The book
also carefully documents the implications
of conservative cross-state network-building for American democracy,
spelling out its consequences for political inequality and representation,
as well as for our understanding of the relationship between private-sector
businesses, political activists, and wealthy donors.
In State Capture, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez
details the development of a
trio of conservative groups operating
within and outside of
state legislatures responsible for the right's success in the states.
This right-leaning "troika" includes;
- the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which brings together state legislators, conservative activists, and businesses to draft model legislation for the states;
- the free-market think-tanks operating as part of the State Policy Network (SPN), which together offer research and commentary in support of the policies ALEC develops;
- and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a federated grassroots advocacy group with millions of volunteers and a hefty campaign warchest dedicated to pressing state governments to adopt conservative legislation, including ALEC model bills.
Following the histories of each group across their victories but also their missteps, the book sheds light on broader themes in American political development and helps us to better understand longstanding issues about how businesses shape policy and politics. A timely and accessible book that tackles important long-term shifts in American politics, State Capture is essential reading - for anyone interested in understanding the intersection between private power and democracy.
State capture : how conservative activists, big businesses, and wealthy
donors reshaped the American states--and the nation
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/13135469
and state politicians than those elected to the more distant US Congress.
Therefore, state and local policy should be more responsive to public preferences than federal policy.
[But] - many states are curbing their democratic processes, like taking steps to restrict political participation—either by making it harder for individuals to vote or weakening grassroots associations that organize citizens. Furthermore, in a growing number of states the geographic distribution of voters, combined with partisan redistricting, means that even large majorities of the popular vote do not necessarily translate into legislative majorities, entrenching minority legislative control. And even when large majorities of voters bypass legislatures to approve ballot measures—like expanded health insurance for poor adults, campaign finance reforms, and broadened voting rights—some state governments have rolled back such measures or even ignored them altogether.
Another antidemocratic strategy involves state preemption. Once a tool used to curb conflicts between local government and states by bringing local governments in line with state policy, it is now aggressively used by conservatives - to strip local authority from city governments - and force an antiregulatory, corporate agenda that disproportionately harms marginalized communities.
Revitalizing People-Based Government
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/revitalizing_civic_infrastructure_at_the_state_level
State Capture really tries to nail down three different types of arguments, answering three different questions.
-
One of them is
how conservatives have managed to construct organizations that build
power within and across the states. That’s a question about building coalitions and organizations. -
I focus in particular on three organizations
- that I call the conservative Troika,
- the American Legislative Exchange Council,
- the State Policy Network,
- and Americans for Prosperity.
I look over the course of the past several decades at how these organizations were created and the different ways that they evolved
to help conservatives build power at the state level. - The second strand of the argument in State Capture asks what effect these organizations have had. It moves from the inside of these organizations outwards and asks what are the concrete policy victories that they’ve enjoyed and why have they been more successful in some states relative to others?
- Then the final part of the book asks why Progressives and liberals have had a more difficult time constructing cross state networks of their own that could build left leading power to pass liberal legislation and move policy and politics in a more leftward direction?
Have Conservatives Transformed the States? - Niskanen Center
https://www.niskanencenter.org/have-conservatives-transformed-the-states/
Book Talk: State Capture with Author Alex Hertel-Fernandez
Some Parts of the Book Talk Transcript
Theda Skocpol:
Most Americans pay little attention to the massive number of elections that occur at the state level every year. Yet - cumulatively -
a party's success in state-level races across the country
can produce major shifts in policymaking and governance.
That is precisely what has happened in the US since 2010. In a wave election that year, the Republican Party began their ascendancy in state-level elections, and by 2016 had solidified their dominance.
The party now fully controls 25 state legislatures and
governorships-one of the largest advantages
either party has had since the New Deal.
After the GOP wave, a broad swathe of states began considering and enacting a near-identical set of conservative priorities-often even using the exact same text.
Where did this flood of new legislation come from? How did so
many states arrive at the same proposals at precisely the same time? As
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez shows in the eye-opening State Capture -
the
answer can be found in a trio of powerful interest groups: ~ the Koch
Brothers run Americans for Prosperity (AFP), ~ the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC),
and ~ the State Policy Network (SPN).
Drawing from an impressive evidence base, Hertel-Fernandez explains how;
since the 1970s, conservative activists, wealthy donors,
and big businesses constructed a right-wing "troika"
of overlapping and influential lobbying groups.
But it is about more than this. It also teases out how;
conservative-corporate mobilization has fostered epochal
shifts in the American political economy: the decline of unions,
party polarization, and the skyrocketing concentration of wealth.
