and norms on the Democratic side. But when you just look at them in the aggregate, they don't stack up. So gerrymandering is an easy one where you can quantify the extent of gerrymandering with statistics. And there it's just true that Democratic gerrymanders, like in Nevada, have not been as extreme as Republican gerrymanders. And then the New York

Court of Appeals throughout a Democratic gerrymander, that's Democratic judges throughout a Democratic gerrymander to give Republicans greater advantage in the New York state map. And then in thinking about restricting access to committee assignments and things like that, those are also more minor than a full partisan expulsion of a legislator from a state legislature. If you look at the issues that the Republican Party is pursuing hardest when it comes to culture wars and other things, you look at abortion restrictions, gun rights, these are broadly unpopular, and they're largely state issues. So even if gerrymandering insulates them to some degree, isn't there a danger for the Republican Party of overreach and seeing these issues

come back to hit them in the back of the head? That's right. Going too far, absolutely, has been backfiring. And in 2022, we saw somewhat surprisingly that heavy sort of fear-based tough on crime appeals, plus transgender panic around bathrooms, plus the abortion issue have actually not been as successful as one might have thought for the Republican Party. So what's the fix here? Are there some sort of, States that are doing things better? So, yes. So the average state in terms of its Democratic health, small D, democracy, has actually been okay.

That's because some states, like where I am now, Washington State, Colorado and others, have really expanded access to voting and have independent redistricting commissions that have really drawn fair districts for both parties. So every voter has an equal say in setting a state legislative or U.S. congressional majority. And then I really think we as social scientists, economists, political scientists, sociologists have understated the role of labor unions and organized labor in keeping Americans, especially working class, white Americans, also Latino men, away from the culture war and towards a politics of what are the policies that are going to help my family materially? And that's a much healthier politics. Jacob Grumbach, thank you so much.

Thanks, David. Jacob Grumbach teaches political science at the University of Washington, and his recent book about state politics is called Laboratories Against Democracy. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Joshua Yoffa has reported from Russia for a decade. He covered the country's tragic slide toward dictatorship under Vladimir Putin. And recently, Josh filed a piece that was quite unusual for him a very personal story,

the Russian government arrested a friend of his, Evan Gershkovich, a fellow journalist who was reporting for the Wall Street Journal. Russia's security agency says it has arrested a U.S. journalist working for the Wall Street Journal in Moscow on charges of... The charge against Gershkovich was espionage, quite obviously a false charge. For years, Putin has been suppressing Russian journalists, closing down one outlet after another, even as foreign correspondents, were still able to report the news freely. But the arrest of Evan Gershkovich is the first time the Kremlin has imprisoned an American reporter supposedly for spying since the 1980s.

What was once a tactic of Cold War politics has returned under Vladimir Putin. I spoke last week with Joshua Yoffa. Josh, when did you first hear this horrible news about Evan? It would have been, I guess, the day after we now know he was arrested in Yuceterenberg. I woke up to the news going around telegram channels, Twitter, that American reporter had been arrested in Russia, quickly became clear that American reporter was Evan and then began the frantic texts with friends, colleagues,

our circle of people who know Evan were close to him from Moscow and beyond trying to figure out, frankly, what the hell had happened. Now, the first time Evan was seen publicly after that was a few weeks later when he appeared in question, court with his lawyers. Yeah, because it's Russia, he was brought to something called the Akvarium, this kind of glass cage where defendants are held during court proceedings. And so there were these pictures and video of our friend Evan in the aquarium.

And it was painful and outrageous, frankly, to see him that way. But also, it was just so surreal. I mean, how many times has Evan? How many times have I? How many times have we all been in a courtroom with our notepads out? looking at someone in the aquarium and writing our story about yet another political case, yet another act of political repression against the Kremlin's enemies. It's always seemed to me that there is a similar closeness and competitiveness

and a kind of community among the pretty few foreign correspondents that are there. Just what was the life like in Moscow, and what was your relationship with Evan like? Well, I moved to Moscow in 2012. Evan came in 2017, full of ideas, energy, ambition, a really fun guy, nice guy, really into journalism, really into Russia. He has this legacy, family legacy from his parents who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. Did he grow up speaking Russian in the house? Yeah, yeah, he spoke Russian in the house, a kind of funny Russian a bit frozen in amber that he had to kind of de-thes. He's much more a student of Russian slang. Maybe it's a fact that he's a few years younger than me, hung out with a younger, cooler crowd of people in Moscow. But I envy how quickly he integrated.

Where did people hang out? Gosh, I mean, that's the thing about Moscow, too, in these sort of late, you know, pre-war period, is that it actually had the trappings, in a quality of life sense as like a fun happening, almost European city, right? Or the illusion of that was really available. So you had, like, great bars, great parks,

like a food scene that was really developing. The Michelin guide had an event in Moscow launching the first ever Russian rankings of Michelin restaurants in Russia. There were these people making exquisite Michelin food with sacolin crab

and caviar and reindeer from Kareeli and it's not that Ivan and I were eating reindeer every night, but still, the point is you know, Moscow, especially for a young funny, happening, smart, charming guy like Evan in your late 20s was just a, you know, a cool place to live. And he was excited about being there, not just because he liked Banya and bars, but because

he had this. Banya being steam baths where you get hit by eucalyptus branches and all the rest. Right. Where you have to go clean out those toxins after a night in Moscow, Moscow bars. I remember understanding early on for me, this is before even Evan came to town, that Moscow might be my kind of town. When shortly after I arrived, I was invited to a press breakfast, and the hour that it was called for was noon. But that's typical.

Right, right. So that's the kind of, but it's also the place where, you know, people are still working at 9 p.m. and, you know, meet for dinner and drinks at 10 p.m. Josh, what was Evan reporting in those years as the Putin government was moving more and more toward autocracy? Well, I think he had a really deep and nuanced sense of Russia.