State Capture will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary American politics...
Alex Hertel-Fernandez:
In my short remarks today, I want to keep them brief so we can get to Q&A and discussion, I want to layout some of the core arguments of the book. And to do so, I want to take you to Iowa, and talk about some elections that happened in Iowa. I know we're all fixated on Iowa for next year's election, but I want to take you back to 2016, and the elections that unfolded then, and the implications they had for next legislative section.
And in that election, control of Iowa state government flipped from being divided as it had been for many years running into that election year, to being fully controlled by Republicans. The state senate flipped control. And that was important because it ended up having, as we'll see, some pretty substantial consequences for the policies that were passed. But they weren't the policies that you might have thought would pass if you were paying attention to the election for those key state senate races.
If you look at those seats that flipped, and gave Republicans full control of Iowa State government, they were running on pretty standard republican issues like cutting regulation, cutting taxes, reducing the size of state government. And so, when control of Iowa State government flipped, most people assumed that the trifecta would begin to move on standard Republican agenda of deregulation and tax cuts, but that's not what happened.
In fact, the first measure that the Republicans ended up pursuing with full force when the legislature convened the following year was a rather sweeping set of changes to union law in states, massive cutbacks to the rights that public employees had to collectively bargain with state government. It also instituted a new requirement that unions in the public sector would have to undergo regular elections to re-certify themselves at the end of every contract. So, this had the promise of pretty dramatically curtailing union rights in the state, and transforming the interest group landscape there, and yet it was not something that many of the Republicans ran on.
Another puzzle comes up when we think about where the sources of this push came from. The political scientists, if they weren't looking to the campaigns that these members were running, or these candidates were running, might look to public opinion. And there too we have a puzzle, in that the best polling that was available at the time of the legislative debate indicated that perhaps 60% of people opposed the changes that Republicans ended up pursuing.
Less than half of voters in Iowa said that they approved of these sweeping collective bargaining cutbacks. It wasn't necessarily that the public was clamoring for these bills either. In fact, because of the surprise with which this legislative push emerged, several Republicans ended up voting against the measure saying that they felt that they would be betraying their voters if they ended up pushing the measure through. But not withstanding that opposition from some of the Republicans, the bill passed and Iowa ended up instituting these sharp cutbacks to union bargaining rights.
So, if it wasn't voters, and it wasn't the party itself that were pursuing these sorts of changes to union law in Iowa, where did those ideas come from? I think the one clue we can look at the legislative text of the bill that ended up passing. If you examine the legislative text, it actually bares striking resemblance to the bill that passed in Wisconsin just a few years before, that severely curtailed bargaining rights, and instituted new owner's requirements on unions there under Governor Scott Walker.
And both of those bills, there are striking resemblances, in some cases even copying and pasting sections from a model bill from an organization called ALEC. That's ALEC, not Alex, it often gets confused. But ALEC had produced suggestive legislative text that ended up being copied and pasted into law in both Wisconsin and Iowa. That's the first hint that there may be an organizational source for this legislation. Another hint comes from the identities of the main legislative sponsors of the bill. All three of the key Republicans in the state that were pushing this measure in the house and the senate, and then the governor, all had long-standing ties to this organization as well.
The house speaker, who was championing this measure was a national chairwoman of this organization, serving on the board of directors of ALEC. The state majority leader was a state chairman of this organization. He was the main person in the state that was tasked with recruiting other members and disseminating the ideas. And lastly, the governor himself, was actually a co-founder of ALEC back in the 1970s. These traces of the organization could be found both in the bill text, and the people who were pushing it.
But ALEC, and I'll talk about the organization a little bit more in a moment, but ALEC wasn't pursuing this on its own. It received big assists from two other organizations that were operating within the state, but had a national presence. The other organization was Americans for Prosperity. We'll hear more about that in a moment, and the role that it plays within Koch Political Network, drawing from some of the work I've been doing both with Theda and Caroline. But for now, I want you to note that Americans for Prosperity was a key player in whipping votes for the legislation during the marathon, all-night, legislative session that Republicans held in order to cut back these union bargaining rights.
It actually happened over Valentine's Day, which is the level of commitment of these lawmakers to passing this bill. But at the time of the bill signing, Governor Branstad said that he wasn't with anyone, and he was going to have a private ceremony for enacting the law, for signing it into place. Shortly after, Drew Klein, who was the head for Americans for Prosperity in the state, posted this picture saying that he was actually at the signing ceremony, and was being thanked personally for the job that he did in recruiting grass-roots supporters, and legislative members to back the bill.
But AFP and ALEC weren't the only ones, and the last organization that was on the ground in Iowa that was pushing for this measure was a think tank, a small outfit known as the Public Interest Institute, but crucially it was part of this broader network, known as the State Policy Network. And as soon as it became clear that Republicans were going to have full control of the Iowa state government, the Public Interest Institute, drawing on work that the State Policy Network had done in other states, began to publish documents, reports, op-eds, saying that Iowa should take advantage of this moment of full republican control to copy Scott Walker, and enact the same sort of legislation cutting back union rights that Walker did in Wisconsin.
So, all three of these networks, which together Theda and I have described as the conservative troika, I'm now having some second thoughts about the label given all the Russian interference in American politics, but it is already out there so what can we do?
Theda Skocpol:
We'll change it to trio.
Alex Hertel-Fernandez:
It's a little less memorable, though. I like troika. So, these three organizations that have a national presence but are operating within each of the states in the country, play a crucial role in not only passing this sort of anti-union legislation that we saw in Iowa, but many other pieces of legislation. We'll talk about the scope more in a moment. But the three organizations contributed in different ways. They have slightly different constituencies, and they have slightly different services and activities, but they work hand-in-glove with one another to reinforce one another's efforts.
ALEC, like I mentioned earlier, and as you got a sense from the model bill, develops ideas for legislation, and pulls lawmakers together in a network. Lawmakers are members, they get access to these ideas, and the bills tend to be written by businesses, and individual wealthy people or corporate philanthropies, conservative philanthropies, as well as advocacy groups. And it uses these bills to promote this coordinated, legislative agenda. It was founded in the 1970s. The State Policy Network, of which the Public Interest Institute was a member, that think tank that I mentioned, is a network of similar think tanks and advocacy groups across the states that operate an outside game.
They produce research reports, op-eds, polling, to buttress many of the same bills that ALEC does. It's no coincidence that the State Policy Network supports ALEC because in its early years, when the State Policy Network was sort of struggling to get off the ground, ALEC's executive director opened up his donor list and said, "You know, it'd be really helpful if there was a network of think tanks that could support the work that we're doing."
The last organization is the newest, but in some ways has grown the fastest, and become one of the most sweeping. It is Americans for Prosperity, which is at the center of the Koch Brother's political network, or Koch Brother at this point. There's Charles, has long been the more active one, and he's the one who remains living after David passed away a few months ago. But Americans for Prosperity is a bit of an unusual creature in that it has some features that combine aspects of political parties. It's federated across the country. It has local field offices like a party might. It has state offices. It has a national office.
And it also combines aspect of lobbying groups, it lobbies for new city council measures, state legislation, congressional legislation, and it weighs in on the administrative rules that executive agencies produce. And it combines both grass-roots heft, it has over three million volunteers that are on its lists that it can reach out to, to canvas for voters, to contact lawmakers. And it also has a large campaign war chest, and it can invest in election time advertising, or radio and TV and ad blitzes to push for particular legislation.
So, these are the three organizations that I talk about in State Capture, and I focus the first half on ALEC, given that in many ways it was the first of the three and an anchor. In the subsequent part of the book, I talk about these organizations, and how they work together, and places where they don't work together, where there are even conflicts between the different components of the troika. But for the remainder of the talk, I'm going to focus on ALEC because I think there is some of the most interesting evidence that allows us to see particular trends in American politics and really understand how power is exerted, especially, at the state level.
Okay. So, I want to take a moment to say what this book adds, and why you should consider getting it as a Thanksgiving present, Hanukkah present, Christmas present. I think if you have seen books like Dark Money, by Jane Mayer, The One Percent Solution, by Gordon Lafer, or the great journalism that's been done by the Center for Media and Democracy, or the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, you already have a sense of some of the key players like the Koch Brothers, or like the Bradley Foundation in Wisconsin that funds a lot of these efforts. But I think what's different about my book is that it take an organizational perspective rather than focusing on the individual personalities of key donors.
It thinks about political structures, organizations, how they operate, and it also asks questions about where they've been successful like some of these books, but it also focuses on places where they haven't been successful. In the history of ALEC that I present in the book, I walk through step-by-step moments when the organization nearly went under, nearly went bankrupt. And I think social science tells us that we can't just focus on the episodes of success of an organization or an institution, you have to understand where things almost went off the rails, and that really gets us a better picture of the power, and scope that these political organizations may have.