He was very clear-eyed, as we all were, about the big macro-level political trajectory of Russia. He covered the story of protests in the summer of 2019 in which people were chased around the streets of Moscow by riot police. He was both, you know, deeply embedded with the opposition, but new people across Russian society. I mean, he was covering that story and knew all about it. But he also had found the time or rather found the interest to find other stories like going to Ur-Dmout. Murtia, a region I still can't pronounce apparently all that well in Russia, where he wrote about dying languages, the last speakers of some indigenous languages in remote parts of Russia and the way that these people were fighting after the Soviet legacy and the Putin one to keep these languages

alive at great difficulty and costs themselves. And that, I remember, is just such a great Russia story. Anyone can come and do the Moscow protests story, the big political story, Navalny and so on, right? You have to know the place, care about it, and have this vision is the word that keeps coming to mind for me, of being able to sort of scan the horizon and see, oh, that's happening and that's a story and I know how to do it. Were you ever in a competitive story with Evan? I remember this would have been the summer, I guess, of 2000, 2021, when there were big, huge wildfires in Yakutia for a while, right? Like, this was the story of the moment, of course. In the Far East, yeah. Right, yeah, deep in Siberia.

And this was, like, the big story in Russia, these incredibly destructive forest fires with huge implications, actually just not for Russia, but for the planet. And I was working on a story set in Yakutia at the same time. My story had more to do with permafrost, also affected by fire, but not quite the same thing. But Evan was really dedicated to writing about these fires

and their impact on local communities. have to have a specific idea of fun to think that going up in Soviet era, like, propeller planes flying through wildfire smoke is like a good time that you're jealous on having missed out on. But Evan was up there with the firefighters, going to these, landing at these remote air strips, camping in the fields with them actually under incredible heat with smoke. I remember at the time, I was also in Yakutia, but here I am looking at like ground that's taking a millennia to thaw. I mean, it's not the most dramatic thing to look at a bunch of stuff. soil that, I mean, supposedly it's the implications, or they are quite dramatic, but it's,

you know, doesn't have the same adrenaline. And it's not just about adrenaline. I mean, he got a really visceral, important first-person journalism. Josh, eventually, like you and a lot of other journalists who were based in Moscow, Evan ultimately had to leave Russia, but he still did some reporting from inside the country during the war. Yeah, he went back over the summer for a reporting trip. He went back for another reporting trip. And that's the way he and others in the Western press corps who continued to report from Russia worked, going in on reporting trips and writing stories

that were really deep and revelatory and tactile and I think brought to light in a way that I just, as a reader, found really interesting. I remember a story he did from Paskolv in northwestern Russia, a town that is home to a number of military units that suffered extremely. extraordinarily heavy losses in Ukraine. And he found a city that was scared and traumatized,

but also in a very macab way, had come around to convince itself of the merit of the war that was telling itself a narrative about the war's virtue. Its importance. And Evan wrote a really moving and dark and disturbing, but important story from Paskol. And he was able to do that kind of work. Evan was not sanguine or polyanish or naive about the context in which he was working.

He understood this was a very different Russia than the one he had arrived to in 2017. I mean, he understood that the climate for journalism had become much more fraught. But still, within that, there was no reason to think that foreign journalists would be targeted by Russian law enforcement. We could cover them the Volny protests. And there was even some cases where foreign journalists were swept up by the riot police and thrown in a police van from the streets covering these protests. But usually by waving a foreign press card at the police, you were let out and you could go on your way. And so it felt like, you know, rightly or not, it was almost kind of an uncomfortable privilege to have. And for all that time, the precedent held that somehow Western reporters were safe.

The worst thing that could happen to them was their visa might not be renewed. You know, they would be kicked out of the country, forced to, or barred from entering Russia to report. So this clear violation of precedent, a really escalatory step, obviously contains a very strong kind of message of political intent on the part of the Kremlin. And I think Putin himself, you know, the rules have changed. We're still left guessing at what this all means and what we're supposed to. understand by it, but this is such a dramatic break from precedent that it doesn't happen accidentally. I was the same age here's when I was in Moscow.

And I can't imagine the fear that my parents would have felt if I were in Lefort of a prison, a notorious prison. And there is your son in the midst of this horrific political situation in which Putin is using your son as trade bait. You've talked to Evans' parents, I know. What is their life like? And what is their sense of what Evans' life is like inside of the Ford of a prison? Of course, it's fear, fear of the unknown fear of what is Evan's life like right now, like in this very second, right? How is he doing? How is he feeling? Will there be a trial? How long could that take? Will there be a trade what everyone is pointing to and speculating about? How long can

that all take? And I think that all that uncertainty, of course, is really crushing for or can be for a parent. But I also want to say that they have real dignity and bravery and courage in facing this and doing what they can to support their son and try and get him home and to keep themselves sane and strong in the process. Josh, if you could get a message to Evan, What would you tell him? Well, I do, I hope, get messages to Evan. I've been sending him letters. I tell him how proud I am of him.

Of course, how worried I am about him, but mainly how impressed, if that's the right word, I am in how he's handling the situation with dignity, courage, humor of all things, right? I mean, somehow the strength of Evan's character is such that he's finding ways to crack a smile, even crack a joke. All I can do, and that's what I've also told Evan in these letters, is to just talk about him wherever I can on this podcast for The New Yorker. A piece I wrote

the day after Evan was arrested and keep his name in people's minds, in the minds of people in Washington, so that everyone knows and Evan knows that we're waiting for him to come home, and hopefully that in some way gets him home a little bit faster. sir. Josh Yoffa, thanks so much. Thank you, David. Joshua Yoffa is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening, and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Ball, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Kalalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gophon in Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Meher Batia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.