Okay. So, there are really arguments that I make about ALEC and the troika in the book that I want to unpack for you in the remainder of the talk. And I think they each point in their own ways to this question of how power is exercised in American politics. The first one is how ALEC in particular took advantage of state legislatures under professionalization. The fact that many state lawmakers don't have all that many resources to make policy with, and so, they're very relying in those cases on groups that can provide ideas, research, and outside capacity. The second insight that I think comes out of this book and in particular a close study of ALEC, is how political organizations on the right manage to combine disparate, and sometimes conflicting interests into a unified coalition that's pushing for a common agenda.
And as we'll see, it was no forgone conclusion that ALEC would come up with these mechanisms for marrying diverse interests. I think that's something that often gets lost when these groups get covered in the news media or on the left. We tend to think that the right is relatively homogenesis. And the last argument that I put forward is how the troika, and especially ALEC, has thought very carefully about using policy, not just as a tool for changing economic and social circumstances, but as a way of building and maintaining political power.
I also think that there are some myths along the way that my arguments debunk, or at least qualify, and I'd like to dig into those, maybe in the question and answer session, even as I won't present more on these now. But the first one is that the difference in the right and the left and how successful they've been at the state level is just a matter of money overall. That the right has more of it and the left doesn't, and therefore that's why liberals and Democrats have failed at building comparable networks or political influence at the state level.
I also think that there are some myths along the way that my arguments debunk, or at least qualify, and I'd like to dig into those, maybe in the question and answer session, even as I won't present more on these now. But the first one is that the difference in the right and the left and how successful they've been at the state level is just a matter of money overall. That the right has more of it and the left doesn't, and therefore that's why liberals and Democrats have failed at building comparable networks or political influence at the state level.
The second one, I've already slightly alluded to, which is to say the right is more ideologically cohesive than the left, and therefore, it's easier to build coalitions on the right than on the left. And the last is that it's all about campaign contributions. That the main reason why Republicans and conservatives, in particular, have been successful has been because of electoral-time giving as opposed to giving to organizations that operate between elections. Okay. So, let me dig into the first argument that I make about the lack of resources in many state legislatures.
So, for political scientists, who study state politics and policy, this will come as no surprise, but I think for many people who haven't looked at the states in great detail, it often is. I'm often struck by the number of times that I teach this in my MPA classes, as in students don't really appreciate how in many states, lawmakers are lucky if they have one or two full-time staffers if full-time staffers exist at all. In many states, of course, lawmakers are only paid a part-time salary. Legislatures only meet a few months out of every year. There are some states, like Texas for instance, that don't even meet every year.
Under these circumstances, lawmakers are really strapped for bill ideas, research that can support bills that they want to pursue, and political strategy because they don't have those resources inside of the legislature. And so, a group that provides those can be quite successful. And that's exactly what ALEC did. It realized that if it provided bill ideas and research support, it could have a big impact on state policy and politics. I think this quote by Kathy T. who is an early executive director of ALEC, basically illustrates the point.
So, she was explaining that for the great majority of state legislators, being a lawmaker is their second career, and so the need for information is acute. Also, in the majority of states, the state legislator has no or very little staff support. And so ALEC, we will help them develop legislation, tailor it for their state, we'll put them in touch with legislators in other states who have been the sponsors of similar bills, who can discuss with them the legislative intricacies of the bill, the strategy, et cetera. And most of you think that this is only a product of ALEC strategy from the 1970s and 1980.
In the book, I quote a nice interview that was done with an Oregon State Representative Gene Whisnant, from Present Day explaining why he relies on ALEC. It's a great resource for a part-time lawmaker like him. Oregon state legislature is part-time. Because during the session, he's lucky to have one staffer that works for him, but when he's not in session, his staff is comprised of his wife, who works half-time, and an aide who works three days a week.
We have such limited staff at ALEC that helps us look at things and consider them. That really illustrates the need for capacity that ALEC is able to fill for these lawmakers. I'm not going to go into this too much further, but I'm happy to dig into it in the question and answer. But in the book, I go more systematically beyond these interviews that are done with state lawmakers to look at what I call policy plagiarism, or cases where lawmakers have actually copied and pasted bills from ALEC. And I show that systematically across the states and over time, states that have fewer resources with which to make policy end up copying and pasting more legislation from ALEC.
That's the trend that you're seeing here. So, let me get to the second argument that I make in the book, which is about coalition building, and the fact that ALEC was able to be successful because it managed to overcome these tensions. So, the first thing to note is what tensions exist. Because I think a lot of the coverage of groups like ALEC is that everyone's on same page, they want smaller government, they want to weaken unions, the want to cut taxes. And to some extent that's true, but there are important tensions, and especially, in ALEC's early years, it was no forgone conclusion that they would overcome them.
So, on the one hand you have organizations like private sector businesses like Shell Oil, Monsanto, UPS, or Walmart, that were participating in ALEC in its early years. This comes from the 1980s, but you also had libertarian organizations like the National Tax Limitation Committee or the Olin Foundation that agreed with businesses on some policies, for instance, like lowering taxes, but disagreed with them when it came to regulations that would support businesses in protected industries or increase subsidies for businesses. And both of those groups, the libertarians and private sector businesses sometimes came into conflict with social advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, or the Stedman Foundation, that were focused on things like gun rights, abortion, defeating the ERA in the 1980s.
And so, how did ALEC manage to get everyone on the same page working together, contributing to the same organization? Well, a key innovation was made by one of the ALEC executive directors in the 1980s, who is a former football player, Sam Brunelli, he played for the Denver Broncos. And he came up with this ingenious idea of delegating policy bill writing, and the responsibility for coming up with ALEC's legislative agenda to each of the sectors most invested in that particular policy issue area. So, for instance, if you were a pharmaceutical company you'd be on the healthcare taskforce.
You could weigh in on healthcare policy, but you couldn't weigh in on all of the other policies that ALEC was tackling like agriculture or social issues. That also gave you plausible deniability to say, "We're in the organization just to write healthcare policy, we're not on the taskforce that deals with the ERA." For instance. And then within each taskforce, ALEC came up with an even more ingenious tool for setting its agenda when there were conflicts, and there were conflicts because in some cases you had a firm that was going up against another business over some regulation that would help the first business but hurt the other one.
So, how did they manage to settle that within a particular taskforce? Well, they did that by setting a bidding system or companies or other members of ALEC who wanted to have their way would just pay more to the organization, and the dispute would come down to whoever was willing to contribute more to ALEC. And you can already see that there are some advantages to this: one, It's transparent. Everyone going into a conflict knows how the conflict is going to be resolved. It's how much money you're willing to pay.
Two, it raises more money for the organization. And so, it's helpful both for the members and for the organization itself. And you can see here, this may be too small, but there is a nice excerpt from some of the archives from ALEC that I worked through that shows the different levels of membership that members could buy, and if you get in at the Madison Club level, you're guaranteed to have a legislative director work on an issue that you care about even if it comes into conflict with people who were a member of a lower tier, like the Lincoln Club, that falls below Madison.
Okay. So, let me get to the last argument that I make in the book about ALEC, and why it's been successful. And this really draws on the great literature in political science on policy feedback effects, or the ways in which once in place policies can reshape the political terrain. I think a lot of that literature to date, a lot of the foundational pieces, focus on ironies, ways in which a policy once it was enacted ended up having consequences that the framers of that policy, the designers of the policy, might not have anticipated creating new interest groups, changing public preferences.
But policy feedback effects can also be very intentional and ALEC realized this. It realized that it could have a substantial effect on the balance of power in the states by designing policies that disadvantage their opponents. It also realized that you could build coalitions through these policy feedback effects. So, I think, the example of that is tort reform in the 1980s. ALEC pursued this quite aggressively and there were several benefits to this. On the one hand, they were able to please their business constituencies.
Private sector firms were worried about rising insurance costs, and so they were in favor of tort reform. But social conservative groups also saw a huge benefit to this as well because if you could take out trial lawyers who are the main folks who are bringing these tort claims, you can weaken the political base of the Democratic Party in many states because trial lawyers form an important part of the progressive and democratic coalition in many states, especially, where unions are weak.
So on the one hand, you're providing material benefits to a key member of your coalition and on the other hand, you're helping to elect conservative candidates who will then pursue a more conservative agenda going forward. As I think this nice quote illustrates, it's a double kiss. Republicans get to force one of their biggest backers of Democrats to spend money just to survive, and at the same time please everyone from the chamber of commerce, the drug companies, to the realtors, doctors, you name it. So, there's really both a political and economic benefit to that.
Another example of this policy feedback as political weapon logic that I think is probably the clearest is of course union policy. The example of the Iowa legislation that I described at the start of the talk being a key example of this. And it's no coincidence that you see this often being the first measure that republican legislatures pursue when they are in power because it then weakens a constituency that might be opposing them in later legislative battles or in subsequent elections. And from the state policy network archives that I include in the book, there's this great memo that describes very clearly to donors and lawmakers why that should be backing these anti-union bills.
And note that there's not much of an economic case for backing these bills, although that's often one that gets made in the public space, but rather the arguments that SPN marshaled were if you pursue cutbacks to unions, you defund and defang one of our freedom movements most powerful opponents, the government unions, and clear pathways towards passage of so many other pro-freedom initiatives in the states. It was not just that you weaken an opponent, but that you pave the way for other unrelated issues going forward.
So, let me start concluding, and I wanted to just put on the table a really productive argument, and exchange that I've been having in the past few months with a political scientist named Matt Grossman at Michigan State University. And he has a new book out as well called, Red State Blues: How the Conservative Revolution Stalled in the States. And in some ways I think it makes for a really productive dialog with my book because we're both looking at the same trend of increasing republican control in the states. We're coming to a slightly different conclusion.
I think Matt views the republican control of these states as being much less successful legislatively than I do. I think its worth pointing out the places where we agree and where, I think, we part ways in our interpretation. I think one of the key insights that comes out of Matt's book is an important reminder that regardless of the party in charge of government, the overall size of government tends to increase even when Republicans take over states, state spending tends to increase. Another important reminder that comes from his book that I think draws on the comparative social policy literature, is that conservatives tend to be more successful when they're stopping expansion of new social programs or economic programs, than trying to enact wholesale cuts to existing programs.
I think where we part ways and where there's a key difference of interpretation is what the baseline of success looks like. Let me give a concrete example of this. In his book, Matt would point to expansions of voting right that Democratic states have pursued in recent years showing that there had been an overall trend towards states passing new laws to make it easier for people to register to vote or to turn out to vote. There have also been an important spread of new laws raising the minimum wage in many states to 15 dollars an hour. And there have also been a number of cities that have done this as well.
But when I look at those trends, I judge them not against the policies that those individual states are passing, but rather against an overall conservative move at the federal level that affects all states. The reason why so many states are taking action now on voting rights is because the Supreme Court took a major step to the right in retrenching voting rights, and making it easier for states to pass actions that curb access to the franchise in its Shelby County decision.
Similarly, the reason why states are passing increases to the minimum wage is that over time the federal minimum wage has declined precipitously from a peak of over $10 an hour in the 1960s to just $7.25 today. So, the background conditions are a right-ward move on policy on a number of these important dimensions. I think you could make similar arguments, for instance, about climate change environmental policy. So, let me wrap up here because I really want to get to the Q&A. So, what can we take away from State Capture for a broader understanding about power and politics across the states and at a national level? Well, the first is that states and control of the states really matters for policy outcomes, as the troika realized.
If the troika was able to have influence in shaping the legislative agendas of state governments, it could have a real impact on political outcomes, social outcomes, economic outcomes. It's an important reminder that states, as Theda mentioned, control these levers that effect or day-to-day lives in a big way. And because of this, organizations, like the troika, could have a national presence, but on the ground operations in individual states, can have a big influence, because they can move resources, and ideas, and staff across state lines to key battles.
And I think the example of ALEC really points out how the lack of resources at the state legislative level can be a key lever for organizations that are trying to pass policy, and shape legislative agendas across the states. Third, and to return to one of the myths that I hoped to debunk in State Capture, so much of our energy and our attention around business influence, influence of outside groups, flows through elections.
With people saying that one of the reasons why companies have outsize influence in government decisions, including at the state level, is because of how much they can spend on elections. And I think this work shows that while that may be true, a lot of the action happens in between elections too. That a lot of what the troika does, indeed most of what the troika does, is in between elections, in setting agendas for people who have already been elected to office.
And lastly, I think the success of these networks as I tried to underscore in the narrative around ALEC, was not a forgone conclusion. Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins has this lovely phrase that I use in the book called the myth of diabolical conservative confidence, the idea that we have a tendency, particularly if you're on the left, to think about the right as doing everything right. And I hope that if you take one message away from State Capture is that that's not necessarily true.
These organizations took deliberate steps, learned over time in ways that made them successful, but there was nothing forgone about that. So, thank you for your time, and I look forward to the discussion....
Book Talk: State Capture with Author Alex Hertel-Fernandez
https://ash.harvard.edu/event/book-talk-state-capture-author-alex-hertel-fernandez
How the Right Won the States: A Review of Hertel-Fernandez’s State Capture
| HistPhil
https://histphil.org/2019/07/03/how-the-right-won-the-states-a-review-of-hertel-fernandezs-state-capture/
